Wisdom teeth removal went smoothly, or so the doctor-man tells me. I don’t remember a thing.

My bleeding stopped fairly quickly, probably helped along by the fact that I was very good that first day about wrapping my face in ice packs to keep the swelling and bleeding down. And by “I was very good” I mean “My Mommy takes care of me.”

Night One went well, with me on the couch and Matt feeding me pain pills every 4 hours. Teamwork, don’t you know.

Yesterday, I spent most of the day actually getting things done, albeit from a reclining position. The bills got paid, emails got sent, phone calls were made (at least two, anyway). I was even thinking I might graduate from yogurt and Jell-O pudding to soft fish today, but then we started with the puking.

So far, there have only been two vomitous incidents, and I’m fairly certain they’re directly related to my prescription pain meds. Since my pain is getting better, I’ve moved to taking lots of ibuprofin (which seems to be doing just fine on the pain front and which might help my swelling). We’ll see if that helps with the puking. But really, how many other people can say they threw up a raspberry milkshake in the Macy’s elevator while sitting in a wheelchair?? Claim to fame, baby.

After that abortive trip to run errands, Mom and I retreated to the house, where I have quite happily not left the couch all afternoon. I read a little bit, napped a bit more, and will endeavor not to puke again tonight, so as to keep the vomit-per-day rate to a minimum.

Oh did I mention that this morning I woke up looking like I stole John McCain’s chin. Happy Halloween! Gotta love swelling.

And now that you all know a whole lot more than you wanted to about me and vicodin, I’ll let you get back to your regularly scheduled Halloween tomfoolery.

Oh, and speaking of tomfoolery, I do intend to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. I even have an idea, but not a very well-developed one. Tom! Fool! Ery!

So I finished the edits on the paper and sent it off yesterday. Picked up a new batch of books at the library, and my momma flew in to baby me after I get my teeth ripped out this morning. Matt will be helping, but he has a full load of work and school this week, and it seemed unfair to make him get behind on all that especially when Mom was willing to come and help.

Plus, now I have an entourage to care for my pitifulness, because believe me, I intend to be quite pitiful.We are about one hour from DOOM. And by DOOM I mean, of course, the pulling of wisdom teeth.

My plan for the day beyond that is to sleep and watch Pride and Prejudice and then maybe sleep some more. If I get really ambitious, I might read. And that’s about it.

See you on the other side of wisdom.

I think I’m done with the paper.

I’ll print it out and do another round of edits tomorrow, but I think this is as good as it’s getting. Talk about pulling teeth – oh wait, no, that’s Wednesday morning. I crack me up.

Time for bed.

I need a thesis statement.

Turns out I figured out why I’m having so much trouble with the genre paper, even getting started. . . and it’s because I want to argue one point, but I need to argue another for the purposes of the assignment. And I’ve been trying to figure out how to argue both, but that’s just not practical.

So now the trouble is, I can’t figure out how to word my central argument. And by “I can’t figure out how to word my argument” I mean “I haven’t got a darn clue of anything to say.”

So. Goal for the day: Figure out what I’m defending.

I need to write my genre paper, and I’m just not feeling it yet today. Part of the trouble might be that I compiled about 22 pages of material and quotations from my sources, and the paper is only supposed to be 5-10 pages long. I will have to summarize and distill things, and I haven’t quite got a firm handle yet on exactly what I want and need to say. So I’m putting it off for another hour or so.

The book I’ve been reading most recently is Naomi Novik’s VICTORY OF EAGLES. I have to say, I love Temeraire just as much as always. Being just over halfway through, I will say that I wish I liked Iskierka better – she’s impetuous and hotheaded and bent on gathering treasure, and I just wish she had some element that made her lovable despite that, that made me want to forgive her instead of just smack her at times. But then maybe I’m not supposed to like her.

And since I’ve been promising them for almost three weeks now, I’ve finally uploaded some of the pics from our backpacking trip in Rocky Mountain National Park. The aspens were in full color, which made for some really beautiful views.

This is me and Matt (no I’m not really that tall – I was standing uphill).

I love mountain waterfalls. . . see how the area at the base is flattened from the weight of ice through the winter?

Matt and I really are in this picture. . . we ate lunch up here in the middle of all that stark beauty.

Pretty pretty.

More pretty pretty.

And I couldn’t resist a great shot of one of the streams.

What a beautiful weekend.

