Yes, I totally made up that word.

No, I have not been lax in everything in my life.  In fact, I have gotten quite a lot of writing done and read several books and played quite a bit of Diablo 2 and rearranged the office and done other worthwhile things, I’m sure.  You should know by now that I can never remember many specifics very long after the fact.  I can hardly remember our wedding date (no, seriously, I had to think really really hard about it just the other day).

Suffice to say that I have been busy.

Also, I have not been very good at getting to bed when I really should, which means I wake up a bit later than I really should and don’t have time to blog before I start the day’s writing.  And I have finally placed working on the novel above blogging in the priorities.  That’s good, yes?  Yay noveling!  But it does mean the blogging has suffered.  Next goal: Getting to bed on time so I can do EVERYTHING!

But I digress.

The real reason for this post is to fill time before I have to pick Matt up from class and we go to a meeting at church tonight.  No, wait.  That wasn’t supposed to be the real reason.  I mean, it’s part of the reason, but. . . . I should stop babbling and wander around to my point.

My point is, where has been a recent addition to the Whitt Household!  That’s right, folks, something else for me to kill!

She’s a very pretty flower plant in a pot, and I’ve named her Georgette.  Here’s a picture of her (with Shiloh, who looks slightly annoyed because I made her sit there and stay while I took a photo and she can’t imagine why):

Yes, those are Matt’s psychoanalysis textbooks on the table.  No, as far as I know he is not psychoanalyzing me (we can all hope).

At any rate, Georgette was gifted to me with the instructions that I was not to intentionally kill her.  My friends know my track record with plants.  I did not feel it was appropriate to point out that I never intend to kill any of my plants.  She’s lasted out her first week and a half, though, which is pretty good in terms of flower-plant lifespans in this household.  I have no idea what to expect in terms of her annual life-cycle, though.  Will she bloom all the time?  How much water is too much?  Her blooms get wilty when I don’t water her every day, but are some of those yellowy brown leaves a result of too much water?  I just don’t know.

Georgette sits on the TV table near the porch windows because she seems to do better with a bit of light, and that’s the most consistent place for her to get it without being frozen on the porch.  I will keep you updated on her progress or decline, as the case may be.

Bob2, for those who are concerned, seems to be doing fine.  He’s still a bit sunburned from where I left him out on the porch this summer, and I’m not certain he’ll ever recover, but he seems to be plugging along just fine.

And now I will think about cleaning the kitchen, which is a mess.  Or maybe I’ll read a bit more. . . . Decisions, decisions.

Sometimes I’m conscious of allowing distractions to edge their way in, and other times I look up and realize I have no idea how I got so far off track.

So I’m refocusing. Matt’s out of town again this week on a nice long wilderness backpacking trip courtesy of Solid Rock Outdoor Ministries, so I’ve got plenty of time and space to clear out the mental cobwebs.

Family: Happily, one of the aspects of my life that hasn’t slipped much lately. Goal is to maintain and deepen time/interaction with family.

Career: Two aspects of this, the writing and the day job. As the day job looks much different now than it did 6 weeks ago, and looks more and more likely to disappear sooner rather than later, I can dedicate more time to the writing. In the current job market, I’m leaning toward investing myself in writing rather than wasting time and energy trying to find a nonexistent position. Regardless, I need to set short and long-term goals for my writing, and I need to find someone to crack the whip and make me stick to them once I set them.

Finance: We spend more money than we ought. We have a peculiar financial situation, and it often results in a rather lax view toward budgeting and savings. I’m taking steps to adjust our mentality on that, beginning with trying out the MVelopes.com service.

Health and Wellbeing: I caught up on sleep last week, and it’s a wonderful thing. I’ve also gotten myself swimming semi-regularly at the apartment complex pool. I’m working on setting up a regular time to take Shiloh to the dog park, which gives us both exercise, and I’m really really (really) going to recommit to my WiiFit schedule.

Recreation: Much of this also falls under exercise, since much of our recreation is active, but I’m making sure I block out time for reading. We also got an XBOX 360 recently, and Fable 2 allows us to log into the same game together and kill bad guys. I’ve STILL got a big unfinished quilt that needs to be completed. And I do very much like meeting people for coffee.

Personal: I am learning about the care and keeping of cacti (turns out they do best in steady, diffused light, not direct sunlight, so Bob2 is back in the office) and I am contemplating installing a window-box-style herb garden on the porch railing, if I can be reasonably assured I won’t kill them all. My writing definitely counts in this category, too, for a variety of reasons.

