1.  I wrote 1,000 decent words today.  w00t.   

2. Double Stuf is the only way to eat Oreos.

3. I want it to keep snowing overnight so I won’t have to go into the office tomorrow. Lazy? Me? No!

4. I got some video of the dog running around like a wingding this afternoon. This is a tame version. When she really gets going, this is about 1/2 or 1/3 speed, and she tends to slide into walls and furniture as she rounds corners.

Also, only about half the times she drops her toy here are on purpose. Sometimes it just falls out of her mouth and she has to go back to pick it up. Oh, and this can go on for 10 or 20 minutes at a stretch. We just sort of get out of the way. But she has a great time. Enjoy.

We got caught in extra traffic on the way to work today (crazy how that can happen when we pull out of our apartment complex, drive 3 miles up that road, and turn into my office building’s parking lot) so I called ahead from the car to tell them I was on my way and ask if someone could unlock the front doors for me on time and watch the lobby for 5 minutes. The message that picked up was different than usual, so I listened for a few minutes instead of immediately punching in the extension I wanted to reach – turns out the office is closed today and nobody told the receptionist (me). HA! I mean, yeah, I knew there was a company retreat happening for some departments, and I knew tons of people weren’t going to be in the building off and on throughout the week, but somehow it never quite got passed around to me that the building was officially closed for the day.

So Matt dropped me off at Starbucks instead of at work and I read while he ran some errands, which he’d been planning to take care of after he took me to work. And now I’m back home getting ready for an extra day of writing.

I got just under 1,400 words written yesterday afternoon, which is the most I’ve put down in one day since the end of October. That’s a very good thing, and I’m feeling good about moving forward. I forgot that we had plans to go to dinner at our neighbors’ place, though, so I had to stop earlier than I planned to get a shower and look presentable after several days of sweatshirts, yoga pants, and a sloppy ponytail. On the up side, we had a great time and I think we have new friends in the building, which is fantastic.

I’ve got a few emails to respond to, and then it’s back to writing. Woohoo!

Shiloh is following me from room to room like a spaz today, which is really unlike her most of the time. I found the bone she’d been missing for a few days, so it’s her current favorite and she’s carrying it around and flopping down in the dead middle of the room to chew on it for a few seconds before she gets back up to follow me to the next destination. She seems pretty happy now that I’ve settled in the office, and I almost just got a good picture of her lying on her back and chewing the bone–one of her favorite tactics–but she’s a camera ham and anytime she hears it turn on she snaps to attention and sits there looking straight at you until you put it away. Like this:

I’ll have to be sneakier next time.

And for those of you who have been around since she was this big…

…here’s a picture from last week. Sometimes she looks much older than 5 and a half months to me…

We’re more and more convinced that she’s got a fair amount of German Shepherd in her in addition to our original rottweiler guess. Luckily, she’ll never be as big as either of those breeds. I’m going to start calling her a mini shepweiler. Hey, if other people can come up with designer mutt breeds, so can I!

Whatever she is, she’s beautiful. And such a sweetheart.

I just don’t know how to tell the next part of the story, which is odd.  Usually this kind of prolonged stall in one area means I’ve gone wrong somewhere, but I can’t figure out where or even if that’s the problem.  Nothing stands out as the place of derailment.

But I’m going with a combination attack today.

Part 1: BICHOK. Butt in chair; hands on keyboard.

Part 2: I dedicate today, yet again, to writing excrement. It did seem to have a positive effect on my word count last time around.

The heater under my desk is on. My rice sock is providing a toasty warm place for my feet. My pot of tea is brewed and staying warm on the desk next to me. Matt’s even working on school stuff today (his classes started yesterday), which means I don’t have to tune out the sounds of TBS and video games all day like I did while he was on break.

There’s no reason I shouldn’t turn out at least 2k words of horrible rubbish today. Twice that would be even better, but that won’t happen unless I stop typing here.

….aaaaand go.

The writing, despite all my good intentions, has been going very slowly.  

I’m tempted to say it’s not my fault, but that would be a lie and I’m only that bad a liar in the minute and a half after I’m woken from a dead sleep.

Today, I’m at work. This means my mentality is that I can’t get writing done, despite the fact that so far all I’ve done is answer eight phone calls and make an announcement. I’ve been here for an hour and a half.

So, since I’m stuck on the writing and nothing types out on the screen reading anywhere near as good as I know it should AND I’m at work, obviously the day is shot as far as writing. That is, writing anything good.

Which is why I’m dedicating today (aside from the times when I have to, you know, pay attention to the job they’re paying me for) to writing as much horrible drivel as I can dredge up.

That’s my goal: Terrible writing. All day. I might not even try to punctuate correctly. (gasp!) I certainly won’t even dream of deathless prose. I will kill my prose at every possible opportunity.

What do you need to do badly today, just so you can say you got it done?

