It was a loooong workday. Bad traffic. Worked from about 7:00-5:30, getting things completely caught up before taking the next two days off.
This is a beach bag I bought on vacation in South Carolina a couple of years ago with my mom, sister and niece. It was a great week.
Now the beach bag carries the excess stuff that won’t fit in my regular bag. Sigh.
Le Pop 3! It’s this collection of upbeat French pop tunes that was playing the last time I was in Hear Music in Santa Monica.
I love vocals, but when I’m writing or working I sometimes find them a little too distracting in my own language. So I opt for cds like this or Loteria de la Cumbia Lounge by Charanga Cakewalk.
I think these are happy songs. But you know, they could be talking about stalking each other or serial killings, for all I know.
My undertanding of French is decidedly—sparse. I am fairly certain that one song (“Un Homme a la Mer”) is about a man of the sea. There’s the one that I think has something to do with something small or a bakery. One of the singers seems to be very happy about white wine. And there’s one about—I’m pretty sure—diuretics and aikido.
Those French. So original.
It gave me a huge rush to go to the coffee house and scatter books around. They are on outside tables and newspaper racks where people will see them.
This makes me happy.
Hydra’s is the one behind our house. This one is mine.
We seldom get to the top of it because—ahem—it is taller than Hydra’s.
This shot is taken from the door of the camper, where we store it in a lot on the edge of our neighborhood. I went down to tape the new license plate into the back window, since the plate and the holder went missing at some unknown point. (Also the reason for the DMV visit Friday.)
Took down some extra bedding for Mom, who’ll be joining us camping next time! (Note to self: must remember to take down a towel for her.)
I know, I know. It’s an evil gas station sign shattering the peaceful blue afternoon.
Or, it’s a kind of interesting geometric shape over a more abstract background.
It just caught my eye as I returned to my car from the neighboring grocery store on Sand Canyon. There’s really no defense for it.
I have been working on a goal, over on 43Things, of getting my writing mojo back. That's part of what this blog--which I've been doing for more than a year now-- has been about. Keeping my creativity going while I denied, then gave into, then got over a brand of depression about my first novel being rejected and my not knowing how to fix it.
I think that this past weekend in Lone Pine really pushed me over the edge from okay-I’m-writing-regularly-again, to the-mojo-is-back! I wrote on rocks, between rocks, under trees, in a coffee house. Last night I wrote two single spaced pages of what will probably be a personal essay based partly on my experiences over the weekend. I can’t wait to get back to it.
What’d I do to get my mojo back? Many things.
Pouted, cried, finally allowed myself to mourn the rejection of my first novel, put said novel DOWN instead of torturing it or me any further (for now.)
Wrote what I wanted to write in various non-novel forms: reworked short stories, worked on personal essays, a secret project, poems, greeting card sentiments, long letters to friends, and my blog. Sent these things out to the world via USPS or the Internet.
Stopped complaining to my writing group that I wasn’t writing. That’s a self-fulfilling problem, because no matter how much I was actually writing, if I kept telling people I wasn’t, it felt like I wasn’t.
Started writing every day for 15 minutes, aiming for 7 days a week, but not beating myself up for missing one here and there. It helped me remember what’s fun about it and what can happen if you just show up, and how it’s not always great, but at least you were there. And I checked in daily for a while with my writing group, which helped compell me do do it.
Realized that I will write, no matter what. And that making art is it’s own reward in many ways. It’s all right to make money with it and to want to make money with it, but it’s also intrinsically good for the soul. Reading bits of The Resilient Writer by Catherine Wald helped here, too.
Signed up for NaNoWriMo, which sounds like good medicine. Got a huge rush when I saw my word count page on the site today. I’m there under the nickname SallyKitt, if anyone wants to buddy up.
Just wanted to say publically that I am reclaiming my creative health. No turning back.
Just had to get a shot of Rocky’s sweet little blue feathers after Hydra swept them out of the trailer as we packed up to head home.
And my foot. Always has to get into the act.
We had a great drive up to Lone Pine at the base of Mount Whitney in the Owens Valley. It was not windy and highway 395 has been recently repaved, so pulling the trailer up there was the best ever.
We’ve got the set-up thing pretty well figured out, and we were able to get from our campground to the Alabama Hills just before sunset.
We followed the Movie Road to a site where a battle scene for Gunga Din was shot and Hydra tried out his new metal detector.
He found a penny! From 2005!
It’s Friday. It’s been a loooong busy week. Everyone in my office is either completely stressed out or a little punchy at the mere notion that we will have two days in a row off.
I am not as punchy as Queen LaFoam here.
I suspect that this may be a tribute to Steve Irwin.
Or a dance of gratitude to the office supply gods, who so seldom deliver anything large enough to require foam inserts to hold them in place.
