NaBloWriMo–a Mo late

I came home from this weekend’s Write in the Harbor conference determined to start writing again.

I don’t mean Facebook post writing; I mean sweat-it-out-straight-from-the-heart-blood-sweat-and-tears-head-down writing, like I used to do here.
What better time to re-dedicate myself to writing, I thought as I left the conference, than right at the beginning of November - National Blog Writing Month. It’s perfect! How inspiring!
Then I got home and looked up NaBloWriMo and came to realize that things have changed since the last time I undertook this endeavor. It turns out that November is now NaNOWriMo – National Novel Writing Month! I missed NaBLOWriMo by, well, a month. It was in October.
I can handle some self-imposed pressure to blog every day, but the pressure to write a novel is exactly what’s paralyzing me – and it’s what brought me to the conference to begin with.
I promised my father before he died that I would tell his story. He wrote for his children and grandchildren but didn’t want his story “out there” while he was still alive. After he was gone, I came across numerous files and documents with “directions” for me, things like “Carol: you’ll want to use this for the book.”
No pressure. Right, Dad?
No one who knows me would call me a procrastinator. In fact, I’m normally quite the opposite. There’s often a fire under my butt, but moss doesn’t stand a chance with me. If I can think it, I can do it – and there’s usually very little time between the two.
Except with this book. I simply can’t seem to get started.
I don’t know if it’s Dad’s voice, telling me just how he’d like the book written or if it’s my own voice, insisting that I could never meet his expectations. But the voice is persistent, and insistent, and I am obedient – and paralyzed.
One of the sessions at the writing conference today was titled “Overcoming Obstacles.” We were asked to complete two sentences regarding our writing. The first was “If I fail…” The second was “If I succeed…” My answers show just how paralyzed I feel:
“If I fail… my father will be disappointed – from the grave!”
“If I succeed… everyone will know my father’s story – and what if he didn’t actually want that?!”
The instructor pointed out that I saw even success as failure. No wonder I’m paralyzed!
Later in the class, the instructor asked us to imagine the most terrible thing that might happen if we were unsuccessful in our writing goal – and not to be afraid to “get dramatic.” My answer to this question was even more distressing. I wrote, “If I finish the book and it’s terrible or if it’s never even published, those who thought I couldn’t tell Dad’s story would be proven correct. I would die without doing the one thing I promised Dad I would do. ‘Never forget’ would be true because first-hand memories of the Holocaust would be a thing of the past – and I’d be partially responsible.”
Then I got really dramatic (per the instructor’s direction) and wrote, “’Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.’ Now we all have to repeat the Holocaust… and it’s all my fault!”
At that point, I had to go back to my notes from the session of the workshop called “Creating Your Writing Persona.” In that session, the instructor quoted Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible: “Don’t try to figure out what the other people want you to say; figure out what you have to say. It’s the only thing you have to offer.” 
And that is exactly what I’m going to have to do.
But first, I need to get back into the practice of daily writing, so Facebook notifications will be turned off for a month while I remind myself to do what I love (and remember how to do it).

Testing in a different browser

I've given up on Windows Live Writer.

I didn't mean to give up on it; I meant to uninstall and reinstall it, in an effort to get it to work again. But now that I dumped it, I'm given error message after error message, preventing me from re-installing it. So I'm trying a new browser (Chrome) to see whether I can figure out this NOT-WYSIWYG-ness of Blogger.

Bear with me.

I have to type blocks of copy, inserting photos along the way. What topic allows me lots of photos? Oh, I know!

Amoosh! (Baby Alex's name for animals. In this case, Shasta and baby Quinn)

So far, so good. (And I could even drag and drop!) But what happens if I add a whole bunch of photos?

I miss Boo! (Enough of a text blog for testing purposes?)

Five amoosh! 

Maybe Blogger works better in Chrome because Google owns both Blogger and Chrome. So far, this is not a frustrating experience.

Simon has a way of throwing things off - often literally... off a counter. So I'll live dangerously and post a few photos of him, seeing if I can disrupt the force.

