Emergency Musings
Posted By kelly on July 11, 2010
I’ve learned a lot since waking up Saturday morning in excruciating abdominal pain. (Keep Reading…)
Our Journey Continues...
Doing a bit of visual upgrading to the site. Later this spot will say/do something more interesting, but for now, you've got this.
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.: twitters :.
- i was going to ask if anyone had heard of this book, but @goodreads answered my question: http://tinyurl.com/374o358 #yayinternet
- aaaand done. i stand by my claim that Alias is what you should give folks who naysay comic books, especially superhero ones.
- @madmarvelgirl yeah, he's the main offender in Alias. there was a girl early on, too. i was all, "give him back his shades, b*tch!"
- my one (minor) gripe about Alias: people with red-tinted shades. that's how i identify cyclops, and i get confused when others wear them.
.: Formspring :.
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.: badges :.
Lent 2010: The Recap
Posted By kelly on April 12, 2010
Considering I didn’t even muster the weekly checkup posts past week 3, it should come as no surprise that I’ve failed, at least in the traditional sense, to give up “not writing” for Lent. When you get right down to it, I wrote probably half the days, maybe less, and the closer it got to Easter, the less I wrote. I just didn’t make it the priority I should have, and while I can point fingers and fussy toddlers and gestating babies, I made the choices I made and they didn’t include writing as often as I’d expected.
BUT! I’m still putting this experiment in the “win” column. (Keep Reading…)
What Is More Disturbing?
Posted By kelly on March 15, 2010
In the middle of the night Saturday night/Sunday morning there was a very loud boom outside. And then nothing. It was odd. Usually if there’s a crash of some sort, there are residual sounds. People yelling, debris falling, trucks backing up from whatever they crashed into, etc etc. I don’t want to give the impression I live on a interstate or anything, but it’s a fairly busy street and we’re only 3 stories up, so most of the street noise reaches us. Weekend nights usually bring quite a bit of noise. We’re used to it, but I hadn’t heard anything like this before. It sort of sounded like metal, but it had no echo. After a few more moments of complete context-less silence, I wasn’t even sure I’d heard it in the first place.
A while later (it may have been moments, but I drifted back to sleep and it felt like an hour or so), I heard it again. It was less loud, but still enough to wake us. It repeated three times, almost like a bell tolling. The “metal” sound was still there, but there was another component I couldn’t place. If it hadn’t been ridiculously early on a Sunday, I would have just assumed it was construction noise. Someone loading or unloading heavy things or whatnot. There’s still enough “urban renewal” going on around here that random mornings get a bit loud. After the third boom, there was some indistinct yelling. Was this someone being chased off? Was this a nearby resident voicing his displeasure at the sound? I’m not sure. After that, it was still again and I went back to sleep.
In the morning, we discovered what had happened and it was…disconcerting. The entrance to our building is inset and more or less directly below us. It has two sets of doors to get through, both glass, with glass “walls” that let in a bit more light. The first set grants you access to the shops on the first floor, the second set grants you access to the residences. There’s a security box on the outside that lets you in if you know a code, or lets you dial some friends to let you up. The outside doors are unlocked when the tea room on the first floor is open.
At some point in the night someone had used a steel cigarette receptacle to break through two glass walls and into our apartment complex.
So what happened? Who did this? There didn’t appear to be any additional vandalism or theft, so either breaking down the doors was the point, or they were chased off before they could go any further. It makes me wonder, though. I figure there are pretty much two types of scenarios: malicious thievery, or stupid drunk people.
Which of these bothers me the most? Not the idea that someone was trying to break in. It happens. I mean, it hasn’t happened here. Most of the theft-y crime in our area is car related. Despite what the news tries to tell you about this being the most dangerous city in America, it’s actually not that terrible unless you’re stupid about protecting your valuables, training to be in a gang in a real city (or live in the relatively small area where such training goes on), or are a halfway-house resident who isn’t particularly interested in rehabilitation. …Sorry. Soap box. My point is, that the idea that someone (or a few someones) took the time to plot how to break into our building doesn’t really bother me. Plus, they’re completely random (unless you’re very stupid about advertising how easy it would be to steal from you) so there’s ultimately not much one can really do to completely prevent them without living in a fort.
It bothers me much, much more that this is the work of stupid drunk people. Perhaps it was just a group of passersby daring each other into something stupid, but the fact that a second set of doors was damaged, granting access to the apartment building makes me suspicious. I can’t help but imagine that it was the work of someone who lives in my home and thought it would be cool/fun/easier to just bash in the doors so they could get upstairs when they forgot their code or whatever. This may sound less plausible, but it’s well within the realm of possibilities. This building is a pretty solid mix of older couples, a few very young families (like us – young referring to the age of the children, mind you), and whatever we’re call yuppies these days. Young kids acting like they’re the shit because they’ve got a swanky loft downtown and haven’t realized that college is over and they probably shouldn’t treat the place their parents have paid for like it’s a dorm. It’s only noticeable on big party weekends (this is St. Pat’s weekend) or when one randomly throws a party. Sunday morning the elevators reek of sticky beer and people leave bits of trash or whatever in the lobby, the garage, or in the elevator banks. It’s not cool, but in a building that’s large enough that you can remain relatively anonymous, you’re bound to get a couple of bad eggs who think that the rules don’t have to apply to them because odds are nobody will know it’s them.
