Author Archives: Owldaughter

In Which She Drags Herself Out Of Bed

Update:

1. I’m out of bed at last. Yes, I spent the last three or four days sick under the covers, using up Kleenex and copious amounts of cough drops, and still not being able to sleep or even breathe with any degree of success. Off and on fever, eternal blinding headache. This is the frst time in years that I’ve been able to listen to my body and stay in bed during one of these episodes. Much easier to deal with than dragging oneself around a job environment, infecting others, and generally suffering longer as a result.

2. Packing proceeds apace. There have even been a couple of carloads of boxes taken over to the new place already. Today, I have trusty friends Tal and Tass coming over to help. I still haven’t decided if this was a good idea (i.e. we’ll get lots done), or a bad idea (i.e. we’ll have way too much fun and by the end of the day it will be, Boxes? What boxes?).

3. Just so we’re straight on this, I do not in the least resent the fact that my mother is taking a well-deserved vacation with her sister in the Dominican Republic. It’s just that I’m here, packing, with tons of snow outside, and she’s reading on a beach. I wish I was with her. Impractical, of course; I mean, I was actually delighted that Montreal got a Real Snowfall in 2003, and with my lack of appetite the scrumptious vacation food would be wasted on me, and flying would have been excruciating. It’s the irony of it.

4. While I was stuck in bed yesterday and lucid enough to connect thoughts, I wrote 1,888 words of the Great Canadian Novel. I didn’t hit my 2K daily goal, but it was the first time I’d written in about four days, and I was pleased. Any words are better than no words, I always say.

Prepare for irregular postings and updates, as I shift into SuperPacking mode and place the remaining 75% of my home into boxes over the next three days. Then there’s that move thing, and the set-up of it all at the other end…

In Which She Grumbles About Poor Health

The final game of the Scott Tournament of Hearts went into an extra end yesterday afternoon. Team Canada won for the third year in a row. You didn’t get exciting updates end-by-end this year because it was a Sunday, and I’ve ruled that I will not sit down at the computer over the weekend, not even to check my e-mail, because I work on it all week. I think it’s a good rule. It helps me feel more relaxed, which is rapidly becoming perhaps the most important goal in my life at the moment.

I’ve also been drop-dead sick, which doesn’t help at all. It started Thursday afternoon – the fever, the golf-ball feeling in the throat, the blinding headache that just won’t go away no matter how many headache candies you throw at it. I had to cancel a dinner with Ceri, which we’d both been looking forward to. Friday and Saturday weren’t much better. Fortunately, my students were remarkably understanding regarding my lack of energy and focus.

What frustrates the hell out of me is that we’re moving this Saturday, so the original plan was for me to be in a packing frenzy all this week. The problem? I can’t stand up for too long without falling over, let alone do the reaching-up-and-placing-in-box motion of packing. I tried last night while my husband was chipping away the net of snow and ice trapping our car out in the winter wonderland called Montreal. It was a mistake.

I hate feeling so damned helpless. I hate it at the best of times, but at a time like this, it’s even worse. So I’m cranky as well, which doesn’t improve matter at all.

The final twist of the screw: My mother is is the Dominican Republic, soaking up sand and sun. Grrr.

In Which Her Productivity Surprises Her

I’ve been experiencing a severe backlash against the amount of hours I’ve been putting in at the computer this past month, which is probably one of the reasons why the most energetic thing I can do is lie on the chesterfield with cats.

This afternoon, I decided to make myself work on the Great Canadian Novel. In a mood like this, writing for myself rather than for someone else means I’m operating under guilt as opposed to an irrational sense of resentment.

I not only reached my daily quota of 2,000 words in only one hour, I surpassed it by 600 words. Then I edited for a while, and cut and pasted all my various chapters into one file, as I had done with my NaNo novel.

To my astonishment, once I’d standardised body text size, I discovered that I had 127 pages and 50, 557 words.

50K is a magic number now. To know that I surpassed it – even over a period of months – means something special. I am quite chuffed. Not only that, I feel like I’m getting somewhere. After a month-long block, I’ve given my protagonist a new direction and new resolve, not to mention producing half a chapter.

Maybe there’s hope for me as an author yet.

Semi-Random Neural Firings:

1. We’re moving March 1. Yay us! Big, bright, mock fireplace, built-in china cabinet in the dining room with leaded glass doors, and a claw-foot bathtub. I’m in heaven. And after only a couple of hiccoughs, it’s ours. We sign the lease tonight. Woo!

2. It sucks to be stuck in the middle of a family power struggle. Especially when it’s somebody else’s family, no relation to you whatsoever, and when you’re (a) a pawn, and (b) a casualty. So long, landlord.

3. I appear to be officially hibernating. I’m so tired of winter. All I can manage to do these days is curl up under the afghan with a pile of cats, and space out.

4. Sleep? What is sleep? We do not understand the concept of sleep.

5. Food is hard to think about, let alone swallow. Tums are my new best friend. Yay, minty Tums! Rich in calcium, too. I seem to remember reading something recently about Tums being bad for you in large quantities, but one a day is not going to kill me. Anything that settles my eternally nauseous stomach must have possess some intrinsic good.

6. Thirty-one days till spring!

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Yesterday was pretty good. The second half of that two-part workshop went well, and I was relieved. I even had a good, solid night’s sleep to counter the useless couple of hours of dozing I’d had to settle for the night before.

Today, however… bad day. Just a really, really, bad day. In every sense of the word.

So, you know, happy thoughts would be nice. If you’ve got the time to think them. Much appreciated. Thanks.

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Drumroll, please….

(Ah. The equivalent here at the Owlyblog is a Busby Berkley-type tap dance performed by tiny sugar-high owls. It’s going to be one of those days, I can tell.)

Ahem.

Owldaughter.org is now up and running.

“Up and running” means functional to the extent that I’ve been able to design and create the basic pages, link them all together, and get the image to actually show, after figuring out the correct paths and directories this morning. As time goes on, I’ll start filling in the pages. The elementary structure is there, however, and I’m terribly, terribly impressed with myself, as I didn’t know a thing about HTML a year ago today.

So, yay me! Pass me a marzipan mouse!