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Playing catch-up

To the dozen or so people who read this blog: my apologies for a lack of entries lately. Life has been extremely busy of late. Work has been wall-to-wall, evenings and weekends activity-filled. This is a pretty typical pattern for me in late October and early November, and the Thanksgiving holiday can never come soon enough.

This is National Novel Writing Month, and I had every intention of participating. The goal is to have a 50,000 word novel written by the end of November. That works out to almost 1700 words per day, every day of the month — not too unreasonable, really. Today is the third, I'm officially behind by 4000 words, and I have no prospect of cutting into that deficit in the near future. I'm including the story I've been slowly working on in my word count, perhaps prematurely, as I don't yet know how far it's going to evolve. So excluding that, it's actually a 5000 word deficit. Regardless, things look rather bleak right now.

One person in my department at work recently got over H1N1 (the clinic he went to said they were "95% sure" he had it) and another returned today after being sick all weekend, still with a hoarse voice and hacking cough. Lots of that going around, it seems. Perhaps my previous statement of "bring it" was also premature. I didn't mean "bring it as soon as you feasibly can and take every opportunity to infect me and remind me to be careful what I wish for."

In a few days I move to step two in my smoking cessation program, which entails a 33% reduction in the amount of nicotine delivered by the patch. I'm excited and looking forward to it. This time around has been so different... the urge is completely gone and was gone after the first week. I don't know if this is related or not, but I've been fighting a low-grade headache for the last several days. I guess I'll know for sure in a few days.

I watched Katie learn an important lesson this evening, that lesson being that sometimes other people get the limelight despite your own hard work. Though I attempted to console her, I realized there really was nothing I could do to improve the situation and decided it was best for me to step back and let her come to that realization herself. That was an important lesson for me, and one that was difficult, because it involved parenting in the sense of letting go instead of parenting in the sense of being there. Both are vital skills, but the most vital is knowing which applies in which situation, a tricky Zen I may one day master.

And tonight, a blast from the past... V! Yes, the old show from the 80s is back, but with a decidedly modern twist and some surprisingly good writing, especially given the dismal failure of, let's say, the attempted Knight Rider reboot. There are other 80s reboots in the works, like The A-Team, Clash of the Titans, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. I can't say I'm looking forward to any of those in particular, but I'll probably end up watching some of them at some point, if not all of them. Hey, I'm a sucker for remakes of old shows from my youth... the danger of being a key demographical market, and for the marketers, supposedly easy money. Little do the marketers realize that marketing to Generation X is not any easier twenty-five years later. Despite us being the ones with the earning power these days, we're just as likely to give you the finger now as we were then.

Last but not least, thanks to those of you who read my little musings. I don't get a lot of comments here, but I check the traffic occasionally and know you're out there, and I do hope you're getting something out of this experiment. I'm enjoying it, and hopefully will have something interesting to say when real life stops getting in the way.

Posted November 3, 2009 @ 23:05:21 EST. 1 comment.