Climbing the Third Stair

The year of 2021 has mostly been about me making small steps to improve my life, both the parts that were upended by the pandemic and the ones that were messed up independent of it. To that end, I’ve just signed up for Get Your Words Out for 2022, at the Basic pledge level. This means I’ve committed myself to writing 548 words a day, which sounds pitifully low to me, but realistically it accommodates things like D&D night, illness, and vacations.

This puts me on a clock for getting an outline done, though the challenge doesn’t require that I write my words on any particular project, or that the words on any particular day show up in a final draft somewhere. I could write some quick scenes that end up not fitting anywhere and they would satisfy the challenge. This isn’t about me getting a novel written in X amount of time, it’s about me rebuilding the habit of writing on a regular basis. Once I get that habit back I will see what I want to do next.

I found this recipe in a notebook of recipes that my Grandma had written out for my Mom when she first moved out on her own. This means it is at least 60 years old, and I don't know where Grandma got it. I have never made it, though I intend to as soon as logistically feasible. I have typed up the recipe exactly as written, and added some comments at the bottom

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I now work for a largish company doing something that involves filling out a lot of forms. It's not thrilling work, but it has its advantages and I'm pretty good at it. Yesterday an email went out informing all employees that there was a new online training available with the title "Workplace Violence Awareness", which I think is an odd title for something that's actually about what to do if an active shooter event happens in your workplace.

Because I'm me I had already given a little thought about what would happen if a shooter showed up at my workplace. I hadn't gotten further than realizing that the doors--which are locked unless you can buzz yourself in with your employee badge--would be no help at all. People are always coming and going out the doors, so it would be trivial to either shoot someone as they were coming out and go in through the door, or to shoot someone as they came out of the elevator and then take their employee badge. So while my reaction as a human being to the training was unhappiness that I lived in a world where this was necessary, my writer!brain was filled with eagerness to take the training--you never know when something like this will be handy.

The three recommended strategies for dealing with an active shooter are, in order of desirability, Run, Hide, and Fight. Fight is the absolute last resort if the other two are impossible, but explaining the various tactics you can use in fighting took up a fairly large proportion of time. This is probably because most people have a good handle on what is involved in Running and Hiding, but Fighting someone who has a very large gun and too many bullets is, shall I say, a specialist skill.

Running and Hiding did have some nuances I hadn't considered, however. When running you are advised to enourage others to evacuate with you, but not to stop or slow down to deal with someone who doesn't want to leave. This raises a thorny point for me: if I was in this situation, what would I do? Would fear for my life keep me moving, or would my instincts as a former Girl Scout Leader take over and make me want to stay and shepherd the slow-mover out? I'm not sure what I consider the good outcome here. I don't want to die of gunshot wounds, but I don't want to abandon people either. (I hope I never have to find out.)

Hiding under your desk is a bad idea. Hiding in a room that you can lock the door and/or push something heavy in front of is best. If possible turn off the lights. Turn off the ringer of your cell phone and its vibrator. This would give me trouble--I usually have my ringer turned off at work, but I'm not sure I could find the control for the vibrator in a crisis situation. On the other hand, I rarely get phone calls so probability is on my side here.

If you have to fight you are advised to improvise weapons and attack with conviction. I'm sure that both Sun Tzu and Musashi would agree on these points. One of the training videos had a dramatization of some office workers arming themselves to take on a shooter. One guy appeared to be preparing to use a computer cable as a garrote, which I consider a non-starter. I am slightly over five feet tall and I am not going to get that close to an opponent. Another grabbed a folding chair, which is more my style--I want to have some distance between me and the person I'm trying to hit. A third person had a fire extinguisher, which didn't have have the long reach of the chair but it's nice and heavy--a good swing could do real damage to the skull of an active shooter. I'm probably going to spend the next several days at work looking for potential weapons and evaluating them on reach vs damage dealt--I'm not sure if this was the point of the training.

