... or I'd like to think it is.
I hit 40k words just a little bit ago. Finally. I almost went to bed early because I've been dragging all day. Instead, something told me that it would be a perfect night to check out the Write Or Die desktop program I bought before Christmas. The premise of Write Or Die is that you can set goals--crazy or easy, or somewhere in between--for your writing, and if you don't hit those goals, then you are punished. The punishments range anywhere from violins screeching in the background to words deleting themselves from the screen. If you are idle for too long the screen fades from pink to red, which I found to be really annoying. So tonight, I managed to write about 1084 words in an hour, which is some sort of record for me. I'm excited about this new gadget to hopefully motivate me to get to the finish line. I'm only 10k off now! Yay!
And now I am falling asleep at the keyboard. That's the price you pay for an hour of super-speed.
Showing posts with label toys. Show all posts
Showing posts with label toys. Show all posts
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Release
It was time.
And, no, the photo above is not really from the Ohboy home. Google "hoarders" and take your pick.... I guess people will put ANYTHING on the Interweb. Gasp! I know! I was shocked, too, when I found out.
I couldn't honestly tell you the last time I'd reached all of the nooks and crannies of my kitchen counter. We had run out of space to make lunches and prepare meals because there was a teensy little glitch in the feng shui of my Leaning Towers of Paper.
In the living room, I moved the Christmas tree (yes, the Christmas tree. In my defense, it's small and white, but, obviously not a Halloween tree) and thought I'd spotted Bigfoot, there was so much pet hair under there. The not-so-fine layer of dust coating everything made me feel all nostalgic like we were still passing through the deserts of Nevada and Arizona--if the deserts were wall-to-wall with bins of Legos and Angry Birds.
Okay, so I'm being a skoch dramatic.
Over the past couple of years, we've decided that Mr. Ohboy probably has some form of Asperger's. He's a fixer of things, but not at all neat. I think he used to be neat. He also used to be a tree-hugging Democrat, but then he married me and I flip-turned all of that upside down. Must've been my cheery disposition, huh? Anyhow, he's messy. And, lucky me, I have a few more boys up in this hizzy who are varying shades of the same incredibly sharp and yet very fragmented mind. Whether I nag for something to be tidied or he takes the initiative himself (which only happens in the garage), the results are always puzzling.... Usually a twisty-turny path lined with piles of things, leading to an eventual bottleneck. Straight lines and angles? No way! Navigation through even the most mundane room should be an adventure, and even a little bit dangerous! Where is the excitement in placing things against walls or--gasp!--throwing it away? Nowhere, that's where.
If you've ever seen one of those t.v. shows dedicated to hoarding, you'd understand that my family was just one major life event away from never washing another dish or throwing away a food wrapper. Again, I'm being dramatic, but, at the same time, I'm sure that lots of those people on those shows probably didn't see it coming, then BAM! They wake up six feet deep in used adult diapers and fossilized cats.
Last Saturday four of the six of us came down with some stomach thing, so we decided, come Sunday, to hang out at home close to facilities and far from other persons who probably didn't want what we had. That's when we (I) began Operation Declutter. Spurred on by some organization my mom had done in the boys rooms while we were on our trip, we began by dusting our room. To dust our room, we had to fold roughly 15 loads of laundry that had been dumped in the corner, file papers, throw away boxes.... you get the idea. From there we moved to bathrooms, crusty floors, my walk-in closet nightmare, the living room toy explosion, and, finally, the kitchen (a.k.a. filing cabinet with a stove).
Five days, I've been at this nearly from morning till night, taking the odd break to sit down, go to a prenatal appointment, or ride a horse. I estimate I clothed a plus-sized army with all of the clothes I lugged (literally) from the house--a mini-van full. In one load of garbage/recycling, the weight of all of those broken, boring toys lifted from my shoulders. I love the way my house looks, and the ease at which it takes to clean things now that I don't have to shift so much junk to unearth the surface below.
I've not completed my mission. I still have three toy boxes to sort through, and a few baskets of boy clothes to move into bins, which will be exiled forevermore in the plastic bin catacombs. The catacombs are next; and, while my soul is itching to tackle (and annihilate) the Rubbermaid abyss, I know I am tired and anxious to make some forward progress on the novel. The clutter was a snare to my creativity, the words finding themselves buried in unimportant things.
Releasing means receiving peace. I'll take all the peace I can get.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Imagination
For a while there, I was my own best friend. Maybe I still am.
My parents split long before my memories could confirm it had ever been any other way. The two sisters I had were four and ten years older; by default I was either too little or too big of a pain to tag along. Surrounded by cornfields and gravel roads, my nearest friends lived over half-an-hour away. I visited them on holidays or saw them at church--playdates were rare, too much stress for my single Mom. Two boys lived next door. They treated me like blood brothers would, rescuing me from one peril (climbing too high up the tree fort tree) and delivering me gleefully into another (swooping bats from the mammoth pine tree in their front yard). And growing up at the tail end of the twentieth century left me with no social network to complain to about it all.
