Once upon a time, there was a young couple who lived in Colorado. They adopted a puppy, and named her Shiloh, and the couple and their puppy often played in a big undeveloped field next to their apartment complex. There Shiloh discovered one of the Great Joys of Doggy Life: chasing geese. Actually, first she discovered the joys of eating goose poo, and her humans had to put a stop to that, but THEN Shiloh discovered the geese, and infinite satisfaction of making a whole flock of them take flight.

Alas, in time, the family moved away from the apartment and the big field full of geese to chase. Shiloh was sad about this lack in her life, but there were other good things going for the new apartment, like being able to see out the windows, so it pretty much evened out. And, on special occasions, Shiloh got to visit places where there were geese to chase. It was a good life.

(Okay, the third person narration is beginning to take its toll, so TA-DAA! We switch!)

A few weeks ago, I brought Shiloh to the seminary campus when I picked up Matt from class. With only one car, we often drop off and pick up, and sometimes it’s really easy to load Shiloh into the car and give her a bit of time to explore a less-familiar place, interact with a variety of people, go running to greet Matt when he comes out of the building, and sometimes, when there aren’t lots of people outside, I can let her off the leash to chase the geese while we wait for class to end.

I generally wait until there aren’t many people around for two reasons:

First, Shiloh can be very, very friendly and excited when she’s meeting new people–when she’s off the leash, this usually involves a very fast incoming approach. This often causes some concern because people aren’t sure whether she’ll jump on them (she won’t) and, regardless, she’s a pretty good-sized dog. People who aren’t comfortable around dogs are usually pretty freaked out by 60 pounds of canine barreling gleefully in their direction. Until we get that under a bit more control, I’m generally very aware of her exuberant tendencies.

Second, technically speaking the campus isn’t really geared toward dogs. There’s an outdoor patio where people sometimes bring smaller dogs on sunny days, but none of the buildings allow non-service animals and none of the on-campus housing allows pets. This is entirely understandable–many people who have dogs overestimate their dog’s good behavior (and lack of mess-making), or assume others will welcome an animal simply because the owner welcomes it. (See above for my awareness that not all people like dogs or are comfortable around them.) Granted, there’s absolutely nothing that even slightly indicates that dogs aren’t allowed on campus–many people love to see Shiloh and many students come play with her for a while, mentioning that they miss their own family dogs–but I still feel just a little bit like I should be extra-well-behaved when I bring Shiloh, especially when any of the seminary higher-ups are around.

At any rate, a few weeks ago I had Shiloh on campus. It was chilly, early evening, but the sun hadn’t set yet so in the light it was warmer. I know the Seminary grounds staff has been complaining about the geese, which are a significant problem. They don’t really migrate any more around here, so these geese have been in the campus area for several years, at least. The deterrents that the seminary uses don’t really work any more, but using new ones will require quite a bit of money invested, and that’s not really an option in this economic climate. Anyway, there weren’t many people around, but there were some geese, so I let Shiloh off the leash and told her to go get them.

With great joy, she sprinted toward the geese, making sure they all took off and were going to stay airborne, and then came back to me, immensely pleased with herself. I spotted another cluster of geese around the corner of a building, so we went and chased them off, too, then returned to the main courtyard area.

Who should be coming across the quad than the Head of Building and Grounds! I waved, since we know each other from the time I was employed there, and he headed toward me.

“Is that your dog?”

“Yep, she is.” Please, don’t be mad at me for letting her run around off-leash.

“I’d like to buy her.” He laughs, so I know he’s not really serious. “What I wouldn’t give for a couple of dogs on campus, trained to run those geese off. But we can’t, because of liability, long-term.”

I volunteered that Shiloh will be glad to help whenever she’s on campus, and Tom made it clear that we’re welcome any time. Yay!

Fast forward to Tuesday. Matt and I were flying back from New York, and when I turned on my phone after our last flight I had a voicemail waiting–it was Tom, asking me to give him a call.

Turns out the school is hosting a big dinner the night before the inauguration ceremony for the new president (who started back in July), and they want the campus to be as clean as possible. Shiloh and I have been contracted to arrive on campus at 9am and stay until a little after 5pm, and keep the geese out of the main areas of campus so the sidewalks will stay clean for the fancy visitors.

I think this is hilarious, but I’m glad to be able to help. Tom asked me to set an amount I’d like to be paid and he’ll get it approved. I have no idea what to ask for. If it’s a warm day, I intend to sit and read or write outside for most of the day, with occasional circuits to be sure the geese don’t get any crazy ideas into their heads about sneaking back. If it’s cold, it’ll be quite a bit more tedious.