Wow! I could drag and drop multiple photos at once - though I can't insert a break without inserting a caption.

Maybe I should reign things back to the safe zone. Posting a few photos of Boo (rest his kitty soul) should do that:

Wasn't he handsome?

Know how much I miss him? THIS much:

Damn that coyote!

He had very little pride. Or he was just pretty lazy.

Yeah, this is pretty much how I feel about Boo.

Good thing I have this girl to keep me company:



Not that she is a squishy, quintessential Golden puppy anymore. She's all grown up!



But she's still dang cute! Just like her big sister, Shasta... who is getting so OLD!



So this was fairly painless. Unlike writing blog posts with Blogger on Firefox, I have not been pulling out my hair and using flowery language, trying to get the output to match the input. This is good news! I just might begin to blog a bit more now.

Six benefits of blogging over facebooking

About five years ago, I joined Facebook.  Coincidentally (NOT!), about five years ago I stopped blogging with any real consistency.  Because Facebook is so easy, it’s been hard for me to go back to blogging. Not because I don’t like blogging – I actually love it – but because it seems that I am a damn lazy communicator. 

‘Listen up, Carol,’ I’ve told myself recently. ‘You really should get back to blogging – if for no other reason than that you LIKE it more than you like facebooking.’  And then I proceed to tell myself why:

1. Because you’re making a point, telling a story, or recounting an experience, you have to actually write when you blog. Facebook – at least the way I’ve been doing it -- doesn’t require the ability to write. In terms of expressive language, Facebook is usually more of a grunt to blogging’s strung-together words that form actual sentences.
2. The only people who read your stuff on Facebook are people you deem as “friends.” The people who read stuff on your blog are people who decide you have something interesting to say.  (And then, if they actually like enough of what you have to say, they sometimes they become friends because of it.)
3. Blogging is like journaling.  Facebooking is like texting.  When I’m long gone, my journals will give far more insight into who I was than my texts will.
4. In term of cataloging, it’s a whole lot easier to find a blog entry you wrote three years ago than it is to find a Facebook post you wrote three years ago.  I can hardly find a Facebook post I did three days ago!
5. Blogging is often like going to a foreign country, in terms of the comments and feedback I get, while facebooking is more like going to my high school reunion.  This can be both terrifying and gratifying.
6. Blogging requires me to stop and think, to be mindful, careful, and detail-oriented, and to review more carefully what I’m sending out to the world. Posting to Facebook is much more impulsive for me.  ‘Hey, my cat’s being cute…’  Snap. Navigate. Attach. Post. This is neither bad nor good; it just is.

All of this said, I found myself posting to Facebook a few times today. 

I mean, seriously, am I really going to blog about an unexpected make-up-in-a-store-with-a-delightful-gay-man-who-made-me-feel-great-about-myself experience, which ended in me buying an unprecedented $112 (gasp!) worth of make-up? 

Ya know, now that I think about it, I really should have!

Sigh.  This re-focus might take a while…

I’ve stared at this all day…

…and this is how far I’ve gotten every time I’ve opened LiveWriter during the past few months.

I love blogging. I love to write. I miss writing.  I’m not sure why this is happening.

There’s something I need to tell you

I can’t type with 10 fingers.  Never could.  I type with two or three fingers.  And I’m lightning fast!  But still…

I enrolled in a typing class during senior year in high school (no second grade keyboarding classes for us back then), but ultimately dropped it because it was offered first period and I didn’t have another class till noon. And because I had no plans to become a secretary, which was the only reason to take typing back then, I figured it would never be an issue.

Oh, how dismally wrong I was!  I have always been a writer.  Now I’m also a social media fanatic, a blogger, a business owner, and an all-day typist.  There’s simply no excuse anymore!

Those last three short paragraphs have taken me about five minutes each to type. Why? Because Peter is standing over me, forcing me to type without looking at the keyboard. 

“For how much you type every day, Mom, you really should learn to type!” he insists.  And he’s right.  So the next few weeks are going to be extremely frustrating for me, as I learn to slow down, re-map my brain, and actually learn to use the keyboard correctly. 

