me – Page 17 – Out & About

Picture from long time ago.

This is E.F. and myself sitting in downtown Amherst in November of 1997. I had traveled back to Amherst for Thanksgiving, or perhaps a fall visit. The two of us had been roommates the previous summer. Excellent mid-90s details include the red point-and-shoot camera held by EF, her short hair the fact that she’s smoking. I am not smoking in this photo, but I’m guessing I have either just finished a cigarette or am about to have one. I’m wearing my dad’s army pants, left over from the national guard, a spanking new pair of Doc Martens, my green sweater, which once upon a time belonged to Sara’s Great Aunt Hazel. I’m also wearing the coat that kept me warm through many a freezing cold New England Winter. On my hand is a ring that I gave myself, so as to be engaged to me and not any guys. The backpack carries my things for the weekend. I will take the Peter Pan bus back to Boston to work my first post-college job as a receptionist. It is a job that is boring and lonely and I travel an hour each way to get to there. I am lonely, and this weekend has been a very good one.

The first two years of college journals.

For a few weeks, I thought they were gone forever, but they were tucked away in my Aunt’s basement, behind sacks of romance novels. They were great to read.

And I think the cigarette manufacturers wasted their advertising dollars on me. Apparently, they just needed to get the boys I liked to smoke.

From 22 January, 1995. Sunday.
I smoked my last cigarette for the weekend. I can still taste the tar and nicotine on the back of my throat and on my teeth. It tastes like the kisses of K.–or so long ago the kisses of T. I became addicted to smoking this summer when I sat in truck stops and Shari’s late at night with TM and K and breathed in the smell of the pipe, or sat on the front porch of the house sittin’ house and smelled the smoke from the Lucky Strikes. I guess now I ‘m the only one around to smoke, so I do and remember the kisses.

Back to the early twentieth century

I spent a year without a watch, figuring I would be like everyone else and just use my phone to tell me the time. But you know what? Sometimes I just want to know the time by flicking my wrist toward me and glancing down rather than rummaging around for my phone, finding the “on” button and pushing it. There’s no way to do that in a non-obvious manner. So welcome back Wenger watch!

What I’ve been up to: collecting rewards and making bread.

I feel like I haven’t been taking very many pictures of late. Although I’ve written over 475 posts for this blog alone this year, so perhaps a short break is in order. But here’s what I’ve been up to, aside from reading, writing, watching movies and blogging.

I didn’t realize I had backer rewards coming, but here they are.

I made some bread. It’s from Laurel’s Kitchen Break Book, which is the best book to pick up if you are thinking of taking up whole-grain bread baking in the new year. This is the milk bread recipe and made two very nice loves. The book itself teachers you step-by-step what to do to create excellent all-whole-wheat flour bread. Most “whole wheat” recipes use a bit of whole wheat and a goodly amount of All-Purpose Flour.

Bread making is a good skill to have if you want to save money and control your ingredients. It’s also kind of magical. This started as two cups of milk, a quarter cup of honey, some yeast, flour and salt. A bit of mixing (with a mixer) and a few hours of rising and deflating and shaping and there is delicious bread waiting for me to eat.

Two tips should you embark on the bread journey:
1) Buy some vital wheat gluten (Bob’s Red Mill carries this product) and add 1 tablespoon per cup of flour. It makes all the difference.
2) If you don’t have a warm place for rising (our house is mostly pretty cold) turn the oven to 170 and when it comes to temperature, set the timer for 10 minutes. Then shut off the oven. The heating turns the oven from a cold cave to a warm environment and if you turn on the light to the oven the temperature will be maintained.

How’s it goin’?

As you may recall, I’ve taken a break from writing essays so I can focus on writing 500 words per day in November and December of the novel I am working on. Here’s an update on my progress.

