July 31st, 2008
Last night, we dug out some foam alphabet blocks that had been stashed somewhere last time we cleaned Robin’s room. And we learned a new facet of his personality.
We would stack the blocks up.
Robin would knock them down.
We’d make a neat pyramid.
He’d scatter it.
We’d stuff all the blocks in a container and he’d stomp over (and somehow it was stomping despite being on all fours) and pull them all out.
From across the room, he’d charge a four-block tower like it was an affront to God, or at least him, and whack it over, and then pick up the individual blocks and toss them aside.
He didn’t laugh. He stuck out his little jaw in an expression of grim determination.
Later, he was on his back on the floor drinking his bedtime bottle. I stacked all the blocks into a mega-tower. He looked at it, and waved his feet toward it, as if he could kick it over from the other side of the room. When that didn’t work, he took his bottle out of his mouth, and stared meaningfully at the tower. Then he popped the bottle back in again, as if to say, “I’ll be coming for you later.”
And he did. He scattered those blocks far and wide. Then he threw them, for good measure.
Categories: Robin |
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July 29th, 2008
In the last 24 hours, Robin has started pulling himself up in his playpen regularly and easily. As has become usual for him, he first hit this milestone three weeks ago or so, did it a few times and then stopped. But in the last day he’s started doing it again at the drop of a hat.
He’s also figured out how to navigate the single step between each room of our house, up and down. He crawled over to the staircase and peered up and down it thoughtfully before backing away.
He also got to pet a live vacuum cleaner as it roared next to him! He was nervous but petting it was the only way forward.
And he got to try some edamame, since previous exposures to soy haven’t caused any problems.
Currently his favorite meal is a slice of bread, torn up, and a chunk of cheddar, cut into little pieces. I try to mix it up some with apples and grapes and blueberries and broccoli but it is only bread and cheese that gets reliably devoured.
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July 28th, 2008
So, I’m doing Rock Band singing and I gave him the Logitech microphone. for the PS2. While I was setting up with the controller he was trying to grab it from me. As soon as I picked up my microphone he went over and grabbed his. And then he spent the whole song looking between me and the tv and his microphone. Heh heh heh.
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July 21st, 2008
Actual real blood freaks me out. When I was a kid, injuries in myself and others (other than scabbed knees) that bled caused me to panic. It was a nice controlled panic, a ‘run to an adult and weep at them’ panic, but still a panic. Now, twenty years of intensive menstrual therapy later, I’ve learned that blood isn’t always a Very Bad Thing. Sometimes it’s just a little badness.
All the same, taking Hannah outside to pee today was nightmarish. If I can go my entire life without again being sprayed by warm blood forced between sutures over an amputated limb by sudden movement and pressure on the nearby area, that would be nice. Maybe tonight I should tape a temporary bandage over her tail stub before we do a reprise.
Part of me, deep inside, is taking notes for writing. A lot of it is cross-checking things already discovered by heroes and heroines throughout the ages. The warm sticky splash. The way so little blood can spread so far.
After we’d taken her outside, I took a shower and then hid under the covers. When I got up a second time, the pad under her butt was covered in gore, but her injury itself was dry and clean. A pad soaked in blood didn’t bother me nearly as much. Thanks menstrual therapy!
Hahahahah. Hah. Hah.
Categories: Hannah, Me |
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July 21st, 2008
My paid subscription to M-W unabridged is ambiguous on the matter. Apparently ‘docken’ or ‘dok’ was Middle English for tail…
Anyhow. Hannah has a docked tail now, just like many dogs do. She’s unhappy; if I were to anthropomorphize her, on the way home, she had a quiet breakdown over all the terrible things that have happened to her lately. She’s in her cage now. Her sutures are unbandaged and leaking mildly, especially when she moves or pressure is put on them. When she inevitably tries to sit up, it’s going to be grim. Hopefully the longer we can keep her resting, the better.
A 24-hour vet after hours is… a raw place. They try to keep things private at human hospitals but pets aren’t protected the same way. By the time we left, the score (counting Hannah) was 3 pets leaving alive, 2 pets… not. We came in alongside a pair of women with a tiny dog wrapped in blankets. It had stopped breathing on their drive there. They kept mimicking its final cries to the doctor as they tried to explain and understand what had happened. It was horrible and depressing and I had to press my face against Kevin to avoid hysterical laughter. They didn’t know what had killed it but they signed up for an autopsy to find out. They were shocked but calm, so calm I wondered if it was their own dog or a child’s. I’m glad they were calm, though, because otherwise I would have cried myself.
