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Havoc, various and extreme
My editor’s assistant is very on the spot, bless her, and while the copyedited ms of PEGASUS in all its red-pencilled, Post-Itted glory* isn’t due to arrive till Thursday**, she sent me the copyeditor’s queries last night so I can at least get started on the more or less substantive stuff, as opposed to the melting-down-over-the-question-of-semicolons stuff, which will have to await arrival of the large square boulder of typescript. Or printerscript.
I am, of course, hyperventilating.*** Deadlines crunch underfoot like the ice that I hope is not out there forming after yesterday’s rain and today’s temperature plunge. Anxiety, foreboding and self-doubt fleet gibbering past like wraiths. And I have a headache that feels like being thwacked repeatedly by the Chrysler Building †. And I may be getting a job tomorrow at the recycling plant, sorting plastic bottles and cardboard boxes. Or old computer components. I’m not fussy.
And I haven’t even told you yet about the latest edition of SUNSHINE which they’re shoving through in some kind of inside-out Douglas-Adams timeframe†† to take advantage of some opportunity for a special promotion last week or something, and they sent me the cover roughs today which there is no time to do much about except keep going and I recognise that they are hip and flash and attention-catching and even pretty on their own terms but I can’t even breathe this fast††† let alone make decisions and AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.
NO PRESSURE OR ANYTHING.
* * *
OKAY. IT’S OFFICIAL. FEDEX HAS SCREWED UP, AND I’M NOT GETTING PEGASUS ON THURSDAY.
KILL ME. KILL ME NOW.
* * *
* Yup. Hard copy. I’m old and feeble and retro and sad.^ Most of this publishing doodah happens electronically these days, except among those of us who are old and feeble and retro and sad. We agreed to deal with the copyedited FIRE electronically, and it frelling near killed me.^^ Probably a great many of my mysterious aches and pains have nothing to do with hellhounds, large heavy potted plants, boxes of books, or cranky bells, but are the result of those pins various publishing people are sticking in wax figures labelled ‘Robin’. She gets her damn book in four months late and she wants the copyedit in HARD COPY? What did I do with those hat pins?
^ And I compulsively reread Calvin and Hobbes. When I get to the bottom of the pile+ I start over. Aside from the astonishingly high level of inspired lunacy Watterson maintained, I like the way Calvin’s parents sit around reading books. I read a strip today where Calvin’s mom is using a typewriter. The copyright date is 1987—that’s only twenty-three years ago! The usual date of the invention of the world-wide web is 1989, isn’t it? And PCs (and Macs) as more than a geek phenomenon are only about ten years older than that. I know, I know, the world does keep changing, but this is the first time I’ve been old, and I think the electronic revolution is pretty amazing.
Robin McKinley is on Twitter? Robin McKinley who was given a phone machine as a house-warming present back in Maine because her nearest and dearest were sure that after she and her phone-answering housemates went their separate ways they would never hear from her again?
I’ve been trying to find that joke about the bathtub and the phone: The bathtub was invented in 1850 and the telephone in 1875.++ This means you could sit in the tub for twenty-five years before the phone rang.
If you turned the phone off, you could sit in the tub for 125 years before your email pinged. You’d be pretty wrinkly by then though.
+ Of course I have them all. I am a card-carrying obsessive. You know this.
++ Except that the bathtub was invented either by the Romans in BCE quack quack something, or by Thingummy in 1883 who came up with the trick of enamelling of a large iron basin, and the phone really was invented in 1875 or thereabouts. Never mind. I still like the joke.
^^ Sheer chronological age is not necessarily the determining factor. Peter coped. I didn’t. And he can remember twenty five more internetless years than I can.
** IT HAD BETTER BE GOING TO ARRIVE ON THURSDAY. I’VE ONLY GOT TILL NEXT THURSDAY TO TURN IT AROUND. AS I SIT HERE, TWITCHING EVERY TIME MY EMAIL PINGS^, THE MS. HAS NOT YET ARRIVED AT MY PUBLISHER, WHICH MEANS MY PUBLISHER HAS NOT YET SENT IT OUT.
