Tag: life

Observations

9/8

Autumn

Dark and windy.

The crickets are giving a steady chirp, punctuated by wind chimes and rustling leaves. The roar of motorcycle engines pass by in the distance, and a dog begins to bark. A cat yowls.

The light from the neighbor’s porch is blaring in my eyes, and the haze of smoke is holding the city glow in the air. The street is empty, and no one is sitting out on their porches despite the pleasant coolness of the night.

The cat’s voice sounds almost human, and it’s easy to imagine why they were once thought of as witches’ companions.

The dust in the wind is triggering my allergies.

Occasionally the wind stops, leaving an eerie silence filled only with crickets, followed by an even stronger gust.

I need to find that cat.

About Me, Uncategorized

Natural Disaster

Autumn

This week, my family was blessed with the opportunity to participate in our local natural disaster! WOW!

Sarcasm!

The weather report issued a high wind warning, which we tend to take pretty seriously around here. Monday night I checked the warning to get an idea of what we were looking at, then we swept around the yard to get it ready before calling it a night.

After a few hours of fitful sleep and nightmares about the wind, I decided to get up at 5 AM (confession: strong winds terrify me). The windstorm had been as expected by that point, so I settled down on the couch to doze until the kids woke up.

At 6 AM, the wind suddenly picked up. A lot.

There were loud cracks and snaps as large branches broke. Out the window, I watched our picnic table flip onto its side and get pushed towards the fence. Then the power went out.

As I listened to the wind gusts, I got so scared that I woke the kids up and brought them down to the living room where it was safer, even though I knew the disruption would have them behaving like little monsters for the rest of the day.

At 7AM, it slowed down enough that we dared venture outside to look at the damage.

And we saw this:

The large pine tree in our front yard.

Thankfully, it fell straight along the fence line. Any other angle would have caused serious damage to either us or our neighbor. Eerily, it made hardly any sound when it fell.

Our power was out for two days.

I’d whine about it, but meh, we’re weirdos and it didn’t actually bother us that much. I liked the quiet, and it was nice to use the oil lamps and candles. We have a vintage gas oven, so I was even able to bake brownies while the power was out.

All told, it was considerably worse than the earthquake back in March.

More random destruction:

Alice and the Warden

AatW – Behind the Scenes

Autumn

I started writing Alice and the Warden back in February, when I was about halfway through my pregnancy with baby #5. Naturally, I was having *a lot* of dreams about pregnancy and babies at the time.

One in particular really stuck with me, about a young woman living alone in a tower, and I found myself thinking about it more and more. The pieces of a story started to come together in my mind, so I decided “what the hey” and went with it. Given the circumstances of my life at the time, I figured that it was going to be a “purely for fun” side project.

Aaaand seven months later, I’m 40,000 words in with a 3-month-old baby.

A little bit of trivia is that in the original dream, Alice had a brother who was friends with Damon. When Alice texted a picture of her baby to her brother, Damon saw it and put the pieces together that he was the father. However, once I started writing, I realized that the brother would function more as a prop than a character, so I cut him out.

Also, in the dream Alice and Damon broke up with a nasty fight after Damon replaced her with another girl. Again, a new girlfriend seemed more like a superfluous prop rather than a character, so I dropped that idea as well. Having her be flat out abandoned worked better with Alice’s neurosis, since she was still too “controlled” to suddenly blow up at Damon at that point in time.

Hackett was Hackett — basically no changes there. He fell in love with Alice the moment he caught her stealing his books with the intention of actually reading them.

There you have it, the origins of Alice and the Warden.

Observations

8/22

Autumn

Waiting in the car. The air conditioner is blasting loudly at full speed, and the 8 year old has control of the music. She’s skipping through songs like there’s no tomorrow.

The 2 year old is crying for daddy, but he’s getting the food for our picnic. I remind her to be patient.

There’s so much smoke in the air, the mountains are obscured by a white haze despite it being a sunny day.