Right after them, another pair of women came in with a dog who was choking, or at least wheezing. The techs took him back and brought him out again five minutes later, with a stick that had been wedged in the upper part of his jaw. The vet didn’t even charge for that, and it balanced nicely against the tragedy 5 minutes earlier to prevent a wash of PMS-enhanced despair.
And finally, near the end of our relatively short wait, an exhausted man brought in his fading cat, carried in a cat bed, to be put to sleep. I think, balanced out, I’d rather be in his position than those women whose dog had died on the drive over. I’d rather make a decision than have a life slip through my fingers in the midst of desperate, frightened confusion.
The fifth pet had been hit by a car; her person was waiting when we came in. The dog survived with a limp and abrasions, and would be going home that night with the usual suite of medications. We talked to the woman some, and she clearly felt awful about her dog jumping the fence to get into the street, and frustrated at her inability to train the dog to stay out of danger. But I was a little jealous on Hannah’s behalf, all the same. A limp and abrasions. Poor Hannah.
But tail docking is pretty standard, even among adult dogs. And as I told the techs, I’m very happy to still have my dog with me. I think, once a bit of time has passed, she’ll go back to being happy to be with us, too. After all, she was just a few days ago.
Categories: Hannah |
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July 20th, 2008
All right. For the squeamish, I’ll just say that Hannah injured her tail and thus it’s getting amputated tonight. Other than the tail injury, the doctor thinks she’s doing very well, and possibly even getting some sensation back (althought not any useful sensation)– and the tail amputation will make managing her condition significantly easier. In the medium and long-term. In the short term, keeping her from sitting on the stump is going to blow.
So it sucks to cut off her beautiful tail (although it’s not beautiful anymore and wouldn’t be again), and I cringe a lot at the thought of it, but it’s okay. It’s a side-effect of her condition and not a sign of more problems to come. Or so the doctor’s convinced me.
I wish the nightmares would stop, though.
Dante is very affectionate today.
Click on for details about how the injury occurred.
(more…)
Categories: Hannah |
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July 20th, 2008
I wouldn’t have nearly as much trouble coming up with something to write. I had a theme for this post (which is the post not about Hannah). It was X, Y, and webcomics. I don’t remember what X and Y are. Oh well.
I’ve spent a lot of the last few days re-reading the Something Positive archives. That’s over 5 years of comics. Funny stuff, but also kind of grim.
I saw my family last weekend. Robin met his grandfather and we spent time with Neil, Stacy, Asher, and Angie. It was too much fun. The drive, however, sucked. Also, we were all sick. I’m still sick. Hey! That was either X or Y: Snot.
If I remember the third of the trio, I’ll be back. It was probably some kind of bitching about writing, or discussion of outliner software.
I think I may take Aenima by Tool as the theme song for Under Bridges. If I do, the protagonist has to get angrier. A lot angrier.
Categories: Updates From the Void |
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July 9th, 2008
One of my writing group people mentioned ‘cluttering’ as a speech disorder, while we were discussing dialogue. I went and looked it up. I read the Wikipedia page. It made me kind of uncomfortable, so I showed the page to Kevin, asked him what he thought, and didn’t think about it the rest of the day.
It made me uncomfortable because it was very familiar. Rapid, disorganized speech. Forgetting specific words. Performs better at language tasks when stressed. Repeating the same word over and over again, half-finished sentences, random clauses, missed words. Impatient, interruption-prone. Giving the appearance of being frustrated to listeners without actually being frustrated, so that the listeners try to change the subject to soothe the apparent frustration, causing real frustration. Messy, sprawling handwriting. Mostly unaware of how they sound to other people.
Kevin said, “That’s my girl!” He spent the day reading all about it. He thinks it’s fascinating and interesting. I was just embarassed.
He said, “I figured that you just had so much to say that it gets jumbled coming out. And that’s the conclusion other people have come to as well.”
I said, “Well, it must not be too bad, or I’ve learned to compensate or something, because I’m better at writing than most people with this disorder seem to be. Possibly that’s even why I’m more comfortable doing things in a written form– phone calls, games, etc.”
But today I was writing and I stumbled over a sentence. I stared at it and I realized I was ‘cluttering’ it– stating one thing, modifying it, and then modifying the modifier. I fixed it, but I realized that was one reason that so often I write so slowly, and why I get so frustrated with myself.