But, for a while at least, Shiloh will be the Official Goose Chaser of Denver Seminary.

I couldn’t make this stuff up.

As I mentioned yesterday, I have been brewing up some resolutions for the new year.  Concrete goals for myself that will direct my progress and stretch me–sometimes in entirely new directions, and sometimes in ways I haven’t been stretching lately, and that I miss.

So here’s my list, with some notes:

1. Write and revise a whole novel. I have the ideas sorted out in my head, but I really need to speed up my production process. This will take the most dedicated time of all my resolutions, but I’m confident that I can do it.
2. Research dog training options and complete Shiloh’s Canine Good Citizen certification. Elements of the test are listed and explained on the AKC website. Also included in this will be attention to Shiloh’s sometimes-excessive warning barks at noises outside (especially knocks on the door).
3. Finish five quilting projects. These can be projects I’ve already started which have been sitting unfinished in the closet.  There are at least two of those, and I have a solid idea for a third quilt to gift someone special this year.  A corollary to this is the goal of not buying new fabric for these projects, but using materials already in my stash.
4. Read 50 fiction books already on our shelves that I haven’t read before. Because there are a lot of books that I’ve picked up from various sources and never read, and I’d like to remedy that.  Also, reading books we already own saves money, whether it’s book-buying money or gas money getting to the library.
5. Exercise for one hour every week. This seems like a pitifully little amount of exercise, but I’m keeping in mind that 1) I will be traveling a lot this year, and should still be able to maintain this goal despite that (even though exercise usually flies out the window when I travel), and 2) my everyday life is pretty active, and this refers to dedicated exercise time, not incidentals like pushing around the vacuum.
6. Query five agents every week until a contract of representation is signed. This is pretty self-explanatory to me.  I don’t stop querying at requests for partials or fulls, an offer of representation (or many!), or anything else except a signed contract.

That’s it.  Those are the things I am resolved to accomplish this year.  I intend to print them out and hang them in some conspicuous place so that I cannot forget them or ignore them.  I think it will be a good year.

Given the month I’ve had, I was pretty darn sure that I wasn’t going to make this deadline, and I’m not sure I can accurately convey how bummed out that got me.  I’ve worked with this story, loved it, hated it, coaxed it along, finished it, pulled it apart, and put it back together again for almost three years now.  Everything in me has screamed that it was taking too much time, but I’m so excited because I think the extra time has been good in the end.  It’s worth the wait, I pinky swear.

The manuscript is finished.  For reals this time.

And now I get to look at the list of agents I started compiling the first time I finished it, revise it, update it, put together a totally rawkin’ query letter (I shall have to see whether I have one or two hiding in my archives somewhere that I can tweak, because I could swear I put one together for this story before), and begin convincing people of how awesome this novel is.

Happy Monday!

Ten days since my last entry isn’t so bad, really.  Not when it’s been caused alternately by furious manuscriptural progress (yeah, I made that word up, and I quite like it, thanks for noticing) and some pharmaceutical adventures, the latter of which I was rather slow to catch onto.

First of all, I’m more than halfway through this manuscript revision, which is significant because close to the first 1/3 was new material that had to be connected and smoothed into the existing text, and now that I’ve passed that juncture I anticipate veritably flying through the remaining work.  In other words, I am optimistic.  But then, I am rarely pessimistic, so we should take my optimism with a shaker’s worth of salt.

As to the pharmaceutical adventures, it’s a rather long, roundabout story, but the short version is that our new medical insurance policy very much prefers not to cover my customary antidepressant (hereafter Drug B), so I switched to another variety that has the same active ingredient (Drug C).  I was assured that very few people have trouble with this change as the two drugs are very similar, and I am so far from being picky about brand or method as long as the darn stuff WORKS that I readily filled the prescription.  Unfortunately, I am part of the “very few people” who do not adjust seamlessly to the new (to me) drug.

For about the last week and a half I have had seriously strange dreams–abnormal ones, for me.  Not scary dreams, just uber weird.  Pretty much every night, three or four a night.  I know this because I wake up between all of them and have trouble getting back to sleep, which leads to a tired Betsy.  I’ve been taking naps most mornings, and have only proceeded from napping to writing (rather than reading or watching “A-Team” episodes on Netflix) about every other day.  Finally, sometime in the nighttime hours no one should ever witness between Thursday and Friday, it dawned on me that there is only one other time something like this has happened to me–and it was almost two years ago, with the very first antidepressant I tried.  This reaction isn’t as severe as the first one, but then I was on Drug A for a month and a half, and Drug C for only two weeks.  Less time to develop strangeness.