Friendship: I generally operate with a bit more distance than some people in terms of friendships, so once I plug back into my “usual” sources of information and communication, there’s not much of a course correction that’s going to happen here. There are a few people, though, who I want to be better friends with, and I’ll be intentional about getting together with them.

Community: For all intents and purposes, the church congregation serves as our community. I’d love to get more connected in the neighborhood and the town eventually, but right now it’s just not possible. I’ll be keeping an eye out, though, and laying the foundation to move on that when the time is right. Meanwhile, maintaining relationships with people in the church, our small group, etc., are the standard.

Household: Goal is to do a general sweep of the house every night to tidy up – clean the kitchen, run the dishwasher if necessary, put the stuff that always lands on the dining room table away, corral the dog toys, find the remotes, etc. Once a week laundry and vacuum, and we’ll be cutting back drastically on eating out.

Spiritual: This one’s between me and God, but it’s definitely part of my consideration in refocusing and being deliberate about how I spend my time.

Since my last set of excuses, work stuff has gotten sorted out (which required quite a few hours of meetings to finally settle on, and will probably be completely reworked again this week), but it made this a rather stressful week. Add some . . . hmm. We’ll call it “excitement”. That’s a nice word that can encompass both good and stressful things . . . from Matt’s half of our world, meetings, a dinner with friends, two barbeques, and the usual church obligations, and I’ve felt a bit stretched this week.

This week looks much the same; dinner tomorrow night with folks who are becoming good friends, band rehearsal Tuesday, going-away shindig for friends on Wednesday, and preparation for a weekend retreat from Friday midday through Sunday. Plus my usual work stuff, a resolution to get my tush back in gear on the manuscript work, and putting together the kernels of ideas that will grow into the sermon I’m preaching in late August at church.

Bob2 was looking rather sickly after several weeks out on the porch railing, so we brought him back inside, since he seemed to thrive there. Fingers crossed that I haven’t killed another one.

Speaking of being busy, I should get ready for dinner tonight with our small group so when dessert comes out of the oven I’ll be ready to get in the car and head over.

I moved him out onto the porch this morning. I realize that I probably should have done this a week or more ago, but I’ve been a little slow on the uptake in general lately. But this morning I came into the office to clean off my desk so I can pay the bills so our electricity stays on and our phones stay connected, and I saw Bob sitting there, indoors, not getting as much sun as he would like. So he’s outside now. The porch is shady in the mornings, but catches sun from about noon until sunset, which is about 9pm these days, so he should be happy.

Now I should go back to cleaning the desk, so I can proceed to paying the bills. And then writing. Because there is always writing to be done.

I’ve spent most of the day cleaning my desk, which might sound to some people like the job of an hour or so, but those people have not witnessed my desk. When I’m done entirely, I’ll take a photo and you can all ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at how lovely and clean it is.

In the meanwhile, Bob2 seems to be faring well. I’d post a photo, but it would look pretty much like all the other ones you’ve seen of Bob2 thus far, so that seems silly.

Shiloh has been a bit neglected lately, in the sense that Matt and I have both been either too busy or too disinclined to brave the cold temperatures in order to take her out for a proper walk or run around the park. But she makes do with running around the house like a demon with one or the other of her toys in her mouth. She also spends a great deal of time looking out the window, now that she can both see out a window and look at something (the parking lot) which is interesting at least some of the time.

Notice that the ledge is at just the right height for her to rest her chin there while she watches. Very convenient.

I took this one this morning when she was playing with her squeaky bowling pin. The body has a nice duck-call noise when you squeeze it, and the rubber’s tough enough to take her chewing for more than five minutes without falling apart.

So that’s what’s going on in the Whitt home today.

Ironically, I realized on the drive to work today that although I remembered to water my cactus this morning, I forgot to water the dog. Er… to refill the dog’s water dish. You might think that’s horribly neglectful of me, but I’m not too worried. First of all, the toilet’s open if she gets really desperate (not that I hope she will take advantage of that option, but it’s there in an emergency, and she’s been known to do it before) and second of all, I seriously doubt it will get warm enough to dehydrate her any further today.

We have an informal temperature scale in our household, in which the person who takes the dog out in the morning gauges the weather for the benefit of the other person’s clothing and/or jacket choice for the day. The terms vary somewhat, but in general there’s super hot, hot, warm, no temperature (also called “perfect”), chilly, cold, and freakin’ freezing. It was freakin’ freezing this morning. Thus, little danger of overheated, dehydrated dog in the house today.