There’s a line of green trees to my right. The pine is my favorite, because it has a lovely shape against all the deciduous trees.

A scuffed up truck with a missing back window is driving backwards through the parking lot. It pulls halfway into a stall, idles for a minute, then exits onto the road.

My husband knocks on the car window. I help him with 2his the drinks and bag of food.

…

There’s a couple making out under a tree at the park, but the place otherwise empty. My husband asks is we want to find a different spot.

I reply, “Nah. Let’s show up with our gazillion kids, and let them see what they have to look forward to.”

Observations

Observations

Autumn

It’s one of those hot and sticky days.

The advertisements in my inbox assure me that this is the last weekend of summer, but the weather feels like it has other plans. I’m sitting outside with a floppy crocheted sunhat, freshly washed hair spilling everywhere, and a bunch of kids completely ignoring their new splash pad.

Smells like cats.

Crows are cawing in the distance, cutting over the music I have playing on a bluetooth speaker. The neighbor’s door slams as they let their dog out. A semi truck rattles by. The baby starts to fuss as she achieves a death grip on my hair, and the two-year-old informs me that she needs a new diaper.

…

The air conditioning inside feels nice and cool. The baby is settling down to nap as the kids beg for ice cream.

Sounds like a great idea.

About Writing

Basil Hackett

Autumn

WordPress finally forced me over to the block editor, and now I know why everyone complains about it. It strikes me as something that a bunch of tech geeks thought would be AWESOME, and they completely forgot that a lot of us users have skills that are more in line with typing up articles in Word.

But le sigh, I will have to learn it anyway.

Or I’ll start copy-n-pasting, and bypass this change all together. Everything keeps popping around and disappearing too much for my tastes.

Back to our originally scheduled program…

Basil Hackett.

For those who don’t know, he’s my fictional character from Alice and the Warden

It’s taken quite some time for me to get a clear mental picture of him, so thus far he hasn’t been properly described. This is the sort of thing that I usually add in while working on the second draft, but that will be awhile. My current goal is to write about 1000 words a week, which is comfortably steady and works well with where I’m at in real life right now, but it’s definitely not fast.

So we’ll go ahead and describe him now.

Physically, he lifts weights a few times a week (lunch break in the prison gym sort of thing), but he also has some extra padding from never saying ‘no’ to dessert. He’s bulky, but not “beefcake.”

His hair is short, combed back, mid-brown with a few gray strands at the sides. He’s always clean-shaven.

His eyes are the one thing that I do describe, a striking hazel-green that can make you forget what you were saying if you look too closely at them.

The impression he gives is being like a boulder, impassive and unmovable. The part that Alice never sees is that, as the warden, he likes to run a tight ship to ensure the safety of everyone in the prison (guards and inmates alike). He takes his job very seriously, doles out discipline when necessary, utilizes psychological methods to promote good behavior, and provides lots of training and resources to help inmates transition to the “outside” world.

Of course, the story mostly portrays Hackett behind the scenes in his private life.

Those are most of my non-spoiler thoughts about him. Honestly, it’s a little weird to be openly writing about characterization with an unfinished story, but hey, first time for everything.

About Me

The Little Things

Autumn

My husband and I finally took a trip into the mountains for a ‘micro-cation’ last weekend. It lasted for about two hours grand total, but I got to feel a little chilly when the sun began to set, which was a wonderful break from dying in the heat.

Thankfully August doesn’t carry the same intensity as July. With luck, I’ll be back to feeling normal (whatever that is) in no time. Might even start braining again.

Though apparently I’m never going to get around to actually finishing this post, since its been sitting here for a few days now. Go figure.

So.

In news that absolutely no one cares about, I am nearly finished with knitting a skirt. This skirt. I started it two years ago, then put it down for a good long while (yarn burnout, lol) until I picked it back up as something to do while nursing the baby. It always amazes me how working a row or two every day really adds up, and I’m looking forward to having this skirt forever.