Later, I was thinking about what to write next, and I knew I had three mini-events I wanted to write and I wanted to write them all at the same time. And I couldn’t, and sequencing them, choosing one to start with would probably make the others not come out as I imagined. And I recognized that I’d been in that position before– uncertain what to write next because I had too much and it was poorly organized. And that my usual reaction to that kind of frustration was to find a distraction and stop writing.
And now I feel weird. On the one hand, recognizing this will probably help me accept the frustration and move on. Eventually. I mean, now I know why writing’s so hard these days (although have I come up with theories for why in the past? I’m sure I have…)
But right now I’m in a kind of self-pitying shock. QQ. Well, not shock. We’re not at the elevate feet severity. But definitely self-pity. I used to be proud of my writing. I used to think writing was easy. Now I’m whiny and sad that the easy writing days of yore aren’t ever going to come back, that this isn’t a funk I’m in that I just have to snap out of. I can’t wait it out or write it out. All I can do is try to recognize it and move through it and take every opprotunity the revision process offers. All I can do is work. And I’m lazy!
Although I still don’t know what to do about the ‘want to write 3 things next’ problem. I don’t know if I should try to work around the hard parts (write all 3, and decide later!), or force myself through them (pick one and move on with the story as it flows from there, bozo! Even if it frustrates you!).
And I’m suddenly terribly self-conscious about even writing blog posts.
Somebody on the web said it had gotten worse for them after they left college. Me too. Less semi-public speaking, I suspect. Bleah.
Categories: Updates From the Void, Writing |
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July 3rd, 2008
June was a bad bad month for the writing. It was a great month for learning what not to do, though. Let’s see if I can apply the lessons in July.
I’m going to skip past the section I was stuck on, and start up at the next scene I feel confident about, and just crazy-write, whatever seems like a good idea, within the boundaries of what I already know. I was torn between skipping the stuck part and rereading what i’ve written so far in the hopes of getting unstuck, but I’ve had bad luck with rereading in the past, and I haven’t skipped a hard part since, oh, a long time ago. Ten years? Possibly ten years.
Wow. Remembering the story in which I skipped a hard part triggered a rush of memories about the house we had in New Mexico. I apparently visualized a scene right before the scene I skipped as being set in the hallway of that house. It’s been… 14 years since I was there? It was the last house of my family that felt like home. It doesn’t seem that long ago. 12 years since I left college… And so few stories I’ve really developed since then.
That’s one thing I’ve learned, or tested and confirmed, anyhow. I need to write my stories fast. I need to work on them everyday, including weekends and holidays. I don’t quite know how to manage that, but I know that every weekend I allowed myself (and I did allow them in my planning) made Mondays hard.
I need to outline a bit more than I did for this story, too. I did a ’snowflake’ outline for Citadel, but I skimped for this story. And it just means I’ll have to do more rewriting and revision. And additions. I may even add another point of view.
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July 2nd, 2008
Whee. Now when I do research on Hannah’s condition, my own blog comes up on the first page of results for various different queries. That’s a good reminder to take it easy and not focus on it too much! But I did discover a different kind of injury: Fibrocartilaginous Infarct/Ebolism, which seems to fit the situation and symptoms, although was not, of course, the exact diagnosis. Unfortunately, the major prognositcation is still based on deep pain awareness. However, I feel a little less like Hannah’s situation is something from bizarro-land.
She seems more mindful of her rear end. I’d like to say this is a good sign. but it may just be her learning that she has these parts she can’t feel anymore and being more alert for people messing with them. She still only has a reflexive, not conscious, reaction to toe manipulation. She hasn’t been drinking or peeing very much the last 20 hours or so, which is a bit worrisome, but there’s been a little movement in both directions. I think I’m going to start adding some water to her dry food in the evenings.
*
In other news, I’ve played most of the first Phoenix Wright game (and enjoyed it), and returned to Dwarf Fortress. I’ve also started the Fantasy Harvest Moon game.
The Phoenix Wright game is not high art, but it does a great job of conveying fascinating little plots via nothing but dialogue and extremely limited art resources. It requires a healthy distance from any prior understanding of the justice system, though. I spend a lot of time shrieking during the investigation phases, when witnesses won’t talk to me, when accidental deaths are still considered murder, when as a defense attorney I’m treated like the enemy of the state, when I have to not just prove my client’s innocence but prove somebody else’s guilt– although I suppose that last gives me both the fun of defending the innocent and the aggressive pleasure of prosecution. Nothing like making a ‘witness’ break down in tears or scream in rage, right? The structure of each case is a bit repetitive so far but if you play the cases far enough apart that doesn’t seem like a big deal.
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