Just comment or email me tonight, and you’ll be in a drawing. I decided, since my first commenter last post guessed who tomorrow’s guest blogger will be, that I’ll pick a random winner. There are two with chances right now–pretty good odds–but anyone else feel free.

I’m fiddling around, even though my instrument is the flute. Fun futzing is what I’m up to. We got a Mac yesterday. Not that I stayed up till midnight playing with it or anything…

Yesterday was a day of fullness. Daughter came over, computer arrived, daughter filed her taxes using new computer, friends came in the evening, son’s friend moved into daughter’s old room (living here for a month or so to get ready for his next step in life). In the midst of everything, I tried to catch up on laundry and the few other things my son hadn’t done for me while I was sick. Then there was the bathtub drain, which, well, wasn’t.

It’s fun to hear men taking on a project like a stuck drain. Wanting to muscle out the clog with hangars, tools, plungers. My back felt very rested while I listened to them from the other room. I kind of knew how it would turn out, when one said, “Now it’s filling up more.” After a while the other said, “The clog must have moved farther down the pipe.” I expected then to be part of the project, since I knew where the Liquid Plumber was.

Anyway, clogs and old computers are pretty much cleared away around here now. Not much left to do except wait for tomorrow’s interesting words in the blogosphere and go to church to play my fiddle, er, flute.

I was into a wonderful, rambling post about further musings on belief, and. Well. Maybe it wouldn’t have been wonderful to try plowing through on your way to a zillion other blogs, distractions, and weekend activities.

So I shall attempt to concise things up a bit for next week. Anyway, one of those cool writing moments happened while I was composing, and I got an image to illustrate my latest idea. Too bad I can’t find one like it on the web somewhere. But if you happen to see a picture of Nathan Fillion in a robe and beard, that’s where I’m heading.

Our first decade had to turn out as the 2000s. While a hundred years earlier people could easily say nineteen-oh-one, nineteen-aught-two, etc., twenty-oh-one wouldn’t have rolled off the tongue. Twenty’s pronunciation is too complex, somehow. It makes the lips pucker, and so does saying “oh.” So we stuck with two thousand.

Whatever we call it, there’s a new decade under way. Despite my inherent melancholy and the world situation, I am glad I’m here. Nobody told me to be. I think I’m just a sucker for mornings, fresh calendar pages, and trying again.

Happy February.

Remember that you could only make an exclamation point by typing an apostrophe (they were straight) and then backspacing to type a period beneath it?

My son asked, first time he tried the Royal, “Where’s the 1?”

You need to use lower-case L. I’d completely forgotten that until I answered him.

Tuesday morning, before we left for Theophany, I checked my email and found a Google Alert for my name on a site that links to mentions of Royal typewriters. Just down the page was a link to a recent interview with Virginia Aste, Richard Brautigan’s first wife. She tells about an Idaho camping trip she and Richard took. She says: “Richard was always writing. He sat at a card table with his Royal typewriter during the trip. I didn’t know what he was writing until later.”

His pages became Trout Fishing in America.

Just when everybody else revs up in excitement over NaNoWriMo, NaBloPoMo, and all the other greatest things to do in and around cyberland, I start to chill out.

Or maybe it’s cozy up. Today our fire burned clear, strong, blithely, and glowingly throughout the hours, while chili simmered in the slow cooker. I’ve been reading through old journals, something I typically get a yen for this season. And I’ve got a novel going, but not one I or anyone penned recently. It’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Perfect for the yellowing light reflected by maple leaves nearly drifted off the front tree. Fun for Friday the thirteenth tomorrow. A tale about evil, but from the points of view of “innocents,” those wanting to do good. At least that’s how the story looks so far.

I wish each of you contentment in your pursuits this month. I think I’ll be around, but then again, maybe not. I’ll keep crafting an essay, reading journals and books, and seeing what blows by with the leaves, what skitters past in the shadows.