In light of the recent bout of frigid we’ve had here, I thought it was past time to make some chili, so I headed to the store this morning to pick up the ingredients we don’t usually stock in the kitchen and set to work.   

Here’s the first picture that’s at all interesting (i.e. not just chopped peppers):

That’s onion, red bell pepper, garlic, a whole host of spices, and two pounds of meat. This time around it’s 1/2 beef and 1/2 ground turkey. We’ll see if it’s as good as usual, but we had the turkey hanging about and it’s healthier and all that, so if it works that’s great.

After browning the meat, I added a bit of salt, dark red kidney beans, tomato paste, and diced tomatoes with the juice, and after a bit of cooking we get this:

It’s almost done cooking, but I’m going to let it cool and sit overnight to let the flavors marinate. We’ll have it for dinner tomorrow night, and eat the leftovers for quite a while. Yay chili!

And now my writing day starts. I know I’m not the only one who’s observed this, but it’s sort of nice to have a writers’ strike for tv, because there’s nothing to watch that’s good enough to make that a better option than writing.

Ta ta!

Well I’ve already created designations for Brewing Days and Writing Days, so I might as well keep coming up with ways of categorizing my working methods.   

In that spirit, today is officially an Ironing Day.

You see, sometimes I brew ideas up and toss them together and I start writing, and I realize that I’ve gotten to a place where things that weren’t terribly important to know about before are now more important. Sometimes these are things like “I don’t know how Devlin’s plot arc climaxes and resolves.” Sometimes it’s working out the finer points of a religious or a magical structure, or how those two types of structures interact and influence one another in my world. Sometimes it’s just issues that I’ve avoided working out because I knew it would take time and I’d rather do things that make my word count increase.

Regardless, today’s been a day of ironing out a variety of those types of problems. In the summer, I often do this sort of thing on a bike ride, talking out loud to myself as I work through ideas, keeping the ones I like in the tumbler and tossing out the ones that don’t fit well in the mix. Since I can’t do that at this time of year (it’s 10 degress outside with a fresh film of snowfall on the ground today), I’ve been avoiding the ironing process for quite a while.

Reaching a new level of desperation, I decided to try working my ideas out on paper – I’m not writing my novel longhand now, mind you, just using pen and paper to follow the flow of my thoughts about the writing a little more clearly – and it’s worked quite well, I must say. I’ve got three sheets of notebook paper covered continuously with writing and musing about various problems I’ve been butting my head against for a few weeks now. It’s not organized so that someone else would make much sense of it, but that’s not the point. I was going to stop the writing work and go run errands this afternoon, but I want to keep working, so a trip to the grocery store will have to wait until after dinner at least, and maybe tomorrow morning, depending on how long this ironing groove lasts.

Very cool.

Also: Shiloh has learned how to ring the bell by the door when she needs to go out and do some business. Victory!

Halting, stunted progress on the novel is better than none at all… and I am getting back in the habit of getting into Kerris’s head for writing, which is good. And I don’t work the day job until Thursday, so I have no excuse for not getting plenty of writing done in the next few days. Here’s hoping the groove (what groove there is) doesn’t get knocked.

Also, between Airborne, Tylenol Cold Nighttime, and Dayquil, I seem to have convinced my body that it doesn’t want to be sick. Woke up this morning feeling more tired than what I think of as normal, but little else. Ok, maybe a little bit of still-sick snot hanging about in my sinuses (is that too much information?) but even that seems to have dispersed since I woke up. Must be the tea.

I don’t even feel mildly bad about going to the movies with Stef and her mom this afternoon, either because I’d rather be in bed or because I’m afraid I’m contagious. I appear to have emerged victorious this time. w00t!

Now, it’s time for me to get a shower, dress in something suitable to be seen in public (as opposed to my current 3-times-too-big fleece and sweatpants ensemble), find some lunch, and go about the rest of my day.

Love and hugs all around.

We all know I have a singular talent for putting off work, but I’m reaching new depths today. And, of course, I seem to be coming down with some kind of cold/flu thing, which muddles my already sluggish novelesque thoughts.

Pitiful.

Frustrating.

Maybe I need to put the computer away and work on paper for a while. It certainly can’t go any slower than it is already.

John Scalzi has a post up today about 10 things he’s done that other people probably haven’t, with the invitation to follow suit and post your own list.  So here’s mine:

1. Went sledding (on a trash bag) on a de-mined section of the 1986 Sarajevo Olympic ski hills.
2. Attended undergrad classes at 4 separate universities, and still managed to get my B.A. in four years.
3. Ran a maple sugar shack for a day.
4. Completely demolished the LCD screen of my first laptop… 4 hours after I bought it.
5. Paid $120 for a taxi ride.
6. Walked through wet cement on a public road.
7. Won $500 and a limo ride to the first day of school.
8. Backpacked for 5 weeks in Europe with my mom.
9. Ran over a tree. Yeah, all the way over it.
10. Married the second guy I ever dated.

So what’s your list?