Be patient with me!

(That’s the longest it’s ever taken for me to write any blog post!)

Our new kitchen: almost finished. (My blog: will be finished if I don’t recommit.)

There was the day – no, there were years – when I would blog daily, about everything.  I’d blog about the least important, most mundane things, no matter what anyone thought and simply because blogging made me happy.

Then I got an insane job at Microsoft and my blogging slowed down a little, but I still wrote often and posted tons of pictures… no matter what anyone thought and simply because blogging made me feel good.

Then I became an active Facebook user and I posted there constantly and began to ignore my blog.  The longer I ignored my blog, the harder it was to come back and explain myself and what I’d been up to.  It was kind of like ignoring a best friend and being afraid to just call them and say “My bad – I haven’t been a good friend lately.  Please forgive me.” 

My bad.  I haven’t been a good blogger lately.  Please forgive me.

So…

Our kitchen is almost finished!  After more than two months of camping in our dining room…

…and two months of pretty much shutting down any communal living space…

…and after two months of Tom working full-time at Boeing during the day and then coming home to do things like move electrical and plumbing lines all the hell over the place and tiling a new floor and installing a new window, and a million other things that had to happen before the cabinets were installed, and basically bringing himself to the point of sheer exhaustion…

…we now have a delicious, gorgeous new kitchen!

But before I show you photos of the almost-finished room (almost finished because, although it’s functional, there’s a long list of things that still need to be done), you must sit through “process photos” because – well, because I had to sit through the process-process, and I’m just not gonna let you off so easy.

Where did we last leave off?  Ah yes, the wallboard was in and the floor had yet to be tiled. 

Tiling was a bitch.  I did none of it and I can still say that it was a bitch.  (Side note: all that stuff they say about remodeling being hard on a marriage?  True.  True, true, true.  Not that the word “bitch” touched off that thought or anything…)

Tom did the tiling over the long Labor Day weekend, and still he stayed up till 5 AM one morning and 4:3o AM the next morning.  I was afraid he’d drop from exhaustion!  It was a long and tedious process.

First Tom laid out the tile in the dining room, in the pattern he wanted to use.

He’s wanted to bring tile into the dining room for years because the hardwood floor by the back door was being destroyed by people and animals coming in from the wet backyard.  I thought this was a bit weird until he laid down this tile.  Once I saw what he was thinking, I decided he was brilliant.

Before any of the tiles could go down, though, the hardwood had to be removed along precise lines.  Aleks helped with this part.

Then Peter helped Tom install the tile.  Thank goodness for helpers!

(Speaking of helpers, the boys weren’t the only ones.  Elisabeth came over on her day off and helped me paint.)

These photo were taken at about 3 AM:

Or maybe it was 4 AM.  Or 5 AM.

(I had probably been asleep and thought to myself, ‘Carol, wake up!  There are important photos to be taken!’  Then I took photos and went back to sleep.  I had the easy job.)

Grouting was a dirty job. Mike Rowe and the production team from Dirty Jobs should have been at our house.  Except that I looked like hell and if Mike Rowe were to ever come to our house, I’d want my hair to be clean, I might wear a dab of make-up, and I’d find a cute blouse to wear… which would be completely inappropriate at 4 AM.  And plus, there’s something perfectly sexy about one’s own husband grouting in his bare feet at 4 AM.

Really?  This will look good at some point?

Lo and behold, it DID look good!

Once the floor was in, Tom’s 6-week push to prepare the kitchen for cabinets and granite was over and he could finally relax a little.  (And we started speaking to each other again.) 

Neither of us had any idea when we went into this how much work would be required to bring this kitchen…

…to…

Oh wait!  I can’t do the reveal till you sit through a few more photos of the process!

The appliances arrived…

Look at that!  They move those heavy appliances by cradling them between the two guys.  Pretty cool.

…and I was teased by having to store them on the deck for a few weeks.