It’s bad enough that sodding Fedex delivers when they feel like it, so while they guarantee 48 hours, they don’t tell you which end of the forty-eight, so to speak, so Peter is going to house-sit while I’m hurtling hellhounds. On Thursday. If it’s Thursday. It’s looking bad for Thursday. OH. GODS.
^Fortunately I am not sitting in the bath. It occurs to me that the real reason I find myself incapable of going to bed at a decent, civilised hour, is because I like to lie in the bath and read. At mmmph o’clock in the morning the phone very rarely rings.+
+ Although Peter scared me silly ringing at 11:15 from Elsewhereshire this weekend. Eleven-fifteen is, of course, the mere shank of the evening by my standards, but anyone who rings me after about 9 pm~ earns my undying opprobrium. (I’m still not a big fan of the telephone.) Ordinarily I would make an exception for Peter, but what was he doing in Elsewhereshire this weekend when he should have been at home bringing me cups of strong hot stomach-quelling tea and frosted flutes of medicinal champagne?
~ Or before about . . . never mind.
*** The funny thing is that today is pretty much the first day that PEG II has not felt like a Giant Spiky Monster which is going to roll over me juggernaut-fashion and leave me a little blot on the carpet^, but a story I might conceivably manage to tell.^^ The last two or three weeks or whatever it’s been it’s been like, No! Go away! I’ve done all that! What do you mean it’s not finished! Of course it’s finished! I know when I’ve finished a novel! Sequel! I don’t frelling do sequels, and if you say that again I will make you eat my desktop!^^^
^ To go with various other recent blots on the carpet. What a good thing we go in for patterned carpets.
^^ I say nothing about finishing it by next autumn.
^^^Which is the computer whose email is still not working.
† Point down, of course. This is all part of the Giant Spiky Monster metaphor.
†† “Oh no, not again.”
††† Especially when I’m hyperventilating
Snow Day*
It’s snowing. And snowing. And snowing. And . . . There’s only about an inch and a half** out there now, but it’s coming down in that steady, concentrating way that is bad news. Well, it’s good news if you’re a kid and want to stay home tomorrow and build a snowperson.*** It’s bad news for those of us who get claustrophobia easily, don’t like falling down, and have hellhounds. And are worried about the fresh-veg deliveries† to the local greengrocers’, fresh veg having become about the only thing I eat in quantity in these metabolism-challenged days.
Meanwhile I have managed to get through nearly an entire day without really noticing that I haven’t done anything.†† I could get used to this.†††
Meanwhile . . . tell you what, I’ll write another quick post when I get back to the cottage. Just so you’ll know I’m not lying in a snowdrift trying to strike wet matches to see why my RaspBerry is refusing to function. If I fall in a snowdrift I more or less guarantee it will be a snowdrift in a dead phone zone.
* * *
* It didn’t start till this evening. It’s just been threatening us all day.^ Hellhounds and I had a lovely walk . . . waaay the ungleblarg out in the middle of nowhere, because it took that long for Wolfgang to stop whimpering about being cold and all his engine oil is pooling in his ankles. And have I mentioned how I’ve got a box of matches on the dashboard so I’ll remember to leave them outside under the windscreen wiper on the driver’s side in case of unlocking problems when we come back from our hurtle? Outside on the driver’s side so I can’t possibly miss seeing them? Actually a box of wooden matches rides around perfectly well in the little hollow at the hinge of the bonnet where the wipers attach. Ask me how I know this.
^ With luck there will be before-and-after photos tomorrow. Snow skies and . . . snow.