Furthermore, I purposefully did not fill the dog’s water dish before I fed her. This is because recently she has had the most amazingly foul breath. (No, seriously. Foul. FOUL.) It got bad enough that we went to the pet store for bad-dog-breath remedies and came back with some minty stuff that goes into her water dish and does seem to have worked, more or less. At any rate, Shiloh LOVES her new minty water, and she tends to drink rather a lot of it, especially right when we put down a new, full bowl. After three days of unfortunate experience, we ascertained that Shiloh drinking a lot of her minty water + a full belly of food = vomit on the carpet. Depending on whether the water was consumed before or after the food was added, the vomit is either plain liquid or sprinkled with entirely undigested bits of kibble. We may be headed into the realm of too much information here, so I’ll wrap up by saying that we’ve decided a fresh bowl of minty water at the same time as a bowl of food is a supremely bad idea. So I fed the dog this morning and intended to put the water down about a half hour later, after her belly had some time to settle with the food, and then we got into a rush to leave the house and I plum forgot. (Plumb? I don’t think I’ve ever typed that phrase before, so I never had to know how to spell it.)

So that’s how the cactus got watered and the dog didn’t.

Also worth noting this morning, my boss is in a musical mood. Between appointments he was rather lustily singing lyrics I’ve never heard to a rather well-known melody from The Pirates of Penzance, but of course I can’t remember the name or the correct lyrics for the life of me now. I don’t know if he made up the lyrics or if they’re simply a version I’ve never heard before, but they were highly enjoyable (about how some people think it best to be melancholy but he prefers cheerful melody or something like that). When he got tired of singing, I still caught bits and pieces of the melody as he whistled to himself.

Mornings like this remind me of how much I really do like my job.

I’m headed to Nashville in two days–if all works out, I’m going to take some fabric with me to make into a quilt top since Mom can bring a sewing machine. So this morning’s agenda is to finalize my math on how many fabrics I need and how much of them, and put together a list so I can go shopping this evening.

Aside from being crafty, Mom and I will be exploring the city in a leisurely fashion while we’re there. Neither of us have been before, so if you’ve got suggestions on fun things to do, leave me a comment!

I did make myself file our taxes, though, so at least that’s done. We get a refund–yay!–and it’s bigger than last year’s, which isn’t saying much, since we only got $7 last year. But I think that doing my taxes might have eaten my brain, because although I can think of three or four things off the top of my head that I could do (ranging from things I really ought to do all the way through things I really shouldn’t waste time on but that are usually fun), I have no desire to do anything. Nothing at all. No ambition, no drive. I could just sit here clicking “refresh” on my FaceBook homepage. Wait, that’s what I HAVE been doing for the last half hour.

So I thought as long as I was wasting my own time, I might as well waste yours, too. Generous, aren’t I?

Earlier this week, in the flurry of melodrama surrounding my laptop, I mentioned that I had an update about Bob2. Here it is:

I finally caved and dug out all the little glued-in rocks around Bob2′s base. I did this mostly with a rather long pencil, and even then Bob2 viciously attacked my fingers once or twice. His soil is now open to the air, and I added 1/4 cup of water right away, because he was very dry. I have a feeling that wasn’t enough water, but as we have established, I know nothing.

Anyway, there were a lot of rocks. I’ve kept them, at least for the time being, in case they come in handy for something. Here’s the photo of Bob2, freed of his gluey rocks, and the dish of rocks from which he has been freed. Beneath them is a page I pulled out of the newspaper with muffin recipes I thought looked tasty, and which served to keep my desk more or less un-dirt-ified while the glued-rock excavation took place.

So there you have it. Bob2 is, at least, not dead within his first month.

I’m headed to Nashville next week–any suggestions on activities I shouldn’t miss while I’m there? We’re pretty flexible on schedule.

And now I’m going to go be boring somewhere else, because you fine folks surely have better things to do. Have a good one!

I’ve been reading a lot lately. I realize that some of you may laugh at such a statement, but I mean that I have been reading even more than usual lately, mostly because I haven’t been able to get my poor brain to focus on spitting out its own original material, so I’ve been inundating it with other people’s stories. I have no idea what I hope to accomplish in so doing, but that seems to be what’s happening.

