Things I Know I Know

--I still have not sold my old house. Last week during the open house, two different real estate agents were also showing the house. It's like a ride at the amusement park--maybe I should give up trying to sell it and just charge admission.

--John Henry had a mostly clean bill of health at his latest oncology checkup. His chest x-ray was clear. They found a mass on his chest near his left front leg, but when they aspirated it it came back with no significant findings, which is good.

--Billie had to have minor surgery for an abscessed anal gland of all things. It went well, she's doing fine. It didn't bother her because she's--by god--a Rottweiler and they laugh in the face of minor surgery.

--I finished the first draft of Cowgirls in Space and am sort of working on Two is Not a Pattern or I would be if I knew more about the plot and not so much about the thematic interactions.

--I recently read The Confession by James McGreevey, former governor of New Jersey about which I'd like to write up a review, but I haven't yet and am currently reading Fiasco, the best part of which so far is a quote from a former Army officer calling Wolfowitz, 'crack-smoking stupid.'

Posted by debco at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whenever a reasonable person gets into a discussion with an asshat, there's always a moment where the reasonable person has an urge to apologize. Resist this urge with every fiber of your being!

Other reasonable people will think--wow, that was a really reasonable and mature thing to do, particularly in the face of asshattery. The asshat will think--ha, ha, I win!

Posted by debco at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I used to write about books on here from time to time. And then I didn't. It may have been because I wasn't finishing anything. Or I got lazy. Or I had nothing interesting to say.

Who knows.

But anyway.

I just finished Mockingbird, which is a bio of Harper Lee. As you all surely know, Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, was a longtime friend of Truman Capote, and helped him with the interviews and research in Kansas when he was working on In Cold Blood. To Kill a Mockingbird was her first novel and she never published another one.

Nelle Harper Lee is in her eighties, reclusive and didn't participate in any way in the writing of this book and the book itself mostly ends where her public life ends, when she's about forty. It's still fascinating. There's some very interesting stuff about Nelle as a child (who swore and punched boys and was quite a lot like Scout--as her father was a lot like Atticus and the town she grew up in was much like Maycomb). The section on Kansas and the research for In Cold Blood is another perspective on that moment in history to be linked with and compared to In Cold Blood itself and the Capote movie (and presumably Capote, the book, though I haven't read it). But as a writer it's most interesting to see the time her agent and editor spent with her getting the book ready to publish, to see things take off in ways none of them anticipated, to see the sales and the movie and Gregory Peck coming to a small Southern town, to see Harper Lee in later life, to see her become not so much a writer anymore as someone who has written.

Posted by debco at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I lived in New Hampshire it got dark at 4:30 in the afternoon in winter, but the sun was up by 7:00 AM. When I lived in Indiana, it didn't get light until 8:00 in the morning. That was way more depressing than having it get dark at 4:30. I love that time in spring when it slowly, finally, starts getting light in the mornings. And I love it when it's light before I even get up (this possibly goes back to my childhood getting up and milking cows when it was so dark and so cold that you could have convinced me that the sun was never going to rise again).

So, now we have gone to Daylight Savings Time even earlier, which plunges us back into darkness in the mornings. And doesn't save me any energy because I'm awake in the mornings *and* the evenings. Go figure.

This post has been brought to you by the Society of Cranky Old Men and Women (Our motto: Hey, you, get off my lawn!)

Posted by debco at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wrote this in Chainsaw on Hand:

If it were suddenly summer in South Dakota after a week of minus two, you would hate it--it would be too hot and too humid and frightening, like the world was ending in fire instead of ice. In South Dakota in winter, you don’t think about seventy degrees or eighty degrees. As far as you’re concerned the tropics don’t exist; palm trees, blue waters--they’re just a television fantasy. Twenty degrees would be enough. If the temperature got up to twenty degrees, you’d unbutton your jacket and shed an entire layer of long underwear. At twenty degrees you’d walk outside without your head covered, with your face turned toward the sun, like you were living in Bermuda. Twenty degrees in South Dakota in winter would give you enough hope to go on.

And as we learned today in Iowa, when it is suddenly 45 after a month where the average temperature is 12, you can walk around pretty comfortably without a coat on (some people can walk around with tee-shirts and shorts on, but the jury's still out on whether they are comfortable or not).

Posted by debco at 07:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

So, I've been working on Cowgirls in Space, which I think I will pretty much finish tonight. I've been sort of kind of working on the next story after How to Hide Your Heart and I've been trying to think of ideas for novels. I've got a couple of semi-aborted short stories that might have novel potential.

And somewhere along the line I came up with this tidbit:

"Why?"
"What?"
"Why do good and evil have to be balanced? Why can't it be all good all the time?"
"We could destroy you."
"You wish."

I think this goes with the last story in a sequence of stories I'm sort of, kind of, not really working on which starts with How to Hide Your Heart and ends with a story called Fargo Fucking North Dakota, but you wouldn't know it from the page I wrote it on.

I assume that at the time I write them I am under the impression my notes make sense.

Posted by debco at 07:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, the B dog and I had to re-certify in order to enter tracking tests (because I didn't get into any fall tests last year and we didn't pass last spring). So I took the day off work and went down to Ankeny. It was really a pretty nice day and warmer than it's been in a month or so. She started terrifically and did really well for most of the track, although she got to the last corner and indicated it like a champion and then *WOULD NOT GO*!!

And, of course, in tracking it's considered bad to, you know, throw your dog down the track. So I stood there and I waited and I cursed and I tried not to get, well, angry because then she would just quit. But finally, finally--oh god finally--she dropped way down below the track and started going in the right direction and came back to the track as she got a little farther along and finished very strong.

So, yes, actual tracking pictures:

I would have pictures farther along the track but apparently I didn't explain the zoom feature very well before hand....

Posted by debco at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)