** Mmm. Two inches.
*** I am building a snowperson. Remotely. He’s called Wolfgang, and by morning all he’ll need is the carrot and the lumps of coal. ^ Hellhounds and I are walking home tonight. I haz yaktraxz. I walk on water. Well, so long as it’s frozen. I actually did walk in them for the first time today: although I had previously spent a remarkable amount of time figuring out how to get them on. I suppose the manufacturer thought any damn fool ought to be able to stretch some rubber bands over their shoes and decided to save 10p on the purchase price by omitting the diagram. Well, yes, but there are variations on this stretching process, and I was assuming that the YAKTRAX insignia would be arranged for the wearer’s delectation. Silly me: of course it faces out to gain new friends and influence people.^^
I told the Midwestern friend who’d recommended them^^^ that they’d arrived and she said that she hoped . . . well, no, she said, she knew me well enough that she was SURE that I had ordered them in an AMUSING COLOUR. She said that aside from aesthetic considerations, you wanted them in an amusing colour so they were easy to find when they flew off and landed in a snowdrift. Um. Pause for deep throbbing sorrow. No. The British market is clearly deemed not ready for amusing colours. Mine are black because the choice was . . . black.
^ Hey. What do kids use for snowperson eyes these days?
^^ Hey! She’s not falling down! It must be . . . YAKTRAX!
^^^ She’s recommended them before. But this is the Longest Spell of Really Cold Weather in Britain in Over Twenty Years, which is how long it takes to make me pay attention.
† And if they’re serious about this nonsense continuing for the next several days then I’m going to start worrying about all the other deliveries. Like . . . Green & Black’s.
†† No. Wrong. I have done things. I spent an hour and a half on the phone with Hannah. And I watched a programme on TV. I mean . . . wow.^ Now you’re all avid to know what I watched, right? A rerun of Simon Schama’s The Power of Art? A no-holds-barred study of how to clear your gutters so they stay clear for at least fifteen minutes?^^ The end of season three of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?^^^
Nope. Stargate Universe. Huh? There’s another one? With Robert Carlyle? It was the first intro ep, and we learn that (a) winning on-line computer games is dangerous (b) Robert Carlyle is a Bad Guy and (c) they’ve got enough backstory loaded for a very long series. Other than that I’m damned if I followed about two-thirds of what was going on. Is it now de rigueur that ‘excitement’ is demonstrated by mad cutting techniques so that no scene lasts more than twenty-two seconds and that you then zap to another one which takes place at another time, in another place, and with enough of the same characters to be really confusing?
But it was great. Lying on the sofa covered in hellhounds with the professional brain in abeyance. Every few minutes it would stir and make little anxious thinking gestures: shouldn’t we be doing something?# No, no, I’d say. We’re just going to lie here and watch more stuff get punched till it blows up.## Notice how happy the hellhounds are. We are providing joy to little furry creatures from the fifth infernal circle.###
^ It’s less unheard-of that I should spend an hour and a half on the phone with Hannah than that I watch an entire TV programme at one go. Well, barring Sky Opera. And they didn’t run an opera every night for the entire month of December. Hmmph.
^^ First you hire your Klingon. . . . The one drawback to the magnificent copper beech in the churchyard that hangs companionably over the back garden at Third House is the way it sheds.
^^^ Please. Buffy isn’t television.
# Still haven’t found the beginning of what is now, or had better be, PEG II
## I don’t really have to remind you of http://wondermark.com/520/ and http://wondermark.com/521/ do I?
### Also possibly the eighth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Dante)
†† No, no! Must find rest of PEG! Or at least write that story (which Peter gave me the plot to) about the parking fairy!
