white noise

New post up today: A 10-Year Plan on the main site.

This short piece is a 500-word essay I wrote to accompany my application for Hollins University. I’m guessing it’s an exercise used to determine if an applicant can spell and grasp the fundamentals of grammar. Given that I live with a worse Grammar Nazi than me :) — no problem!

I survived a semester at Hollins, but discovered that with FMS 16 units (required to be full-time and qualify for certain student aid) a semester is more than I can withstand and retain my sanity. I ate a lot of pain killers. A lot.

I’ve been slogging through 10 or 25 years of collected crap that I don’t need and should probably burn anyhow, but the good news is that I’ve found stories, parts of stories, and poetry that I didn’t know or forgot that I’d lost. The neat thing about having such a horrid memory is that everything reads fresh and new even the 20th or so time around. I have learned one very valuable lesson in reading all these lost gems: I’m a dreadful story-teller. My greatest weakness? Endings. I suck at ending my stories.

NOW I remember why I love the desert so much! It has rained almost non-stop for 4 days. Okay, okay — 3.5. If this keeps up, I think the dehumidifier might go on strike. Then the basement will become our new indoor swimming pool, but I don’t know how to swim! Please send floaties. :)

Actually, the rain was pretty bizarre yesterday. I went to Jo-Ann’s in C-burg and when I left home, it was sunny. I wasn’t in the store five minutes when this massive torrent and lasted maybe 20 minutes. We had such a deluge of water, so quickly that streets turned into rivers and parking lots became lakes. From Jo-Ann’s, I went to Target and by the time I got out (45 mins later?) the sun was shining again. Well, 20 minutes later … you guessed it! It was raining again. It rained steadily all night long and hasn’t let up at all today. I think it’s all those iceberg-thingies up north melting cuz of global warming.

Lightning scares the heck outta me, but I love the thunder. Although we’d get rainstorms once in a blue moon in Olancha, I don’t recall there ever being much thunder. Now, the lightning storms in Owen’s Valley are far superior to those here in Virginia, but only because the forest here is so dense and makes it difficult to watch the lightning. The cannon volleies of thunder certainly make up for lost visual effects.

Ugh.

I thought the following worth stealing from Rick’s e-mail siggy:

Heinlein’s Rules for Writing

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

It’s going to rain. There’s been thunder and lightning for maybe an hour now and the thunder sounds awesome. It’s not shaking the windows in their musty, old frames yet … oops, spoke too soon. :)

There is this bird … I don’t know what it’s called or even what it looks like, but every once in a while I hear the cry of a newborn kitten mewling outside the window. It’s disturbing in that it whacks my Save-the-Animals! button soundly, leaving me with the overwhelming compulsion to drop what I’m doing and run out to rescue that poor, dear kitten. It takes a few seconds for the call to register as a bird.

It’s not like other birds, though. It doesn’t clamor all morning as predictably as does the blue jay with its incessant (and I do mean non-stop) squawking from the crack of dawn to the end of time. Nor does it vanish at the warmest part of the day. I’ve heard the distressed-kitten-call at noon and at dusk; it’s not predictable at all. But, I suppose as long as it doesn’t start sounding like a fire alarm, I’ll be okay. :)

Today, I am gutting more of the house — namely my keepsake trunk which, alas, has suffered water damage and is in desperate need of replacement. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a similar style trunk. I bought a real scrap book, but for one who loves paper art, I stare at those blank pages and all my keepsake paraphernalia — cards, letters, and photographs — and find I’m intimidated. Sheesh, what a wuss. Brought down by a ruthless, cunning blank scrap book. What next?