What did I do with all of my free time? I did what any desperate kid would have done in my situation: I used my imagination. Hour upon hour was whiled away in my basement serving never-ending droves of invisible diners who would hover around child-sized card tables at the renowned "Cactus Bay Restaurant". In the creepy-crawly recesses of the back storage closet, I would whip up light-as-air cuisine on my warped burnt orange kitchen set. This was where I first learned to answer phones, a skill I would take with me into adulthood. If only I could say as much for the cooking...
When life as the maitre d' of the Cactus Bay Restaurant became a drudgery, I morphed into a librarian, organizing a family's worth of books in the middle of the basement. It remained, more or less, organized until my parents remodeled a couple years back, undoing all of my hard work and tossing most of the books. At least I hadn't gotten more than five books into the card catalog system I'd dreamed up before deciding I wasn't that bored. Librarians of the world, I salute..... zzzzz.
When it used to dump dozens of inches of the white stuff in Michigan, I'd bundle myself up and run around the yard. My shuffling footprints became paths, and the longer I played, the more places there were to discover. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. "Who's the crazy kid talking to herself over there all by herself?" "Oh, her. Whatever you do, don't make eye contact."
I played with a gaggle of Barbie dolls and the solitary (but insanely lucky) Ken doll. Barbie(s) and Ken fell in love; got in jealous, hair-pulling cat-fights with unsurprising frequency; awkwardly rode their palomino horse, Dallas, even though their rubber-snappy legs weren't really horse-worthy; and went swimming. Of course they went swimming! The only outfit I had for Ken was the shiny purple swim trunks he'd been wearing in the box. Out of pity for perpetually-underdressed Ken, there were an abundance of luaus. That was much easier than, gasp!, buying him a pair of pants. It was nearly the same with My Little Ponies, except they were already horses, so they didn't need to worry about being ill-designed to ride themselves. Interestingly enough, the ponies were all girls, as far as I could tell, but there were an awful lot of babies within the herd. No one ever explained that one to me, and I'm still wondering.
A family friend gave us an incredible handmade dollhouse that had been his daughter's when she was a young girl. It was the most magical thing I thought I'd ever laid eyes upon, and not a bit of it was made of plastic or blonde hair. There were still hair-pulling cat-fights, but those usually took place after sipping from a teeny mason jar of sweet tea while sitting on the wraparound porch, perusing miniature copies of The New Yorker. You know, like in real life.
During a particularly inventive time in my life, I collected Happy Meal toys. Besides the fact that they were way more awesome back then, I was fresh off my first read-through of The Indian in the Cupboard. In that classic book, the main character, a young boy named Omri, brings a toy Indian (and, eventually, other toys) to life by locking them in a magical cabinet. Well aware that magical toy-incarnating furniture was not easily located within K-Mart, I was hopeful that my cluttered bedroom closet would be the next-best-enchanted thing. At night I would lock up my plastic Miss Piggy figurine and tell myself that maybe in the morning she would be asking me to transform cold, lifeless Kermie, too. Of course, it never happened, and for that I'm probably thankful. A few decades later, I realize that I would have likely soiled myself in fear if I'd managed to bring life to any of the things I locked in that closet.
My extensive stuffed animal collection made up my entourage, headed up by the purple pony I named "Diamond" after a palomino mare Mom attempted to buy and promptly returned after she repeatedly walloped on our poor Tennessee Walker, Jake. Stuffed-animal Diamond managed to escape from a trip to Lost Toyville after she'd had the brilliant idea to hide in a twist of hotel sheets during a Wild West road trip. A nice maid rescued her, and she's been with me ever since. I still wonder how many miles my parents had to backtrack to the previous night's hotel just so I would stop howling.
Somewhere on the outskirts of my posse was my Cricket doll. After dad let me watch the first Chucky movie at the ripe old age of eight, she was banished to a black garbage bag in the corner of the basement. Rest in pieces, scary doll.
Being easily-amused has always had its advantages. I'd like to believe that having to rely so heavily on entertaining myself, especially in those years prior to my own pony, the goodness that was the Nintendo Entertainment System, and pretty much every single bit of technology we have now, I was preparing myself for something much bigger. My thoughts and feelings were solely mine then, not given a lot of chance to find a living, breathing audience. And even though I found a fairly reliable pressure-release valve the first time I put my leg over a horse, I also discovered that I'd taken on another role--counselor. By putting ink to paper, I learned to get it all out, because sometimes that was the only way I knew how. Some of those joys and hurts are still bottled up, others have made their way to the surface. Somehow writing for my therapy, my sanity, also became writing for my enjoyment... and, if you really think about it, maybe the two aren't all that different.
