Unbreakable

Have you seen the movie Unbreakable?

Samuel L. Jackson plays a guy who has brittle bone disease. His bones break at the slightest provocation. Just being born would have broken most bones. Naturally his character grows up stunted, not physically but emotionally. Because he can't do all the things that other people do.

I'm feeling a lot like that guy today. Breakable.

This week I went to the chiropractor and we talked about my recent neck x-rays. I fell on the icy sidewalk on Valentine's day and gave myself whiplash--it still hurts almost 6 weeks later. Being cautious, my chiropractor wouldn't do an adjustment until after an x-ray proved I hadn't cracked anything.  Fortunately, I hadn't. But it shows narrowed discs and bone spurs, evidence of degenerative disc disease and osteoarthritis.

This isn't entirely surprising, three years ago I had disc replacement surgery in my lower back for those very reasons. But the cervical area is different than the lower back. It's not so easy to fix, not so easy to prevent the damage from worsening. I already have tingling in my hands, neck stiffness and pain. And I'm barely in my 50s--how much worse is it going to get? How much longer will I still feel my hands enough to type? Another 10 years? Maybe 20 if I'm lucky?

I'm a writer. If I'm going to finish all the stories I want to tell, I'd better get going on them.

And start looking into voice recognition software.

Interruption

Sitting at my kitchen table.
Working hard, focused.
Mind filled with words- rebuilt sentences, restructured story.
Suddenly a sound intrudes.
Familiar, yet not heard for so long that it is new again.
High-pitched and musical,
A long moment to identify the source.
Birds. Tweeting, chirping in my backyard!
Perhaps spring will return after all.

Knitting Excuses: Part 2

Well, here I am again and it wasn't a month between blogs! Aren't you impressed? I know I am. ;)

I've promised friends and family that I would post pictures of the first sweater I knit so here goes...

Oh wait, that's not the first one!  This is my second sweater. I finished it and added a few extra details (the red edging) to really make it my own.

And now that you can see I know how to follow a pattern and be successful... now I will show you what happens if you don't follow a pattern when you don't know what you're doing.

I can hear you saying "That doesn't look so bad!".  Yes, it does look good, doesn't it? Shall we see what it looks like on the body it was intended for?

Just a touch too big, eh?

I haven't decided what to do with it yet. I haven't the heart to just take it apart.  Maybe I can turn it into a blanket...

But in the meantime, my hubby wants a vest, my daughter wants a purple sweater and my son is undecided.

And my writer's group needs a piece to critique so I'd better put down my needles and get writing!

Excuses... excuses!!!

I started my blog with such good intentions. I treated it like a kind of New Year's resolution, planning to work on it daily. Well, weekly at the least. Okay, monthly, yes, I can do monthly.  Maybe bi-monthly would work better? Quarterly? Yearly?

I have figured out that if I don't have an actual deadline, I just don't get around to it! Everything jumps the blog in my to-do-queue.

Especially knitting.

So today I will show you all the stuff I've made since I taught my daughter to knit this summer. Yes, I might have gotten slightly carried away.  Most of my family got a scarf this year. A small sampling of the nicest ones:

 The scarf that started it all!

My first infinity scarf & matching hat, made for my niece, modeled by my daughter.

My only foray into sports-themed apparel!

Another infinity scarf with matching hat

This is my favourite infinity scarf, I almost kept it for myself!

Hogwarts finery for my kids (Gryffindor & Ravenclaw)

Learning how to knit cables, it turned into a gorgeous scarf!

An experiment that may never get finished. Most of my earlier
scarves took 1 to 3 days. THIS is 3 days worth of my invented pattern!
It's the most labour-intensive thing I've ever done.

Now I've graduated to creating sweaters.  But considering the debacle that my first sweater was, it would take a blog of its own. So I'll leave something for next time. See you next week. 
Or maybe next month. ;)

Summer Inspiration: Our first adventure in which I eat vomit and laugh about it!

This isn't going to be my usual "inspiration for writing" blog post. With both my kids out of school for the summer, my available writing time has decreased. So for the next couple of months we're going to goof around and do fun stuff that we don't usually get to do during the rest of the year. 

Yesterday we started by going to the Ontario Science Centre.  (Yes, at some point I will explain the title of this blog post!)

"Game On 2.0" is the exhibit of choice this summer. Our Science Centre has a huge room which has been turned into a maze filled with arcade, video and computer games.  There are over 150 of them!  And they are all playable.