A week or so ago I came across an ad for pottery classes here in town, and ever since I've been wanting to sign up for them. The money is not trivial and until spring bike riding-weather arrives transportation is going to be a problem, but still.

I took my first pottery class when I was in my late elementary school years, at the community center of the local park. I no longer remember what attracted me to them in the first place, but I really enjoyed them and did them several years running. Both my junior high and high school offered ceramics classes, which I gleefully signed up for. (I managed to get a D in my high school ceramics class, which looked odd next to my B+ in Advanced Physics. I could never do anything right...) It was in high school that I first heard how uranium compounds make really lovely yellow glazes, a fact I've managed to work into conversations about once a decade.

I took the intro to ceramics class in college to fill my art requirement and then had to stop, because unless you were an art major you weren't allowed to sign up for higher level classes. (I suppose they allowed art minors as well, but I was already minoring in math and English so that never occurred to me.) I never bothered to look for opportunities after college because I Am Not An Artist and Have No Artistic Talent, which closed off all the possibilies I could imagine. But the classes being offered are specifically geared towards people in the community who want to work in clay, and they sound non-stressful.

I have still have a number of the things I made--the very, very large vase inspired by a pine cone, three non-identical mugs, a few bowls, and a drinking horn with incised elvish lettering. (I know one side says "I am Nancy Sauer's" because I can recognize my name, but I'll need to dig out my copy of the Return of the King to translate the other side.) I've started a list of things I could make in the future, just in case I make this work--I don't want to spend the first week trying to figure out what I want to do!

I should have been in bed more than an hour ago; work was hard today and it's going to be worse tomorrow. I just don't feel like going to bed. Part of it is I suspect I fell asleep briefly before dinner, and part of it is that I have so many things I think I ought to be doing I feel guilty going to be without doing something. Of course, as I am running on short sleep I've been spending a lot of time just staring into space which, as you might imagine, is not helpful.

Bad things so far this week: I tried to donate platelets at the blood bank Monday and was rejected because my iron was too low, something that has never happened before. I rescheduled for next Monday and had started a campaign to bring up my iron stores--beef, leafy green vegetables, multivitamin plus iron, etc. I was only slightly under, so this should be fixable.

It's Tuesady already and I've gotten nothing done.

I finished N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and it was so wonderful I think Inshould give up trying to write a novel.

Good things so far this week: I think that physical therapy is fixing the pinched nerve in my neck. Imhave jot yet managed to do all the assigned exercises twice a day, but I do as much as I can and the tingling in my arm is definitely decreasing.

I'm still on track to meet my October bicycling goal. I want to get to 300 miles on my odometer by the end of the month, and I can do it if I can manage to average 4 miles a day. I had been afraid I would fall behind today because of the weather, but it cleared up a little after 3 and I was able to get a long ride in.

It's rained almost every day this week and it's starting to get me down. I am trying to not get sucked down, but I don't think I'm doing well. It's raining, the person ordering bakery supplies at work isn't ordering us enough white flour (we've run out twice this week already and I don't know if we are going to make it through the weekend), I haven't written anything in over a week, and I was reminded yesterday that it really doesn't matter because if you want to make money with writing you write romances, and I can't write romances.

No, really, I can't write them. I can write stories where the characters have romances, but that's not the same. Romance, the genre, is defined by the Happily Ever After, the payoff, the fantasy that there is Someone Out There who loves you and wants to be your life-partner and after a series of suitably scripted problems the two of you get your denouement and ride blissfully off into the sunset. I can't write that. It's too painful to be reminded that I'm not going to get a HEA, I'm not even going to get dates, I'm not going to ever get someone to tag-team with me through life, and I'm going to die as I have lived, alone. Which sounds incredibly melodramatic when I put it down in text, but it's still true.