Nope
I didn’t make my PEGASUS deadline today. I probably knew by the end of last week that I wasn’t going to. Sylvi—my heroine—goes off and has adventures, as my heroines are wont to do, and when she comes home again, all kinds of things have changed, including her. Followed by my Frodo-was-alive-but-taken-by-the-Enemy ending, and you’re not going to be able to turn the page and find out what happens next for at least a year, and . . . well . . . let’s just leave it as ‘at least a year’. I decided I needed to [insert verb that does not exist in English here*] the last thirty pages a little more to bear the weight, as it were, or possibly the drag into the bottomless ravine, of that ending, and the waiting that follows. Part of the difficulty is that when Sylvi comes home it’s no longer home** and she spends those last thirty pages going the high-fantasy equivalent of ‘huh?’ a lot, not knowing what is happening or what to do. And the story is told from her perspective. Now, you can get away with this in the middle of a novel***. It’s called ‘transitional’. Not so much the end of a novel, even if it’s only the middle of the story. Dranglefab. More frelling learning curves. Isn’t learning to sing/compose/ring bells† at my advanced age enough?
So I’d more or less just finished exchanging emails with my editor yesterday—we having agreed we’d make the final decision on Monday—when the news about the car crash came in. No, there isn’t really anything more to tell you today. If we’re lucky we should know something by Christmas—if we’re really lucky we’ll know something good by Christmas—last night they were saying 48-72 hours post-surgery. But while there’s nothing either Peter or I can do besides sit by the phone/computer and wait for it to ring/ping, the waiting is pretty grisly.
And about PEGASUS, the Novel with The Ever Retreating Final Deadline . . . 4th January. That’s when everyone at Putnams goes back to work.†† Pre-car-crash I was saying drily to Peter and Merrilee that the irony is that if my deadline really had been Christmas Eve, as I’d declared in the first place, I’d’ve probably made it. Drat Christmas anyway. But post-car-crash I’m moving a little slower and my concentration is a little more fragile. I wanted Christmas off.††† Well, I’ll have time for yet another read through now. I’m not sure I’m bouncing up and down with glee about this.
* * *
* Sharpen? Hone? Focus? Expand? Rework? Redirect? Rearrange? Brace? Fortify? Reinforce? Rejuvenate? Rip to frelling shreds and start over? No.
**PhD thesis support alert^: I think I was born and built or built and born to be an outsider, and even if I’d grown up number four in Cheaper by the Dozen I’d’ve still felt I didn’t belong. So far so normal; it’s a common enough trait among those of us driven to do weird stuff like obsessively write stories. It’s also normal to find out at some point that you can’t go home again, whether you’re a nutca—a sensitive artistic type or not. I’ve told this story many times before but it is one of those informing moments of my life, and every time I find myself doing something like it to yet another heroine I remember it happening to me: coming home after five years in Japan, where I was clearly and absolutely a foreigner, and finding out that America was no longer home. This was also during the first drowning high-water mark of my passion for LORD OF THE RINGS and you all remember what happens to Frodo when he gets back to the Shire, don’t you?
^ and don’t bother telling me I’m giving myself airs, there are already a few PhD theses out there on me, although I don’t know or anyway don’t remember if any of them got accepted and granted their strange-topic-choosers any doctorates
*** THE HERO AND THE CROWN, say
† On the subject of ringing bells. Someone posted to the forum the other night in response to my snarling about keeping the Old Eden tower ringing with almost no help from the locals, that possibly they don’t realise they’d be welcome in the tower, possibly they don’t realise that we really need more ringers. Sorry, but this is a sore point. We’ve done everything BUT lock them up till they agree (ref another poster’s she-thought-she-was-being-funny-but-if-it-worked-we’d-do-it suggestion) to try and convince a few of them to stick around and learn to ring. We’ve put ads in the local newspapers and parish magazines, posters on what’s-happening-in-this-town bulletin boards including in the church vestibule(s), since we need ringers at New Arcadia too, just not as acutely, Vicky has done talks at schools and the WI^ etc. We used to have tower open days but Vicky says they NEVER EVER ONCE GOT ONE learner out of them^^ so since open days are a pill to organise we don’t any more.