I came across the toddler’s swimsuit the other day. We bought it at the end of summer last year, because it was super cute and on clearance, and we were absolutely certain that we were going to have TONS of summer fun this year.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

I felt bad, so a browsed online a bit for swimming pools, but I couldn’t bring myself to commit to any. I settled on getting a splash pad — a big one that can accommodate four kids screaming at each other. I’m half expecting it to be destroyed before next week is up.

My husband also got the battery in my laptop replaced, so now it doesn’t randomly die on me. Yay!

Plenty of mundane stuff going on. Nothing terribly philosophical, but it’s keeping me busy enough.

About Me

School Lunch

Autumn

We were part of the free lunch program with our school district this summer. Normally it’s not something I participate in since we’re homeschooling, but this year I figured it would help ease the burden of feeding the horde of monsters that fill my life, with having a new baby and all.

Honestly, we won’t be participating again.

While I appreciate the idea of nutritionally balanced, it functionally doesn’t mean much when the kids refuse to eat their whole grain oatmeal raisin bars. I mean, that’s really asking a lot of them.

ANYway, my main complaint is actually the fact that absolutely everything is ‘fat free’. Like, hey I really don’t approve of the assumptions that you’re making.

I, for one, do not believe that,”eating fat makes you fat,” I do not think that drinking 8 ounces of whole milk a day is going to cause childhood obesity. Maybe the insane amount of juice and soda pop that I’ve seen parents give to their kids, but not things like milk, ranch dressing, and mayonnaise.

I do, however, believe that fat is essential for physical development. I don’t appreciate feeling like I need to supplement meals that are supposed to be nutritionally balanced, because they go out of their way to eliminate such an important element.

And seriously, what sort of person actually thinks that children are going to wash down their whole grain oatmeal raisin bars with skim milk?

The end result has me feeling guilty about the amount of food we’ve thrown away, and I’m grateful that homeschooling is an option for us so my children aren’t stuck eating like that all year round.

 

About Me

Thistle

Autumn

Even my 6-foot tall thistle got et by bugs.

I know this probably makes me a weirdo (I totally am anyway), but thistles are one of my favorite plants. They look so mean, yet the purple flowers are exotic, and they get monstrously huge.

And even that wasn’t enough to save it.

Curse you, grasshoppers, curse you.

About Me

Homesteading

Autumn

For some time now, I’ve been thinking about loosening my veil of anonymity, but I haven’t done it yet because it’s – well – scary.

But hey, it’s 2020. YOLO?

I live in Utah. Since that always makes people wonder, the answer is: No, we aren’t Mormon. We have five kids because we like having kids, and religion/God never factored into it.

I grew up in Utah with a fairly boring and normal life, until I met my husband and he dragged me around the country on a number of adventures. Our first baby was born during our “off-grid” phase, and when she was a few months old we returned to Utah.

Living off-grid with a baby is flipping HARD. I do not recommend it.

But enough of it got into my blood that I can never return to being a typical suburbanite after that experience. We homestead — and we aren’t the only ones in our neighborhood with backyard chickens.

However

I hate gardening.

I know. Pinterest has everyone convinced that homesteading revolves around picturesque raised garden beds, but we don’t do that at all.

A few years ago, we planted a bunch of perennial herbs straight into the ground, then let them grow wild and untamed (just like my spirit, lawl). The strawberries and raspberries were also plopped into the ground and left to do their thing, with some maintenance weeding every now and then.

Anyway, the reason why I hate gardening is that it requires an enormous amount of work to set up, followed by endlessly watering and weeding, only to have the end result always be this:

20200725_1717514790642615789183487.jpg

Et by bugs.

Alas, the sad fate of our potato plants this year.

We don’t use pesticides because of the children and animals, and there are an insane number of insects and slugs around our property. We’ve tried a number of organic methods, but they are ultimately ineffective. The bugs always win.

Hence why I hate gardening.