I’ve missed two days. One was Thanksgiving, which had me going from 6:15 in the morning to 9:30 at night. In all that activity, I completely forgot to write. I woke up suddenly at 11:30 the night of Thanksgiving, was stricken by breaking my streak, and then decided to stay in bed instead of hauling myself out to bang out 500 words. The other day was a game night we hosted. I miscalculated just how long the gaming would go on. It was a very long and hard day, and by the time it was 11:15 and I had the choice of writing or bed, I chose bed. In general, it has been no trouble to find the time to write, though Fridays and weekends are more difficult because my time is not as scheduled as on the other days of the week. I’ve had a few sessions of cranking out the words and then going straight to bed because of this.

I’ve done a good job of meeting my words written per day goal of 500 words. Only one day did I write exactly 500 words, every other day I wrote, I exceeded the goal, including one day where I wrote 3400 words. I was suspicious of that outlier, but I went back and double checked and indeed, I churned that day.

By far my usual practice is to write 500-599 words. I did so on 21 days. The next most common is 600 words, happening on 6 days and then 700 words (5) days. From there we step down to 1 to 2 occurrences.

All that writing is adding up. When I set my goal of 500 words per day, I accepted the fact that I would “only” have 48,000 words by December 31. This was seen as lesser achievement because in order to “win” National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) you need to write 50,000 words between November 1 and November 31. I was beginning with a bank of 17,000 words and taking two months and still coming up short. But I’m happy to report that exceeded my original writing goal on December 11 and I crossed over the 50,000 word mark on December 13.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with my progress. The book is still fun to write, I’m chugging along and the rest of my life hasn’t been thrown out of control. Plus I get to make nerdy Excel charts as explanation. Win-win.

Home

From a series in the Oregonian about US 26:

“This is where the rubber hits the road. This to me is what eastern Oregon is all about. This is where you can picture pioneers slogging through the desert, running low on water and wondering how much longer it will take. This is a very lonely section of the road before arriving in Vale close to the Idaho border.” Thomas Boyd.

Or, as I call it: home.

Reading.

Tonight was my reading. I meant to take a picture at the bar with my story leaning up against my cocktail and the dark atmosphere really setting the stage. But I forgot. I was nervous and then I was busy listening to the others (I went second) and then I was talking with my friends that came out and then I was talking with the other people in my class and before you knew it, I was home and instead of a dark, atmospheric photo, you got a picture of my Sunday paper and my reading. But you already read it earlier in the week.

Things to note about this experience: I loved it. It was very fun to get up in front of people and read something I wrote. I practiced a lot and thought throughout my many practice sessions, “there is absolutely nothing I can cut from this.” Then when reading I left out entire sentences, thinking, “yep, that doesn’t actually need to be said.” It was very interesting to observe that going down. The lights meant I couldn’t see anyone while I read. That was unfortunate, as I would have loved to see some expressions. But I could hear a bit of laughter in parts, so that was cool.

The Third Summer of my Summer Reading

The Library was open on Monday again, so I reverted to my Monday 4-6 time slot. It was a good summer of summer reading. I will volunteer again next year.

Administrative Professional’s Day. Someone thinks I’m pretty great.

Cupcakes, dahlia’s and several cards all greeted me on the awkwardly named Administrative Professionals Day.

Here’s my favorite card. I laughed when I first saw it and I smiled every time I encountered it.

Aprons

Okay, there’s a new uniform plan afoot. The following two pictures are of the Laurel, by Colette Patterns. I have plans this summer to make two dresses and two tops, but with a cute “small ruffle” variation and no pockets on the dress, and this will comprise the core of my new uniform. The dresses/shirts will be in the same material, most likely a neutral, and I will get some black pants to wear with the shirts and black leggings to wear with the dresses. But the exciting part will be that I will also sew a fun apron to wear over the ensemble!

I already wear an apron at work. Because there are not reliable pockets in womens’ clothing, early on I adopted the basic three-pocket waitress apron to hold my work walkie talkie, keys and a few pens. But I’ve decided to break out of the boring three-pocket apron and make some very cool ones to go with my uniform. So I’ve been doing apron research. You can come along with me.

I love the cherries and the piping on this one. I’m looking for a full-front apron.