And I know from my own experience that as soon as you say anything about coming along some practise evening to give it a try to some congregation member or even ordinary joe on the street complimenting you on the sound of the bells, they instantly go all shifty. Part of the problem is that they think it’s a difficult skill . . . and they’re right. It’s not hard to get to basic call-change-ringing competence, but it does (usually) take several months, and unless you find you LIKE bells, you probably won’t bother. And if you do like bells, then you’re really frelled, because unless you’re young and talented, you have one unglefarb of a steep and bumpy road ahead of you, learning proper change-ringing.^^^
I wish I knew what the magic ingredient is—what herb you sneak into your victim’s tea^^^^ that will make any dormant bell-ringing urge leap to active life. It is a totally addictive skill, but you do have to put yourself in the way of becoming addicted, which includes a lot of time on the end of a rope, and a lot of time being direly convinced you should have taken up knitting instead. Which is when you need friends like Niall to talk you out of any dramatic renunciations.^^^^^
^ Women’s Institute. It’s not a lot of fluffy coffee klatchers. http://www.thewi.org.uk/
^^ Which surprised me, since that’s how I started the first time, eleven years ago.
^^^ There are in fact a lot of people out there who get to call-change ringing or possibly plain hunt or treble ringing and . . . stop. But this is so utterly alien to my own frantic little personality that I’m not going to try to discuss it. And a call-change-only ringer on a Sunday morning when there are only three or four of you is still a blessed event.
Oh, someone on the forum asked if we were ringing Christmas Day. Yes. I have to get up early on Christmas morning to go ring some frelling bells.+
+ Okay, maybe there is a reason why not everyone who reads this blog regularly has rushed out to sign up at their nearest bell tower.~
~ Two hundred miles? Oh, stop whinging.
^^^^Eww, what is in this, it tastes like feet/water from a vase of really dead flowers/cat pee
^^^^^ No, no, you don’t want to learn to knit, knitting needles are sharp. . . .
†† And yes, it’s still on the autumn ’10 list.
††† Yes, I know I can take Christmas off. And I probably will. But the book will still be sitting there sort of looking at me.
A blur of . . .
. . . well, hellhounds, among other things. I’m unbelievably tired and whacked out, even on my recent usual scale of tired and whacked-out-ness, and even as Lo Text Mondays go this is going to be lo lo looooo, er, low. And blurry. I also need to try the assault on my hill while the temperature is still below freezing: the idea is to hang out around here at the mews whilst the last moments of melt go on outdoors—and then whip down* to the cottage just before it drops below the evil magic number again. The very thought of tomorrow makes me cry: we had about two inches of snow this afternoon, followed by several hours of slow drip . . . which is about to be followed by another hard freeze, and tomorrow. . . . I couldn’t walk down my cul de sac’s steep little hill this morning.** And this afternoon when hellhounds and I went out for our second canter the road at the end of the long mews park driveway was solid traffic in both directions—into town because a lorry had broken down at the bottom of the hill at the crossroads and no one in Hampshire had a spare recovery vehicle that had the traction to cope with dragging him out of the way, and out of town because the dual carriageway was down to one crawling lane in both directions due to snow and at least one ambulance that couldn’t get through.
And of course there’s PEGASUS.
And the final blow is that someone near and dear to us has been in an awful car crash and we aren’t going to know for at least a couple of days what the prognosis is. Peter, being a British male, is soldiering on. I’m trying not to disperse into my component atoms. But I do kind of want to lie down and curl up and snivel. The bad news ruined the hell out of tonight’s opera, which was the Damnation of Faust, and I think was probably a pretty good production.
So let us distract ourselves with hellhounds. Lovely funny silly hellhounds. This is why domestic animals were invented.
A blur of hellhounds.
And yes, this is all the snow there is. (This grass is pretty long, and some of the snow has melted since out here it’s not being trampled into titanium thaw-proof ice.) If you can get out of town without killing yourself it’s fine.
My hellhounds really make me laugh.
Look at that FACE.
* * *
* And up. Ordinarily the down-and-upness of Hampshire is one of its charms.