My parents split long before my memories could confirm it had ever been any other way. The two sisters I had were four and ten years older; by default I was either too little or too big of a pain to tag along. Surrounded by cornfields and gravel roads, my nearest friends lived over half-an-hour away. I visited them on holidays or saw them at church--playdates were rare, too much stress for my single Mom. Two boys lived next door. They treated me like blood brothers would, rescuing me from one peril (climbing too high up the tree fort tree) and delivering me gleefully into another (swooping bats from the mammoth pine tree in their front yard). And growing up at the tail end of the twentieth century left me with no social network to complain to about it all.
What did I do with all of my free time? I did what any desperate kid would have done in my situation: I used my imagination. Hour upon hour was whiled away in my basement serving never-ending droves of invisible diners who would hover around child-sized card tables at the renowned "Cactus Bay Restaurant". In the creepy-crawly recesses of the back storage closet, I would whip up light-as-air cuisine on my warped burnt orange kitchen set. This was where I first learned to answer phones, a skill I would take with me into adulthood. If only I could say as much for the cooking...
When life as the maitre d' of the Cactus Bay Restaurant became a drudgery, I morphed into a librarian, organizing a family's worth of books in the middle of the basement. It remained, more or less, organized until my parents remodeled a couple years back, undoing all of my hard work and tossing most of the books. At least I hadn't gotten more than five books into the card catalog system I'd dreamed up before deciding I wasn't that bored. Librarians of the world, I salute..... zzzzz.
When it used to dump dozens of inches of the white stuff in Michigan, I'd bundle myself up and run around the yard. My shuffling footprints became paths, and the longer I played, the more places there were to discover. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. "Who's the crazy kid talking to herself over there all by herself?" "Oh, her. Whatever you do, don't make eye contact."
I played with a gaggle of Barbie dolls and the solitary (but insanely lucky) Ken doll. Barbie(s) and Ken fell in love; got in jealous, hair-pulling cat-fights with unsurprising frequency; awkwardly rode their palomino horse, Dallas, even though their rubber-snappy legs weren't really horse-worthy; and went swimming. Of course they went swimming! The only outfit I had for Ken was the shiny purple swim trunks he'd been wearing in the box. Out of pity for perpetually-underdressed Ken, there were an abundance of luaus. That was much easier than, gasp!, buying him a pair of pants. It was nearly the same with My Little Ponies, except they were already horses, so they didn't need to worry about being ill-designed to ride themselves. Interestingly enough, the ponies were all girls, as far as I could tell, but there were an awful lot of babies within the herd. No one ever explained that one to me, and I'm still wondering.
A family friend gave us an incredible handmade dollhouse that had been his daughter's when she was a young girl. It was the most magical thing I thought I'd ever laid eyes upon, and not a bit of it was made of plastic or blonde hair. There were still hair-pulling cat-fights, but those usually took place after sipping from a teeny mason jar of sweet tea while sitting on the wraparound porch, perusing miniature copies of The New Yorker. You know, like in real life.
During a particularly inventive time in my life, I collected Happy Meal toys. Besides the fact that they were way more awesome back then, I was fresh off my first read-through of The Indian in the Cupboard. In that classic book, the main character, a young boy named Omri, brings a toy Indian (and, eventually, other toys) to life by locking them in a magical cabinet. Well aware that magical toy-incarnating furniture was not easily located within K-Mart, I was hopeful that my cluttered bedroom closet would be the next-best-enchanted thing. At night I would lock up my plastic Miss Piggy figurine and tell myself that maybe in the morning she would be asking me to transform cold, lifeless Kermie, too. Of course, it never happened, and for that I'm probably thankful. A few decades later, I realize that I would have likely soiled myself in fear if I'd managed to bring life to any of the things I locked in that closet.
My extensive stuffed animal collection made up my entourage, headed up by the purple pony I named "Diamond" after a palomino mare Mom attempted to buy and promptly returned after she repeatedly walloped on our poor Tennessee Walker, Jake. Stuffed-animal Diamond managed to escape from a trip to Lost Toyville after she'd had the brilliant idea to hide in a twist of hotel sheets during a Wild West road trip. A nice maid rescued her, and she's been with me ever since. I still wonder how many miles my parents had to backtrack to the previous night's hotel just so I would stop howling.
Somewhere on the outskirts of my posse was my Cricket doll. After dad let me watch the first Chucky movie at the ripe old age of eight, she was banished to a black garbage bag in the corner of the basement. Rest in pieces, scary doll.
Being easily-amused has always had its advantages. I'd like to believe that having to rely so heavily on entertaining myself, especially in those years prior to my own pony, the goodness that was the Nintendo Entertainment System, and pretty much every single bit of technology we have now, I was preparing myself for something much bigger. My thoughts and feelings were solely mine then, not given a lot of chance to find a living, breathing audience. And even though I found a fairly reliable pressure-release valve the first time I put my leg over a horse, I also discovered that I'd taken on another role--counselor. By putting ink to paper, I learned to get it all out, because sometimes that was the only way I knew how. Some of those joys and hurts are still bottled up, others have made their way to the surface. Somehow writing for my therapy, my sanity, also became writing for my enjoyment... and, if you really think about it, maybe the two aren't all that different.
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