We are experiencing technical difficulties....please stand by.

Who remembers this from when we were kids? It always seemed to happen during after-school cartoons. You'd be sitting there with your cookies and Tang or your cheese sandwich and Quik, innocently watching Bugs and Daffy or Tom and Jerry beat the crap out of one another and presto: some stupid transmission issue would result in what seemed like HOURS of psychedelic color bars accompanied by "Theme from 'A Summer Place'" with a completely sincere voice intoning the magic words. And all you'd want was to get back to the action. Given that we had, maybe four other channels to choose from, rarely did I ever change it. This was, of course, when you had to change the channel by getting up off your dead ass and turning a dial ATTACHED TO THE SET. So here were the choices: good cartoons on 5, live action drug-induced insanity (Magic Garden, Joya's Fun School, Banana Splits) on 11, endless BOR-ing episodes of Little Rascals on 9, and sanctimonious 70s touchy feely happy programming on 13.

Anyway, right about now I'd give just about anything to be six and sitting in front of the TV. The technical difficulties are as such: I'm STILL sick (week four) so I'm not sleeping a whole lot, I wake up at least 4 or 5 times a night, usually in a cold sweat out of a nightmare (yeah, Nazis this week!) My family is experiencing some fallout from the downturn (Mom's hours cut, brother in law's company shutting down in March, etc) so there's some worry there. And the general tension of the holidays is, well, what it is.

So I have not been blogging a whole lot. I have, however, considered composing a mock-Italian opera based on the recent reunion debacle. But it is hardly a story worth the telling. I just hope it's over by now.

At the end of the month I am planning on taking some time off to work on the 2nd book, although a recent whisper in my ear has encouraged me to do a different book first - a conversion/outreach book - but I don't know if I have the energy right now. Or if the publishing industry has a need. Something to explore, perhaps.

Thus, if I'm not around/online/posting for the next couple of weeks, I wish you all a happy holiday. Please stand by.

One of these things is not like the others...

I know it's been a while, but there have been some good reasons for not posting. First, I've been completely overwhelmed at work with a lot of projects, which is a good thing in this toilet economy, but a bad thing for those of us who used to take 20 minutes or so out of the day to update our blogs. And out of respect for my dear ones who have been casualties of the downturn, I feel like it's almost a bitchy thing to blog about my stupid/kvetchy issues when they have so much more to worry about - believe me, I've been there.

Second, I've been sick for about three weeks with a sinus bugaboo which has been more of a pain in the ass than an actual illness, but just the same it's preventing me from sleeping adequately, and on the nights I do actually get some sleep, I get hit with numerous fever dreams which are so scary and soul-shaking (plane crashes, being trapped inside burning houses, big old jet air-o-liners hitting burning buildings, I could continue but you get the picture) that I usually have trouble functioning the next day. Not exactly conducive to creativity, or anything else other than getting through the day, going to that night's meeting or class, and then going home to eat leftover casserole in front of Law & Order repeats.

But anyway...it's been a pretty crazy few weeks. I was sick for Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, which I love because it involves no religion whatsoever. And also, and quite wonderfully, I have reconnected via Facebook with a number of former classmates from elementary school. I can't even begin to tell you what this has meant to me, since those were probably the happiest years of my childhood - way happier than when I ended up in public school. For your amusement, here's a scene from spring of 1978. Can you spot the Jew?



More to come...back to work.

Warming up for NaNoWriMo

Update: it's been a while, and in the meantime, Obama WINS! Yay!

There's a lot I could say about the election, but thousands and thousands of words have already been written. Suffice to say that I cried when they called it for Obama. Like so many others, I feel like we've been living in a really bad place for the past eight years, and now there's hope for the future.

On the writing front, I'm trying to (temporarily) focus away from blogging during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which I signed up for on October 31. Nothing like putting things off till the last minute. And if that means anything, I'll probably be attempting to write 50,000 words on November 30th.

Although I have promised myself some hours today to re-start, jump-start, and otherwise begin the new opus: Not for PRofit/Mission Statement/Title TBD. I've got until April 24, 2009 to finish it. We'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, the virtual RA crew team - i.e., the guys who show up in the middle of the night with great big mighty wooden oars to get in a beat-down of my joints have been hanging out in the neighborhood lately. They must be, otherwise I have no explanation for hurting so bad in the past week. Oh well: that's why the Holy One invented Vicodin.

I'll be over at StarCrossed later today (I hope.) More to come.