** I tottered uphill to my parking slot, and hellhounds and I then slid majestically down the slope in Wolfgang, praying there wouldn’t be anyone in the road when we got there. There’s actually a little relatively level and relatively bare spot just before you squash any pedestrians, and before you get to the road proper. This is good.
And the first amaryllis/hippeastrum of the season. Yaaay.
And in my mission to keep you up to date with my footgear I felt that you really needed to see these tights from the OBE party. Are they good or what. The little ankle boots are good too but the tights rule. And just by the way, it’s REALLY HARD to take a photo OF YOUR OWN LEGS. (Note to self: really must find out how to do auto-photo.)
8 October
NO DAYS.
Okay; it’s done*. It went in. About 6 pm my time . . . while everyone is at lunch in Manhattan. Instantly got an ‘out of office’ robot email from my editor, so I wrote to her assistant saying, she knows it’s coming so presumably she’ll be checking her email, but would you be kind enough to LET ME KNOW WHEN IT ARRIVES? Supposing it does, and the out-of-office isn’t some kind of warding programme.**
Two and a half hours pass. I fidget. I stare into space. I walk hellhounds.*** Surely people are coming back from lunch/meetings/their secret lives as intelligence agents and alligator wrestlers†/walking their three-headed dogs. I’m watching the clock and twitching, as it’s starting to get kind of late in Manhattan too, and today was the deadline. So I had just started writing an email to Merrilee’s assistant saying, is everybody playing hopscotch or Snakes and Ladders†† or talking to their nanny†††, please ACKNOWLEDGE, if I need to resend, I want to KNOW. And then, email ping! And again, ping!
The Large Flying Creature Has Landed.
And . . . thank you all. I’m sure all those thought waves swept PEGASUS and me on at a speed we were incapable of attaining on our own. But I do feel compelled to warn you, aside from my standard fit of ‘oh, it’s rubbish, it’s rubbish, it’s RUBBISH’ . . . I really don’t know how I managed to cram it through in the last three weeks, and it is unfortunately quite possible that I didn’t cram enough of it through, and that it needs more work than I can give it in (say) the short breathing spell between now and when it would have to go to copyediting, if it were going to copyediting for publication next autumn. Working this fast and this hard is not the way to do your best work—my best work anyway: I’m not a deadline junkie—I’ll know for myself after I start working on it again how much there is to do, but my poor editor is going to have to read the whole thing through at quintuple speed so she can decide whether or not to put it on the schedule. So chances are we’ll all know next week some time, even if I’m still sailing through some of the good bits and wondering if I’ve got away with it.
I’m concentrating at present on the idea that even if the news is bad, PEGASUS is still salvageable. The story is there. I may just not have done enough with my plastic teaspoon on that rockface yet.
Stay tuned.
And thanks again.
* * *
* Well, it’s not done. But that’s another story for next week. It went in in its Present Condition, which includes a time line in part two that resembles a cross between Spaghetti Junction and overused Silly Putty.
** This has happened to me. You send something, you get the robot ‘out of office’ so you figure okay, fine, at least it arrived, they’ll get back to me when they get back. And then they don’t. Because they never got it. Out-of-office was playing goalie with a ray gun and a three-headed dog for extra shielding. Caroooooooom goes my small hapless email into the outer reaches of the galaxy.
*** The standard afternoon hurtle the last few weeks of PEGASUS-fixation has been walking the loop down along the river to the cottage and then back to the mews via a variety of playing fields. When I’m not beating myself to death with a keyboard I pause at the cottage to do a little gardening but that hasn’t been happening recently. But it does mean I can check my phone machine for more frantic last-minute pleas for wedding ringers^ and my front stoop for packages bearing large labels that say LEAVE BESIDE HOUSE BEHIND GATE BEHIND WATER BUTT where, among other things, there’s a little roof so that when it rains I don’t come home to cardboard pulp on my front stoop. Snarl. Anyway. There was a package today.^^
I refer occasionally to the fact that I love clothes. And that while certain concessions are made to the facts that I work at home in the company of two large^^^ hairy hellhounds with whom I go for long muddy brambly walks every day and that I can’t stop buying rosebushes, which need planting and feeding and weeding and pruning, still, some of my favourite light reading is clothing catalogues. Big emblazoned SALE banners and I start drooling like Pavlov’s dog. Last spring a catalogue I like had a hoodie that called my name in a loud and unmistakable manner. Hoodies are like All Stars: I’ve been wearing them since before today’s hoodie- and All-Star-wearing fashion icons were born. I was wearing hoodies when they were even less cool than All Stars at their nadir: and that is uncool.