Yeah, my best friend all day Tuesday was my box of Kleenex. Bad head cold. I stayed home… ended up working from home for four hours, but sleeping a lot, too.
Hydra brought home Tom Yum Koong (Thai hot and sour shrimp soup). It’s the best for making you feel better when sick. It worked. I was feeling much better by the next morning.
Because I went to bed so early. Getting a cold. That’s a porcelain duck, not a real one.
I had pet ducks when I was a kid. Georgie and Baby (named by my mom and sister) where white domestic ducks. Wolfie was my mallard male. He was gold and yellow when he was a duckling, the colors of Wolf Lake High School and Elementary School. Where everyone but my mom went before consolidation.
Wolfie was a headstrong duck. He followed me out to the school bus a couple of times and stood in the middle of the road quacking up defiantly at the big yellow and chrome grill till I got off and tossed him back into the yard.
Good prep for parrothood.
As part of cleaning up my studio, which had gotten pretty messy and uninviting, I made shelf space for my stash of as-yet-unused bound notebooks.
A few months ago a good stationary store told me that the company that makes these wonderful notebooks had been sold to a bigger company and they were no longer making them. I made some calls and found them at the UCLA LuValle bookstore where I have bought them since 1990. With Hydra’s encouragement I went and bought 10 of them, which should get me through several years. These are 300+ page hardbound notebooks with wonderful heavy paper and numbered pages. They’re called legal notebooks for whatever reason.
So I thought, hmm, I’ll take a photo of this. My future in writing is right here, irregardless of my publishing future. And then I realized that my past is right there, too. Photos of my mother and my father, taken before they met each other. Surrounded by stones I found on the beach near Hedgebrook (writing retreat) and little animal figures given to me by my writer friends.
I remember reading somewhere that someone around the turn of the 19th/20th Century said that schools should be designed to look like workplaces. They looked like brick factories for a long time. My high school, which opened in 1969, looked like an office building.
I think this one looks like a prison.
Okay, I’m not proud of this one, but it’s the only photo from the day that came out! Hydra and I went to a matinee of Hollywoodland and then out for sushi. For some reason I was compelled to take this photo before we left.
I also tried to take one inside the theater, but it didn’t come out.
Hollywoodland : loved Ben Affleck. Could have cut all the Adrian Brody story. Click here if you want to see my full review.
The brainwashing is complete. It was $2.89 a gallon and I actually thought, “Wow, what a great price.”
And then I was standing there wondering where my next photograph was coming from, and I thought, “Hey. Who knows? Maybe this will be the most exotic and sign-of-our-times photo I take all year.”
Maybe my grandnephews and grandnieces will be all impressed that I actually put flammable liquids in a private pod and drove it around at 70 miles an hour.
I don’t know. He just seems like a Gus. He and this cow are out on the sidewalk outside a place that sells—
Hmm, I don’t know what they sell. Maybe they sell cowboys. And cows.
I really want to make a project of photographing all along Sierra Highway, because I think parts of it must be like what Route 66 was like in some places in its heyday.
I love driving down a road I have never been on before. It’s one of my favorite things to do on a weekend. Go drive somewhere and know I have never seen this place before.
There are a lot of little roads leading off the two-lane highways or roads around where I live that I haven’t explored yet. I took this one on Monday afternoon. It winds down about 600 feet to what looks like an abandoned farm after crossing the railroad tracks.
It was a very narrow but nicely paved road, so I wonder if it’s maintained as an access to the tracks. If I’d met anyone with a car any bigger than my little Echo, one of us would probably have had to back up.
This is the view from about half way down. You can see the train tracks at the bottom and the tunnel where Soledad Canyon Road passes through the mountain on the upper left. The farmstead is just to the left of the tracks.
It was slightly creepy at the bottom… Maybe just tapped into some reptilian part of my brain that knew that there was just one really viable way out with my car.
Here's a shot of the falling-in barn, for those who are curious enough to have followed me this far.
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This book blew me away. It’s such a great, early example of making a novel out of short stories. It’s so brilliant to put these seemingly unrelated stories together and let the reader be smart and figure out that taken together they are a view of an era.
This book excited me very much about writing, because it showed me that there are other ways to put a story together.
Kitty is demonstrating the appropriate reaction to the board meeting of a nonprofit organization. I cannot begin to express how much I wanted to assume a similar posture by about 4:30 in the afternoon.
We left the house at about 7am to visit Auntie Em, who was in the hospital again for observation. We love seeing her and spending time with the cousins. But after having lunch with the cuzzes, we had to go to a board meeting of our acoustic music club Songmakers . We didn't get home until after six p.m.
It’s not often that I’m this jealous of a cat.