My nine year old loved the Mario Bros and a monkey game. My twelve year old and I spent ages playing various Zelda games. I relived my university years by playing Space Invader. Oh, how I loved that game! I saw Donkey Kong, Pong, Pac-Man, Tomb Raider, Doom to name a few. For a complete list of games, follow this link: http://www.ontariosciencecentre.ca/GameOn/

Somehow, we managed to spend more than three hours in this massive room and it felt like only a couple of minutes elapsed.  (Be patient, reader, I am getting to the vomit!)

Exhausted and foot-sore we limped our way to the gift shop. You know, to buy something to remember our visit.  Like a video game. Or a t-shirt. Or maybe a science book. (I'm getting to the title!) *sigh* A piggy bank that "shrinks" money came home with us. Totally exemplifies our day, right?

The other thing that came home was a box of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans. (You can see where this is heading, can't you?)

The Jelly Belly Candy Company have been making these for a while.  I've even tried them before but it was only the standard sort of flavours: mint, licorice, apple, lemon.

They've added a couple of new flavours: blackpepper, dirt, earthworms earwax and vomit.  Yes. You read that correctly: Vomit.

Being totally a kid at heart, I immediately got into the taste-testing hosted by my 9 year old. I tried the vomit one.  At first, I was thinking, no, it can't be, it only tastes this way because I'd read the box.  I was wrong.

IT REALLY TASTES LIKE VOMIT!

I don't think I've ever laughed so hard while spitting and gagging at the same time.

I was a little bit more cautious with the next ones. But yes, I tried them all. (Boogers is pretty gross, in case you wanted to know.) We tried Banana, Blackpepper, Booger, Candyfloss, Cinnamon, Dirt, Earthworm, Earwax, Greenapple, Sausage, Soap, Tutti-fruitti and Vomit, of course.

The back of the box lists all the available flavours but unfortunately we didn't get all of them. We missed out on Blueberry, Cherry, Grass, Marshmallow, RottenEgg, Lemon and Watermelon.  I'm hoping we get those in our next box.


To check out the other blogs in the Thursday’s Children blog hop, please follow the link below:

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This old dog learns some new tricks

A weekly blog hop where writers share their inspirations. Please join us!

After playing around most of last week, destressing after my daughter's birthday parties and playing around with her new toys and crafts, this week was time to get back to work with frequent pauses to admire my daughter's new nail polish. Yes, these are MY toes. The jellybean colours were just too tempting!

I’ve gone back to a different WIP this week-- the practice
screenplay that I started for a course last fall.  So I get to play
around with Final Draft, the new-to-me screenplay writing
software recommended by my teacher.

Oh, my.  I’d forgotten just how much I love, love, love exploring new software!  I’ve spent so much time on Word and Firefox over the past decade that I know most of their capabilities and there are no surprises left.  I used to learn new software all the time when I worked outside of the home (ie. prechildren!).  Our office was always upgrading.  It was a challenge I loved, getting proficient as quickly as possible.

By the time I finished the screenplay writing course I realized I liked creating stories in a visual medium, so I indulged and bought Final Draft 8 to make the process easier.  

So not only am I now high on the endorphin rush of a new storyline percolating up in my mind, new characters vying for screentime, I also get the fun of playing around and seeing what this software can do.  

Yes, I'm totally geeking out, reading the manual and wandering through the menus. The writing life doesn’t get much better than this!

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Real People as Inspiration

A recent conversation with my sister went something like this:

Me: Yes, this character is named after you.  But at least I didn’t kill you this time.

Her: No, you dropped a great big tree on me instead.

For some reason, I’ve been writing my younger sister into a lot of stories recently.  The poor thing has been killed in a plane crash, drowned in a puddle, and succumbed to cancer. She’s died as an infant, a young girl, a teenager on the cusp of adulthood and as a mother.  I’ve killed her so often that she’s developing a complex over my apparent desire for her death.

But that’s not what it’s all about.  It’s kind of a compliment how often she shows up.  She inspires me to write characters that I care about, that my MC will care about and my readers will cry over.  When she died of cancer in recent short story, I cried so hard that I was typing blindly.  I still haven’t been able to finish the plane crash scene, it actually hurts to read those lines.  They are far too realistic, so believable that they terrify me.  I don’t actually want her to die: she’s one of my closest friends and confidantes and I hope she knows how much I like her and love her. 

But she inspires me to write the very best death scenes and my MC’s grief-stricken reactions are exactly how terrible I would feel if she truly passed away.  And as a writer, I can’t afford to miss out on what produces strong emotions.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and dig her out from under the tree I dropped on her.  And come up with her next fictional death scene.

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