I need to shake this off. I have a stack of short stories in various stages of completion, there's an anthology I want to submit something too, and I still need to humiliate myself with a draft of a novel. (I still want to write what I want to write because I'm stupid. And because I have stories inside of me.) This is Nebraska so the rain can't really last forever, and sunshine will help.

Well. I had a follow-up blood test in July and my A1C came back in the normal range. It was at the very top of the normal range, but it still established that I can control my diabetes with a healthy eating plan and that was my goal. I admit August was kind of a bad month for me, foodwise, but I've stayed mostly on track. I don't know when my doctor wants to do another test, but hopefully I can assume enough virtue before then to stay healthy.

One of the things that makes August so hard is the let-down from Gencon. It's five days of people acting as if I was an interesting person who is worth spending time with......and then I go home to where I'm alone. I have a number of people in town who I would like to be in regular contact with, but only one of them thinks it's worth making the effort to stay in contact with me. I wish I knew what made me such a terrible person: then I could try to fix it.

I really, really need to devote myself to writing. Not only is it a hypothetical source of more money, it would keep me busy. Busy people have less time to mope about the fact they are going to die as a lonely old spinster.

My garden out back has been a semi-success. I never did manage to stake the tomato plants, so they are just snaking around on the ground. The yellow pear tomatoes are bearing LOTS of tomatoes; the beefsteak vines are less bountiful. My Anaheim peppers are bearing well, except most of the fruits start to develop the pepper version of blossom end rot as they ripen. Still withholding judgement on the bell peppers.

I am thinking that maybe I should skip getting a CSA next year. Robinette Farms has good quality produce, but it has too much of the things I'm not fond of (like cucumbers) and not enough of the things I do (like green beans). It's been this way two years running, so I guess this is a feature and not a bug.

The problem with being sick--aside from the obvious that I am sick--is that I live alone, and when I'm home being sick I lack even the minimal social contact that work provides. I came home early on Thursday, and missed work Friday and Satuday. Sunday and Monday are days off, which is good for sleeping more and getting better and bad for my loneliness. I have friends, but I seem to lack friends in town who consider me part of their lives. Or maybe I'm just too demanding. Or maybe, probably, this is all somehow my fault.

Someday I will die, and no one will notice until I fail to show up for my work shift.

I'm trying out my free sample of BPAL's Vixen. It's making a bid to be one of the very, very few patchouli-note perfumes that I don't hate with the hate of a million fangirls. I'm intrigued!

I am trying to get ready for my trip this weekend. I had to work today, which is normally my day off, but I went grocery shopping, washed dishes, and cooked. I should have done laundry as well, but I wussed out. :(

I wrote a page of a new story, but I'm thinking of tossing it all out. I don't like how it opens, but can't think of what to do better. It so frustrating. I wish I could find an idea that amused me, the way DA amused me. (DA was never supposed to be a real story, it was my effort to master first-person POV. Maybe that's why I felt free to stuff cool things into it.) At this rate I might as well go back to studying Latin; it would keep my brain limber and give me an excuse to play with my pens and ink.

The larger of my two orchids is blooming with great enthusiasm. I need to come up with a way to support the bloom spike before it tips the pot over. It's safe for now, as I have it leaning up against the lemon tree, but I can't see it well from that perspective.

Got half the dishes washed, along with enough laundry to get through the week. I desperately need to wash some towels, but that will have to wait. Watered plants, took out trash, fed myself, had nap.

Did not get any letters written or food made for tomorrow, so I'll have to buy lunch at work. I hate doing that when I have so much food at home, but all that food is ingredients and turning it into food to eat takes time and energy.

Dropped two pens today, my Pelikan 200 and a Lamy 2K. The 200 was capped and fell onto a pile of papers, so it's fine. The 2K was uncapped and fell on to the tile floor of my bathroom. The drop was only a couple,of feet and I don't think it hit nib-first, so I'm hoping for the best. I'll know tomorrow when I ink it up.

At some point this week I have my annual eval. So not looking forward to this.