Hey, Laura, what’s up with you?
So life is ephemeral, adulthood is hard, and my child looks to be ready to go through another growth spurt. He’s chest-high to me right now–when I rest my elbow on his head, I have to tilt my arm up, which was not the case back when summer started–so I can only assume he’ll tower over me at twelve (and, wow, does he love that idea. Little does he know, height is not the controlling factor for the WiiU or the TV remote).
What gets me, though, are his feet. They’re huge. Okay, not out of the ordinary for eight years old huge, but comparatively. I look at them and just shake my head. His feet were the first things of his we saw that were recognizable as human: due to my sort of vaguely high-risk pregnancy, we had a lot of ultrasounds. And, you know, they point things out to you, and you squint and say, Oh, sure, okay, there’s his nose. And I can make out the skull, all right,[1] but we were taking a lot on faith, there. Until the boy stuck his tiny little foot out and we got the perfect ultrasound shot of it. You can see all the bones, a hint of the flesh around it–I showed this one to my childfree friends and they knew instantly what they were looking at.
I spent a lot of time looking at that picture. Foot! And now that foot is big enough that it makes me think my kid’s going to be six feet tall before he’s reached adolescence.
How’s the weather?
Last week, I was actually feeling offended by the amount of sunlight we had. I’m at a point right now, after a very busy summer, where I want to turn the air conditioning down to, like, 65,[2] pull a blanket over my head, and make believe it’s cold outside so I can hibernate. And, you know, this is not a realistic fantasy (I would end up sharing the blanket with the boy, and eventually this would result in one of those feet I’m so nostalgic over being planted in my face or my ribs, along with an elbow and possibly his cute little alien skull), but it’s even less likely to happen when the damn sun is shining down like a radioactive nightmare lantern. I mean, I can’t even pretend it’ll happen at that point.
Today, it was sunny in the morning but thundering. Loudly. Now the clouds have rolled in and it’s gloomy and gray outside, and I feel less oppressed. (Last night was window-rattling thunderstorms and intermittent power outages, so the middle ground of rumbly gray skies is much preferred.)
How’s the book?
So for those of you, friends and family, who have been asking me this, I have been telling you variations of, “Fine, but slowly.” And that is true. The more in-depth answer is that I had to stop and do research, the research took over some of my brain, I had to scale that back; I was feeling very paranoid that I either did not know or would forget the plot points for part 2 of the book, so there was a lot of frantic note-writing … and now I seem to be in the place where the bones of the thing are in my head, and I can, I hope, get on with writing it without having to stop every 5-10 pages or so and look stuff up.
Oh, and those three stories that were totally Jason and Scott’s fault. I ended up writing those. We’ll see what happens there.
One way or the other, the answer is now, “It was slow; now it’s slow but back on track.”
We all know how much I wish I was faster with this, right?
Read anything good, lately?
I read the second book in the Love’s Labours series of novellas by Racheline Maltese and Erin McRae, which are fun m/m romances–the first is set during a summer stock production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, the second has some Twelfth Night in the background (hence the titles). They’re fun, quick reads with some depth. The covers are … um … I’m not entirely sure I believe John and Michael have those abs? Plus the second book is set at Christmas in New York, so the shirtlessness seems a little unrealistic?
We also read, as bedtime reading, Castle Hangnail by Ursula Vernon, and that was really good. If you like Dragonbreath and Neil Gaiman, you’ll like this. Minions, a very small wicked witch with very big boots, an evil sorceress, and a donkey who … um … well, read it, it’s hilarious. And I can say that this cover is actually quite indicative of what you will find inside (though I pictured Pins a trifle smaller, myself. Pins and the fish are my favorites, by the way).
All right, then, to conclude?
I have … nothing to conclude with. Um. Yeah. Apparently if I write ~198 more words, I can make this an even thousand, which would be cool, but I doubt I’m going to manage that.
I hope, if you have read this far, that you have a nice day. Read some books, hide from the hideous shining hellbeast in the sky, stay dry, get back on track with a big project if you need to. Life is ephemeral and adulting is hard, so, you know, whatever we can do to find the calm center of the maelstrom.[3]
998?! There. 1000.
1 [back]Actually, the best shot we got of his head–like, you could tell this was someone’s head–made him look like one of those gray aliens from The X-Files. We, of course, displayed it on the fridge until last week, when we took it down to make room for our new calendar/organizer. It’s very faded. No worries, though, I scanned it when we first got it.
2 [back]No, husband, I won’t really do that.
3[back]My life is not really a maelstrom, but it’s such a good word!
Laura E. Price 