Once more unto the breach

Not doing so good at keeping up here. Gonna try to dash out a post while the boy is amused by a playdate.

Readin' and Writin' and Suchlike

I made my Funny Times Facebook page readers give me a writing assignment. They gave me 20 words; I wrote a story. Of course they had to go and give me words like triskaidekaphobia and sesquipedalian. Charming bunch, those Funny Times fans. So that was kinda fun. I also had to write an essay in order to get a mystery shopping job, but I won't bore you with that.

As for reading, I wasn't really in the mood for The Lacuna, but will likely pick it up again eventually. Instead, I've started up with the 2013 Pushcart Prize book. Much better suited to my short attention span. About five stories in now and nothing I've adored yet, but Pushcart always has an interesting mix so I remain hopeful.

Good Eats

Lunch: egg salad wrapped in lettuce leaves. Dinner: something involving chicken, avocados, and hijiki. Coffee today: yes, indeed.

My Adorable Child

...wrote this for me yesterday:



Instructions on how to go to sleep. I had given him an assignment to write three sentences, thus that second line says "the sentences." But he said he combined all the sentences into one.

The boy is currently in the backyard with his buddy, making a snow dragon, whilst his friend makes a snow cow. They have fallen in and out of love with each other a dozen times in the past hour and a half, periodically declaring that they hate one another and will never play together again, then working it out and having a blast. Laughter, tears, and fart noises. The stuff little boys are made of.

Off topic: Now if anyone can tell me how to fix the font size on blogger, I'd be much obliged. I want something between "normal" and "large" and I don't want to spend the time going into the HTML and changing every instance of "font size" to a number. Thanks!

Nothing Fancy

Hellooooooooo!
echo
echo
echo

Yeah, so about this ghost town here. My bad. My intention was to write here often. I figured it would be a good way to practice, given that I fancy myself a writer. I guess that's a bit of a stretch since a writer, according to traditional convention, typically...writes. But hey, I'm writing now, am I not? And this is because I complained about my own lack of blog posts to a friend who blogs and asked for an assignment. She obliged, as follows:

Your assignment is this: find three general categories of activity or thought in which you engage fairly regularly (you like food, could be food, or parenting, or existentialism, or candy, or movies, or presidential history. It doesn't really matter. Whatever floats your boat) - make headings out of them - now write no more than one paragraph about the latest instance of each. Repeat on a set schedule (every other day). Rules and structure can be very useful in a creative endeavour.

So this is what I will do now, at least until I come up with some other sort of inspiration on my own, assuming that such a thing may happen someday.

Okay, so category number one. Humm. Let's call it:

Readin' and Writin' and Suchlike

I just finished The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx, which, as might be expected of a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a damn fine novel. Just started reading Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna. Also reading a book by Joseph Sestito, called Write for Your Lives: Inspire Your Creative Writing with Buddhist Wisdom, which I happened upon in the local authors section at my local library. I'm hoping to win bonus locavore points for this. As for writing, you're looking at it. Not much of a paragraph, this, but I'm going for quick and dirty today.

Next topic. Yes, I suppose food floats my boat, or at the very least, keeps it from sinking. Thus:

Good Eats

Today I had lunch at Lemon Grass with my friend Sandee, the managing editor for The Funny Times, where I have worked off and on in various roles for over 25 years. I had Chicken with Thai Basil. Quite good. Good lord, this is ridiculously boring. It needs some spice, I think. Try this: I was daintily nibbling on a jalapeno pepper when all at once, a flying zombie vampire hobbit dressed as Abraham Lincoln...aw, screw it. That one's been done to death. I'm having chicken soup for dinner. Might make some Paleo biscuits to go with it.

Two down. I suppose the obvious choice for category three would be:

My Adorable Child

My adorable child hates to read. This really irks me. And apparently, yelling at him and telling him that he's going to LOVE reading someday, dammit, is not going to help him like it any better. Go figure. For now I'm looking for books with only one sentence per page, as this seems to keep him from getting overwhelmed. I can tell he really does want to read, he just finds it difficult and doesn't want to do all the practice it takes to get good at it. Just where in the hell he picked up that attitude, I can't begin to imagine.

There. Done. Not pretty; nothing fancy. But it's a start. Or a restart, anyhow. More to come...

I think.