Anyway. There was no way I was going to pay full price for this thing but I liked it in the colour I was pretty sure was going to be unpopular, so I decided to keep an eye on it. And, lo, it went on sale a couple of months ago. But it didn’t go on sale enough. And it was still available in even the good colours, so I figured I could wait some more. I said to myself, if it gets below £x, I’ll order it.
Weeks pass. With email you get nearly daily updates on all your favourite catalogues; I have half a dozen I actually open and look at. Us writers need small idiot excitements like this to keep us in touch with life and three dimensions.^^^^ And then one day, lo! My hoodie has fallen below £x. By one pound. Never mind. And in my size only my unpopular colour is still available. So I stick it in my virtual shopping basket, have a cruise through the rest of the offerings for anything to keep it company—yes: brown velvet jacket with brown velvet roses on it, fabulously on sale, it never occurred to me it would come down to my price range—and then leave it for twenty four hours, which is what I do to make sure I really mean it. I’m a little dangerous with on-sale clothing catalogues. And I have a weight-bearing attic floor to pay off.
Decide I really mean it. Go back to virtual shopping basket. My hoodie has sold out. Frell. All right, all is not lost, continue to keep an eye on the situation; they may have returns. Another fortnight or so passes. Double frell. Oh well. I didn’t really need another hoodie. . . .
They’ve had some returns. It’s back again in my size. So I order it—and the brown velvet jacket—fast, before they change their minds, or their stock-taking.
The brown velvet jacket arrives . . . alone. (And it’s delicious. So that’s okay.) On the invoice it says of the hoodie ‘cannot supply’. What the (*&^%$£”!!!! does that mean? It probably means ‘we didn’t really have any returns, somebody hit the wrong key in the warehouse’. ARRRGH. Okay . . . I didn’t really need another hoodie.
About five days ago I got an email saying ‘your goods have been shipped’. WHAT? YES! They found a hoodie in my size! Lying under a forklift truck somewhere! And they’ve dusted it off and are sending it to me!
I’ve spent the last five days wondering what’s going to happen next—it’ll arrive in the wrong size, the wrong colour, the wrong item, the person who hit the wrong key in the warehouse has hit another wrong key, this time telling me I’ve got something coming . . .
Nope. It’s here. They sent it. It’s in the right size and the right colour. It was lying on my front stoop (in a cardboard box with a large label that says PLEASE LEAVE BESIDE HOUSE . . . ) this afternoon. And it’s cute too. But then I like hoodies.
Life. Three dimensions. Yes.
^ We have one tomorrow that we had our first request for last Thursday. One wants to know if they left the wedding to the last minute, or just the idea of having bells.
^^ It’s been a beautiful day. Just the sort of day you would like to be out in the garden planting bulbs. Sigh. It’s supposed to rain again tomorrow . . . but this is a good thing. I haven’t done any housework in like the last month and I have a friend I don’t see very often coming on Saturday. The sort of friend I kind of want to protect from reality.
^^^ They’re large in terms of hair production.
^^^^ Yes. It is that bad. See? You don’t want to be a writer.
† http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/alligators/a/sewer_gators.htm
This was my favourite urban legend back in the days before ‘urban legends’ were a commonplace.
†† very suitable for publishing
††† What do you mean you’re in Houston/a traffic jam in the Lincoln Tunnel/jail? My kids get out of school in twenty minutes!