At any rate, I called the doctor folks on Friday morning and after numerous call-backs for them to verify lots of angles, I am now gradually shifting to Drug D. If it works, great.  If not, I know that the doctor can jump through some hoops and get Drug B (my antidepressant of choice) approved coverage with the insurance, if it’s the only thing that works for me.  I’m not sure how many others I’ll have to try before they can conclude that I actually do need Drug B.

All in all, I’m not all that upset at present.  I’d much rather not have to jump through hoops (either personally or via my doctor) to get what I need to be healthy.  On the other hand, if they make me try several more medicines before we find one that works, I can see the next two or three or four months basically going down the drain, practically speaking.  As it is, barring severe immediate issues, I have to stay on Drug D until Christmas, more or less, before they’ll consider trying me on something else.  I have not yet run through even all the antidepressants that most people would recognize on hearing because of various advertisements, much less any lesser-known ones.

But I am trying to remain optimistic, because getting pessimistic about depression tends to be a rapid downward spiral and we can certainly do without any of that.

All that to say, another week (probably) of funky dreams before I’ve totally phased out Drug C, and then we’ll see how well Drug D works through my winter depressive slump.

And now back to my regularly scheduled manuscript edits.

So I’ve waited and debated a bit about putting up a public link to this, but I’m going ahead with it.  A few Sundays ago I preached at one of our church’s weekly services, and as it is standard policy, I was recorded and added to the podcast feed the church maintains on iTunes.

So if you go to the iTunes store and search South Suburban Christian Church, two options come up–stick with South Suburban Christian Church, not the other option, Salt, and scroll down the podcasts to 2009-10-18 Levi’s House.  I’m listed in the description as the speaker, so you can be sure it’s me.  It should be free to download and you can listen to it any time.

Forgive the incessant “ahs” between phrases in the first couple minutes. It gets better once I get rolling, I promise.  It’s about 25 minutes long, beginning to end.

For those who either don’t have access to iTunes or don’t have any use for downloading, there’s a recording on the church’s website, as well.  Click here to listen.

And I think that’s about all for now. There’s a lot to do between now and Thursday at about noon, when I intend to kidnap Matt and whisk him away for a few days.

Ta ta for now!

I have decided to stop apologizing.  So hah!  Take that, guilt!  For those who wish I would update a bit more often, I’ve added a widget to display my twitter feed in the right-hand column at the bottom of this page, so you can keep up with goings-on even when I’m not finding much time for blogging.

The last few weeks have been busy ones.  I’ve been writing, Matt’s been super-busy with work and classes, and we currently have almost two feet of snow, and it’s supposed to keep coming down for another 12 hours or so.  I do like snow, but this is really early for winter to hit like this.  I have a feeling we’re going to have a whopper of a winter.  Also, we need to get new tires on the truck.  I thought that could wait for another month or maybe two, but with this much snow we can’t put it off much longer.

As I browsed through a bookstore earlier this week I came across a copy of Elaine St. James’s Simplify Your Life on super-sale, and since I usually do better when I have a checklist of sorts, after I paged through it a bit I brought it home.  (I did pay for it first. I’m not always a book thief.)  I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been updated since it was written in 1994, so there are some pretty great time/lifestyle gap things, but the concepts are all very solid and easily modified to apply to life 15 years later.  And the first thing is to clear out the clutter.

You see, we have a LOT of stuff.  We’ve acquired it in the usual ways: purchased back in the day when we had extra money, gifted by well-meaning friends and family members, swapped with friends, salvaged from other people’s trash, and generally accumulated so slowly we never realized how it was piling up.  We even clean out every time we move, which has been once a year lately, and we STILL have tons of stuff we never use and probably never will.

So, following the first two suggestions in The Book, we have been cleaning out the house during the last two days as drifts of snow piled up outside.  So far, we have almost two 18×18x18-inch boxes of stuff to donate and at least two 30-gallon trash bags to throw out.  That’s from the office (and closet), our bedroom (and closet) and two bathrooms.  We haven’t touched the main living area, the kitchen, or the garage.  It feels really good to get rid of stuff that’s just been sitting there, being moved from apartment to apartment.  It’s amazing–there’s room in the closets for things that have been “living” on the floor, getting kicked out of the way all the time.  Crazy!

Also, we bought some cheap plastic drawers for my quilting fabric, which means now it’s not all piled in big boxes, so I can actually get to what I need without taking over the whole office.  There are drawers for my projects-in-process and all sorts of loveliness.  See?