In positive news, just in case you were wondering, Matt loves me. Do you want to know how I know? Of course you do! And even if you don’t, I’m going to tell you, because it’s my blog and I’ll cry if I want to. Oh, wait. Sorry. I had a Leslie Gore moment, but I think it’s done now. . . . Yeah. We’re clear.

But back to the issue at hand. How do I know Matt loves me, you ask? Because he cleaned the house today AND he made me gravy. That’s right, folks. Gravy. Chicken gravy especially for me to have to biscuits for dinner tonight, and enough to take care of dinner for both of us tomorrow night.

“But Betsy,” you say, “you don’t strike me as a biscuits and gravy kind of girl.”

Ah, and you’d be right. I don’t like just any biscuits and gravy. Well, chances are that I like almost any kind of biscuits. But gravy? I’m picky about my gravy.

That’s right.

And with that, I’m going to try to write a few more pages tonight. Because, you know, this manuscript has to get finished sometime.

Oh, and Bob2 is still alive, as far as I can tell.

We hope.

I got more done last month than I thought I did, looking at numbers instead of feelings of moving forward, but that just goes to show that if I could actually get my brain to turn on every day, I’d get TONS done. So I feel less bad about completely wasting a month, because I didn’t, but I didn’t use the time all that well, either.

Today is a day for crossing things off my to-do list.

Good quote from Howard Thurman, American theologian, clergyman, and activist:

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Hi, Bob!

Look, he’s even got a little Bob-bud! He grew a few more, too, but I didn’t get any photos of them. Bob lived longer than all the other plants I’ve ever cared for, combined. I watered him! But not too much! Or so I thought. Still, he only made it about nine months before his pretty pink head decayed and fell off, and then his stem turned into goop that resembled hair gel inside a thin, waxy skin. It wasn’t pretty. For his sake, I didn’t take pictures of the end times.

When Bob’s headless goop started growing black mold, I had to admit that I had killed a cactus. The plague-infested blackened thumb of DOOM had struck again!

Matt, in a kind-hearted attempt to ease the sting of failure, has developed a theory that Bob was only meant to live for one season, as a clever plot from the cactus-growers to sell more Bobs! Or something. I’m not convinced that he’s right.

This is all going somewhere, I promise. Really. Stick with me.

Fast forward two and a half years: the date is February 10, 2009. (Yes, I know today’s the 11th. I’m setting the scene, people.) Matt went into the grocery store to buy shiitake mushrooms for dinner while I waited in the car. He came back out with–surprise!–my valentine’s day present:

I call him Bob2.

Hi Bob2!

Bob2, according to his handy dandy care tag, is a “resilient” cactus. The “care meter” has three types of cactus listed: Delicate, Tolerant, and Resilient. Resilient means Bob2 “grows virtually anywhere with little care”. Woohoo! I suspect, based on this scale, that Bob was probably “delicate”. Poor Bob.

I tried to take a picture of Bob2′s tag, so you could see this information for yourselves, but had very little luck. I did, however, catch the most important bit without glare or super-fuzzy focus:

Exotic! And, more important–Everlasting!!!

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Okay, I don’t, but I know one thing you might be thinking. It’s that I’ve finally got a plant that even my plague-infested black thumb of DOOM can’t kill. Not so hasty, sir!

There are so many ways this can go bad. Here they are, in rough order from least worrisome to most:

First, Bob2 is supposed to remain in temperatures about 50 degrees. Not a problem. He’ll stay inside during the winter and probably out on the porch railing in the summer, once temperatures are reliably warm enough.

Second, Bob2 needs “High Light”. We’re going to put him in the office in the winter, since that gets the afternoon sun, but we often have all the curtains closed for heat and light conservation. Once summer comes, I suspect he’ll stay out on the porch railing, where he’ll get sun regardless of the state of our curtains. But what if medium or low light for his first few months with us weakens poor Bob2? I wouldn’t be too worried, except that I do have a record of killing cacti.

Third, Bob2 is supposed to be fed every six months. Fed what? And how am I supposed to remember when 6 months has passed? I can’t even remember what the last movie I watched was, and that was two days ago.

And fourth, Bob2 is supposed to be watered only when his soil is completely dry. This, you might think, would be the easy part. But wait. Scroll back up to Bob2′s picture. Go ahead, I’ll wait until you get back. You see those pebbles? Am I allowed to move those? I don’t know. Going off my own initiative has, universally, ended up with death. But they’re in the way! I can’t tell when the soil is dry! I don’t even know for certain that there IS soil under there!

Poor Bob2. Doomed before he really had a chance.