At first, my reaction surprised me, but then I remembered how our country generally reacts when under attack. Remember the Oklahoma City Bombing and how devastated and freaked we were that it was “one of us” that planned and executed the whole thing? It didn’t seem possible, and in many ways it was more disturbing than 9/11. At least then, it was “others” we could point the finger at and take a small amount of comfort in the fact that they want what we have. Am I oversimplifying? Of course I am, but the general sentiment is the same.
I’d just rather when the email comes out that it talks about an attempted break-in that was scattered by our alarm system and talks about the ridiculously fast response time of the local police department. I don’t want to see the cops pull up in a couple of days and arrest someone I’ve shared an elevator with who couldn’t bother to respect our communal space.
Lent 2010: Week 3
Posted By kelly on March 11, 2010
So…yeah. Last week was a doozy. I’m tired of making excuses and all, but man. it sucked. I thought I was going to have all these opportunities to write and get caught up, but as the week went by (and I fell and I recovered and I felt better and I took a glucose test that made me sick and I recovered from that) the over-due writing kept stacking up.
It was a huge flashback to nanowrimo in November, and my “excuse” was largely the same: pregnant. (Keep Reading…)
Lent 2010: Week 2
Posted By kelly on March 4, 2010
Well, crap.
It turns out that I’m much better suited to giving something up than adding something in. I can handle the “withdrawal” issues of giving up chocolate or internet, or soda (not caffeine mind you, with true withdrawal issues) much easier than forcing myself to spend 30 minutes each day writing. Last week I was at 7 of 8, but only 5 of those were “on time”.
This week, I managed to pull off 4 of 7, plus make up for the one missed last week.
(Keep Reading…)
Lenten Promise 2010: Week 1 Judgement Day
Posted By kelly on February 24, 2010
“It wasn’t my fault,” I’d say to St. Peter if he called me on how well I did this first week.
“I was in Vegas for the first few days. I tried, but there was so much–”
“Sin?” he’d ask with one eyebrow arched as he jotted a note down with his quill on a gilded page.
My Lenten Promise: 2010
Posted By kelly on February 17, 2010
There are lots of things I could go without for a while. A few weeks ago I realized that I’d let the Internet take hold of me and considered another 40 day purge. This produced a surprising reaction in a few friends who reminded me that at the end of it I was miserable and there were lots of things I said I wouldn’t ever do again. I remember feeling isolated, and now is not the time to try that again. Plus, I have loads more internet friends this time around. I’d hate to vanish on them for nearly 2 months. I tried sussing out the details, to come up with a schedule/set of restrictions that made sense, but by the time it was all over, I realized I should just do those things anyway and I wasn’t really “sacrificing” as much as fixing. Plus, Lent was fast approaching and I didn’t really have that much time to plan.
Having a “Phoenix” Day
Posted By kelly on January 11, 2010
I’m in a foul mood because I’m filled the the sense that something needs to drastically change. And I hate change, so I try to dig in my heels to avoid it until there’s so much “stuff” in the way (mentally and physically) that a pre-change outburst is immanent.
Fine. Call it a temper-tantrum.
Today, I’m going to try and look at it as a Phoenix Day. At some point all this building pressure is going to cause an explosion and make a big mess. Once it has passed, I’ll start picking up the pieces and arrange them in a whole new way and everything will be “better.”
…At least until the next Phoenix Day.
To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
Posted By kelly on December 8, 2009
While I think blogging about your dreams is one of the most narcissistic of past times, I had a dream a few weeks ago that just refuses to let go of me. In the hopes of “taming” it by talking about it, I’m going to share it with you. It’s also possible this is a ring-like dream, so if I share it with you, you’ll have it and then it will leave me alone. Won’t that be swell?
Nanowrimo 2009: Ain’t Happening
Posted By kelly on November 11, 2009
A funny thing happened on the way to my 2009 Nanonovel: Life. Literally.
I’m a little bit pregnant, and unfortunately for nanowrimo, it’s the stage of pregnancy where I’m at my most exhausted and my most unmotivated. To say nothing of the 24/7 nausea that prevents me from doing much of anything except willing it to go away. I tried fitting writing in with everything else that was happening. I tried sacrificing what i could in favor of writing, because that’s what nanowrimo is about.
It just wasn’t working, and instead of being something that i was looking forward to, nanowrimo was becoming something that was adding another level of stress to my life when i really didn’t need it. It’s not likely I’ll get out of this phase until sometime in december, so “waiting for it to get easier” wasn’t an option, either.
I think it would have been different if i’d been more invested in my story. I can’t pretend that’s not also a factor in quitting. I’m just not into it. All stories come from outside inspiration, but there’s something that gets “hooked” internally to make it work. This novel has been lacking that, so far. It just feels like I’m assembling a puzzle into something that looks like a novel but isn’t right. In order to make the novel work, I have to invest much more into it, and like i said, I don’t really have the time right now. Maybe in my second trimester, when things are supposed to get easier before they get umpossible again, I’ll host a personal nanowrimo.
This doesn’t mean you get to quit. Far from it. Unless you’re also hiding a life-altering medical condition, you keep plugging away. I’m still going to be a cheerleader, so look for a post on murmur.com in the next couple of days about how to get past the ides of November.
10,398 words and out.