Why, on the first Monday in October, did window washing strike my fancy? Since around May I’ve planned to do it, but only now, when storms will soon blow rain against my north-facing bedroom glass, did I whip into cleaning action. Ah, well. At least my westerly view from the treadmill should remain much clearer. Boy, I hadn’t washed that window in a looonngg time.

Change has arrived with crisp mornings. Last Friday marked the first time in nine weeks that I didn’t send out two submissions, per my modest goal. After finally putting ten different pieces of writing out to editors, I allowed the shift in rhythm. I’m back to work on my memoir. New form, new title. Lots of helpful input by writer and reader friends.

I also have a new buddy at the keyboard:
Support in many forms infuses my days.

Now that October’s been breached, more reasons exist to let the writing momentum slow. They’re good reasons, peopled by loved ones beneath harvest moons. They wear spooky costumes and plan for meals with gravy and stuffing. They wax creative with ideas to wrap in bright paper and place under aromatic evergreens.

Summer’s writing pace will slacken, but autumn’s holiday sprinting won’t scare word work completely away. The web of mind will still interact with the clicking of keyboard, at least until somebody needs an eaarrly shopping partner the morning after Thanksgiving.

Weird, I know. But I am my enterprise’s go-getter, slacker, researcher, harried bookkeeper, and PR person. Today we’re all brainstorming, sending out for Yumm bowls, and trying not to drive one another insane.

Hope we wrap things up before the crimson sunset in our wildfire sky.

More fun is reading around the blogosphere and other places. People are clever. I haven’t even gotten to the writing blogs I regularly read. The list of those grows daily for me, and I ought to make links to more of them in my sidebar. Putting it on the to-do list…

Then in the writing category, I’m published online again, here at Camroc Press Review. For those of you practicing writing and wanting a lesson in concisity (if ‘rithmetic works, so does this), Camroc’s a great place with a wise editor. You have to make your prose 550 words or less, but believe me, with a lot of looking it over you’ll find much to cut, and often the piece comes out stronger.

This piece is my first in-print story regarding my grandma and Richard Brautigan. I’m hoping, of course, for more. But this one’s fine.

So now, before I move on to Quicken, one random thing relating to the important study of science (but if you’re squeamish regarding reptiles you’d like to go away now). In our side yard I discovered the coolest evidence of our garter snake friends. Side by side, two complete shed skins. I had to bring them inside before some animal stepped on them.

They must have done their sheddy thing together, or at least within hours of one another, because these don’t last long. I never imagined two snakes wriggling out of skins beside each other, but now I have evidence they might.

(To see more detail, click on picture.)

“Hey, Martha,” says one. “I need to take off this outfit. Care to join me?”

“Sure Joe,” Martha replies. “Mine’s tight, too. Just don’t get any ideas.”

“You can trust me, Martha.” His lips curl into a snaky grin.

“Right. Don’t look.”

I’ll work on that story later. Back to numbers and lists for this schoolish, random afternoon.

1. Comedian Eddie Izzard has been running marathons around the UK all summer. I mean, he has run one every day, six days a week. Amazing. You can read the story with a couple side interviews here.

I came to enjoy Izzard’s stand-up humor almost against my will. He’s irresistible, though, his imagination making connections everyplace as he rants about computers and describes queuing up at the supermarket. There’s cussing, yeah, his f-word is an adjective. But by the time I got sucked in to the videos of his my kids were watching, I’d become much more comfortable with our cultural, colorful word phenomenon than I used to be. I’d made some conscious decisions about what I think language is doing in different circumstances. Now, what a guy is doing in heels onstage may be another matter, maybe. But at least he had the good sense not to run in them. Go, Eddie!

2. A post, over on Fresca’s blog, about, um, Cheesus. It turns quite thoughtful regarding ignorant arrogance and, as often do things at her site, serves up a perspective free from blind obedience to one cultural/political side or another. But the opening and the close are at least as funny as Izzard’s best. You kinda have to see it.

I guess a good question of the week might be:
What sort of stuff brings out your best belly laughs, providing as good a workout as a London marathon in the rain?