So today warrants hot chocolate and cozy writing time, at least until Matt gets back from his youth ministry symposium.  Then I suspect there will be snowshoeing.  I’ll try to get video of Shiloh–she LOVES the snow and has tons of fun.

Oh, and I am signed on as a Official Participant for NaNoWriMo 2009, but honestly I haven’t figured out how serious I am about that.  I suppose I should decide, since it starts in two and a half days.

Also, my good friend Venessa Giunta has asked a good question over at her blog:  Do you [as a writer] tell people what you do?

Finally, for those who use Amazon Wish Lists and/or those who wish they could get their hands on a Kindle without paying for it, don’t miss the Kindle Love Sweepstakes.  You can enter through Saturday for the Kindle, and then it moves on to another kind of prize next week.

That’s all for now!  Time for hot chocolate!

I have been lax in my bloggelation duties.

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.

For those who have not been paying attention, today was New Stove Day!  Before the old one was hauled away, I took this photo of the damage:

Yes, the oven floor is a bit dirty, but at least it was not flaming.  For those who really like details, the right portion of the broken coil was the bit that wasn’t getting power, and the left bit was the angry red/white-hot/flaming bit.  The flame traveled from the broken end up and around about the where the top rack crosses it in the photo.  Maybe a bit more.  As I said before:  alarming.  I do not recommend it as an experience everyone should have.

So the new oven came today.  It’s white and extremely clean (it makes our white-painted cabinets look a bit dingy), and it doesn’t have a window in the door or an oven light.  But it seems to cook things just fine, which is really the material point, and I can’t blame the landlord for going a bit cheap on his rental property instead of shelling out a big load of cash.  See?  New oven:

And to initiate it, I thought it was appropriate to cook myself a chicken pot pie for lunch.  That which brought the last one to its death will initiate the new appliance’s life.  Or something.  It smelled something awful for a while, but that was only alarming until I decided that was “new oven smell” (which is decidedly not as nice as “new car smell”–no one will be bottling it and selling it at Wal*Mart) and in the end I had a perfectly lovely chicken pot pie made with ABSOLUTELY NO FLAMES INVOLVED.

To be entirely candid, the bottom was less crispy than I really like, but that could be because I didn’t preheat the baking pan like I usually do.  I will report on this high-interest story as it develops.

In other news, I need to go officially turn in my key and access card and final timesheet to leave the day job behind.  I should probably call Matt and make sure he remembers that so I can have the car.  Also, the new writing regime has been working quite well, and I anticipate consistent progress in the future as well.

Finally, I leave for Ohio tomorrow, so you can expect things like updates of me with my adorable nephew for the next week or so.  And funny things I see at the airport.  And whatnot.

I’m sure there’s more, but it will have to wait.  You know how it is.

A lot of my “free” time recently has gotten sucked up in preparation for the sermon I delivered this morning. It went well, I think, and I can now look forward again.

1) We got new phones! And unlimited texting! Whee!

2) I caved and joined Twitter. I am @betsywhitt over there. I suppose I should put one of their little buttons in my sidebar.

3) Things are good. I have very few complaints.

4) It is time for bed very, very soon.

It’s been an interesting week. I’ve gotten some things done as planned, and others have fallen through the cracks. If I’m honest, that’s because I have stayed up too late and then been extremely reluctant to wake up early enough to have a truly productive morning. It’s a common trend in my life.

Matt has the car today, so I’m stuck here at the apartment. Stuck isn’t really the best word. I mean, I do have legs. I can walk somewhere–there’s a wide variety of things within a mile of here. Or I could ride my bike, which opens the circle of possibilities further. And, you know, there are city buses. But the easiest, coolest (as in, air conditioned) mode of transportation is the car, and I don’t have access to it today, which means either I will lie on the couch and waste time (tempting, but guilt-inducing) or I will get up and get to work on the variety of things just waiting for my personalized attention (delayed gratification–stinky now, feels great later).

The dog is extra-needy today. She wants attention and activity. Both Matt and I have been gone during the day for the last five or six days, so her life has been less than exciting, napping and waiting for us to come home. We’ll see if I can work out a trip to the dog park after Matt returns with the motorized chariot. I suspect she will curl up touching me once I settle into place at my workspace, which today is my folding table since my desk is covered in Stuff I Need To Deal With Eventually and if I have to look at all that Stuff I won’t get any revisions done. And nobody wants that.

That’s about all the news. Things here are, on the whole, quite good. Can’t complain, except that I’m not getting enough done. And that’s nobody’s fault but my own.