And then -- the cabinets.  Ah, yes – the cabinets!  The work Tom had done during the previous six weeks – moving water and electrical lines, bolstering walls, running a gas line (OK, we had help with that) – hardly showed, and the kitchen didn’t look all that different from day to day.  Then suddenly, within a few days, this happened:

We contracted with Keystone Kitchens on the cabinets and they did an amazing job.  Talk about personalized service!  I’m almost tempted to have Chris and Susan, the owners, and Jeff and Tom, the installers, over for dinner.  But that might be a little weird. 

Things were beginning to move quickly at this point.  Within hours of the cabinets being fully installed (which took about four days), measurements were being taken for the granite using a very cool high tech machine.  And believe me, these were precise measurements, down to the width of a business card!  So cool. I do love meself some technology!

Two month previous, we had selected the exact pieces of granite we wanted in our kitchen.  The slab is called Stormy Night and it was love at first sight!  I loved all the movement and drama of this piece of granite.  None of this “all looks the same” speckled granite for me!

As part of their personalized service, Vince at Venetian Stoneworks even sent me photos and a video (which I’m not including here because it was basically one noisy shot of muddy rippling water) of our granite being cut as it was happening!  Did I mention that I love technology?

Here’s a video of their process, using a photo of the exact purchased slab.  

I could barely contain my excitement as the granite – perfectly and precisely fitted to our cabinets – was installed a week later.

(See how the granite pattern flows right off the bar and onto the counters? I so love that!)

And an undermount sink!  I always wanted one of those.

Once the granite was in, Tom only needed to hook up the plumbing under the sink, connecting the insta-hot faucet, the regular faucet, the disposal, and the dishwasher.  Good thing he warned me that it would take a few days and that there would be flowery language involved.  Both were true.

There’s still much to be done – all lighting, floor and paint touch-ups, the back splash, and a zillion other little things (15% of which, based on history, will never get done), but we now have a fully functional kitchen!

(Purely out of habit, I filled the dog bowl with water in the bathroom this morning and I went for plastic cutlery with which to eat my breakfast.  It’ll take a while for it all to sink in.  No pun intended…)

And now, finally, the unveiling!  Here are a few “after, but not quite finished” photos.  The first few are panoramic photos that I captured using a very cool iPhone app called Photosynth.

I love, love, love some of the features of the cabinets, like full-extend drawers that must have some hydraulic hardware.  Mad as one might be, these drawers cannot be slammed!  All by themselves, as if to say, “Calm down, dearie!”, they slow down and gently ease themselves closed.  Not that I’ve ever tested them.

And the pull-outs.  Oh, lordy, the pull-outs!  Every single cabinet has pull-outs.  I love them!

There are even pull-outs for my spices.

I have two lazy Susan cabinets, one for my new lusted-after cookware from Costco (yes, Costco’s Kirkland Brand, makes wonderful stainless cookware) and one next to the sink for my small appliances.

In our old kitchen, cookie and cupcake tins would fall onto the floor every single time we opened that cabinet, so this adjustable tray divider above the fridge is especially luxurious!

And then there’s the handy-dandy fold-out drawer for my sponges, allowing me to keep the sink area clear.

The leaded glass (actually fake leaded glass, but who cares, and who can tell?!) was created for us by Art Glass Technologies, another company that was a pleasure to work with and whose work is phenomenal!

I found the hardware at Home Depot (special order) for $3.49 each!  That was quite a bit cheaper than the $29 a piece we’d seen at one of those hoity-toity specialty stores!  I love the hardware and think it really gives the kitchen a classy Craftsman-style flair.

Ah, gas!  What a joy to cook with gas again!  Tom insisted on this (and it was an expensive royal pain to make it happen), and he was absolutely right.

More of the granite, with all its “visual interest.”

And the whole glorious room – which feels three times the size of the previous kitchen, although we didn’t expand the actual size of it at all!

I’ve ignored my new business this summer because the project management of this kitchen has take an extraordinary amount of time and energy.  But now it’s time to re-focus and re-dedicate myself to a few things… BLOGGING (about topics other than the kitchen) for one(don’t leave me now… oh, baby, don’t leave me now!)  and my business, for another. 

And the timing, being Fall, seems to be good for turning over a new leaf.