Oh, what’s that you say? I need to work on my paper now? Well, fine. I suppose I can think about it, at the very least.

This does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside, what he relates is “true” : it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.

Right on. That’s from J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay, On Fairy-Stories.

One of my favorite chunks of The Literature of Hope in the Middle Ages and Today: Connections in Medieval Romance, Modern Fantasy, and Science Fiction, by Flo Keyes:

Action, not introspection, dominates. The reader is not told how to act; he or she is shown. The hero is not proposing a plan for the future; he is carrying it out. If a science fiction writer had a man wake up to discover he had been turned into a giant cockroach, as Kafka has Gregor Samsa do, the story would not focus on the cockroach’s loss of humanity, his sense of alienation from his family, the resurgence of gumption in the previously passive family members, and a wasting away into death to get himself out of the way. Instead, the reader might expect to hear the human/cockroach thinking something like, “Wow! I’m a cockroach. No insecticide known to man can kill me, maybe not even nuclear radiation can kill me. I can get into all kinds of places humans don’t want me to be, and I can walk on ceilings.” Then the cockroach would tumble out of bed, squeeze through one of those impossibly small spaces no one can believe a cockroach can fit through, and set off to save humanity from itself (and maybe make the world a better place for cockroaches of all sizes, too).

I don’t think there’s anything else to say, really. But in the end, I think that’s a pretty succinct summary of why I didn’t like METAMORPHOSIS at all. Wimpy Gregor just laid down and died. What’s that about??

It’s been a good day.

The first day of the new job went well.

I got word last night that both my mentors approved my manuscript, which means the biggest step toward graduation is done. Whee!

The new Discovery Channel show, Time Warp? FANTASTIC.

Seriously. Check it out.

Has it really been a week since I posted last? Apologies.

It’s been a busy week, but largely mundane. Most of Tuesday and Wednesday involved reading heavily in preparation for my genre paper due at the end of the month. Wednesday night, I got to go downtown to the Colorado Book Awards, which was a very nice evening, and very worthwhile. Thursday was my last day at the former day job, and on Friday I read more for the paper, and got re-certified in CPR in the afternoon. Saturday was mostly a day of fun reading, then an evening with friends and a potluck dinner. We tried a new sweet potato dish, and it was a big hit. We’ll have to make it again.

Sunday morning was church, then Matt had a youth staff meeting, and then we headed up to Broomfield for the concert I’ve been looking forward to for two months: Third Day, Switchfoot, and Jars of Clay. I’ve been a fan of all three for at least ten years, so Matt got us tickets for my birthday and we went. Fantastic show. Really amazing.

Today I’m making chili to take to my bible study potluck tonight (is it potluck season?) along with a whole list of other things around the house. The car needs an oil change, there are book to pick up at the library. My goal is to finish with all this stuff today so that I can focus on finishing my reading for the genre paper tomorrow. Wednesday marks the beginning of my new job, which should be a lot of fun.

So there you have it.

Shiloh is still cute as ever, I still haven’t posted pictures from backpacking last weekend, and I haven’t had breakfast yet. I think it’s time I got dressed and started the laundry, at least.

I was going to wait until I had time to upload some photos from this weekend before I posted, but that will be silly, since I won’t have time until at least tomorrow. The backpacking trip was lovely, in almost all the possible connotations of the term. The only down side, so far, is that I managed to strain my right knee, which means today I’ve taken three ibuprofin pills and taped one of those one-time-use heating pads onto it (you’d be how surprised how little it takes to dislodge a badly-adhered heat pad from your knee joint area) and as long as I don’t so anything really silly (like crouch down) it’s just fine.

Shiloh doesn’t seem to have picked up a knack for jumping fences, though we are told she did dig a few small holes in the yard. We’ll have to watch out for that in the future. Also, she stayed in the yard when the gate got left open, even though the other dog went galavanting around the neighborhood. We’re pretty sure that’s because Shiloh knows which side her bread is buttered on, and staying near the humans who feed her is pretty much always a priority.

Also, I can now announce that news that’s been in the works lately – I’ve turned in my notice to my current day job, and this Thursday will be my past day there. Starting next week, I’ll be taking a job at the seminary as a personal assistant. I’ll get more hours at the same pay rate, and there’s an excellent chance that I’ll be able to make progress on my own projects while I’m there. It’s a winning situation all around. So that’s very fun.

Hope your weekend was as lovely as mine. Was it?