Glory hallefrellinglujah whatever gave me the insane idea that I could seamlessly* insert** writing a blog back into my life? Although if TECHNOLOGY would stop kicking me around like a an old damaged football*** I might be both more willing & more able to tiptoe across the Dead Marshes of the blogoscape†, averting my eyes from the spooky candles of distraction††, & keeping my gaze fixed on . . . hmm. I don’t want to go to Mordor, & I especially don’t want to go to Mordor with the Ring hanging around my neck & in the company of the revolting Gollum & the EVEN MORE REVOLTING Samwise Gamgee. It’s just that the Dead Marshes have a very evocative stumbling-around-in-the-dark-with-added-eerie vibe to them, which rather suits a manic introvert trying to figure, or re-figure, blogging again & FRANKLY TECHNOLOGY IS VERY MORDOR LIKE.†††
Furthermore stuff keeps happening.‡ I had a friend coming over late morning, which is EARLY by my standards so I took Genghis out for his first walk in my Morning Garments‡‡, which meant the door key was loose in a pocket instead of weighed down by several other keys & a key ring in my jeans. We had an adequate walk‡‡‡ & when we got back, in plenty of time to feed the Mongol Horde & brew myself another cup of tea before my friend arrived . . .
. . . the key was no longer in my pocket.
PAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANIC.
Additional whacks up longside the head provided by the fact that I’ve had the new back door for . . . um . . . a year & a half? Maybe? But I’d just somehow never got round to replacing the old key with the new one in my key safe.§
So, having scraped myself out of the ancient pear tree that overhangs the back garden, a nice indoor ceiling to fly up into not being available, I managed to remember to text my friend NOT TO COME UNTIL/UNLESS SHE HEARD FROM ME AGAIN & Genghis, who knows that coming home means food, was briefly nonplussed when we did not crisply enter through the back door & immediately give him (a) a special, coming-home treat followed by (b) a proper meal, although I’m not sure what we were calling this one? Elevenses? He doesn’t care, but the only thing that comes CLOSE to food on his list of reasons to go on living is MORE WALKING, so having bribed him with an extra ordinary-going-for-walk treat or two, he was happy enough to turn around & go out again. On exactly, & I mean EXACTLY, agonisingly & persnicket-ingly EXACTLY, the same walk we’d just finished.
The fates were kind. I found the key.
& have spent most of the rest of the day prostrate with the aftermath of a major adrenaline spike. The kind that just about takes the top of your head off§§.
I did however pull myself together long enough to put a NEW BACK DOOR KEY in the key safe. I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear.
* * *
* all right, yes, it was never going to be seamlessly
** I want to say shoehorn but the idea of a seamless shoehorning makes my brain hurt
*** AKA a little old lady who still remembers rotary dial phones^. I’m sure there’s some invasion of privacy going on, the way every Expensive & Frequently Bogus Help for the Aged catalogue suddenly starts arriving on your doorstep somewhere in your 60s. Because when book-in-progress is thumbing its nose at me & going nyah nyah na na nyah, which has been most of the time, the last few years, I will look at almost ANYTHING to get away from that blank screen, & I glance through even these things occasionally. & along with the bunion pads & the nose-hair removers I notice with some dry amusement that manual typewriters are apparently making a comeback among the elderly. I’ve told you already, I’ve been a professional-level typist for nearly 60 years [sic]^^ & your average home manual wouldn’t last a week with me, but I admit to CURIOSITY about the Japanese company that has started shipping electric typewriters to the yearning west. But unless the Japanese economy is running on an alternate-universe model, they’re too cheap to be adamantine, & protestations of their being professional quality ring hollow, rather like the sound of an exploding typewriter. The advertising come-on also wants to tell you that when you aren’t struggling with spreadsheets^^^ they are PERFECT for your aspiring writer persona, but that’s only if you are the one-perfect-letter-per-hour variety of aspiring writer. Someone who pounds the doodah out of her medium of expression when the story is running hot would soon find herself with a typewriter-shaped doorstop.
^ I’m pretty sure punch-button phones, although they were still landlines you plugged into the wall+, existed by the time I bought my first IBM Selectric, but I’m equally sure I didn’t have one yet.
+ & you didn’t call them landlines. They were just the phone system. They were the only phone system going. AH THE GOOD OLD DAYS. Yeah. When, for example, organic food was so far off even the fringe-loony spectrum that the only way to eat it was to grow it yourself. & good luck finding, for example, organic fertilizer. AH THE BAD OLD DAYS. But the bad old days did contain IBM Selectrics.
^^ Things not to be excited about being precocious at
^^^ Erm, what is a spreadsheet?+
+ NO NO DON’T TELL ME
† Assuming it still exists. I’ve already acknowledged that EVERYONE TELLS ME no one blogs any more. RIGHT. GOT IT. YOU CAN STOP TELLING ME, THANK YOU, & if my new blog fails, well, I want my experiment to have been an honourable one, which does mean I have to write some blog posts.^
^ & if it does fail, hey! It’s not my fault! It’s that no one blogs any more!!!
†† & footnotes.
††† full disclosure. I so don’t keep up. If it’s not LORD OF THE RINGS^, STAR TREK the original, NEXT GEN & DEEP SPACE 9, or BUFFY, with lashings of FARSCAPE & BABYLON 5, I don’t know it, & won’t make cranky ill-judged allusions to it.^^
^ The book not the movie(s). Peter Jackson should burn in hell. Ahem.
^^ Oh, well, a friend got me started on Marvel recently. AVENGERS ASSEMBLE IS ONE OF THE TEN BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME.+
+ I’m not sure what the other nine are. I’d have to think about it. & next week it would be a different list.#
# TOY STORY would also be on it both weeks.
‡ Just to get the technology out of the way for at least five minutes, the Disappearing Document situation is getting worse. Used to be I had to have left a document for half an hour or so for it to disappear. It’s now disappearing in the time it takes to hit the ‘print’ button. I suppose this should make me want to write blog posts rather than book-in-progress because when it’s only a blog post the bridge I want to throw myself off of when the document disappears is a lot lower. I might just sprain an ankle. When the BiP disappears there is no bridge tall enough.
‡‡ I got in the habit of sleeping in something I could answer the door in when Peter was no longer available for morning duty. This is usually a long loose jersey dress with a hoodie over it in the winter. & an apron over that once I’ve fallen out of bed but before I want to strain mental faculties with things like getting properly dressed.^
^ Also, define proper. I have a lot of fun with dresses, hoodies, aprons, etc. Today’s hoodie says Books. Helping introverts to avoid conversation since 1454. Truth in loop-back cotton terry.
‡‡‡ Except for the part about being assaulted by an overweight off-lead Jack Russell while its equally overweight, & a lot slower off the mark, owner, stared at us for a good ten seconds before he moseyed over & started trying ineffectually to catch his ****** dog. Meanwhile Genghis was turning himself inside out. In terms of sheer brute strength, if I have the beast by the collar, I can hang onto him—which requires me to be on Constant Alert for Collar Grabbing, because if he hits the end of his lead at speed, he is away & I have a dislocated shoulder—but the inside-out part is challenging because of the way he FLAILS.
§ Tangential rant about the key safe: I read up on these gizmos, of course. Fretting over potential purchases is something I’m good at. It’s the frelling follow through I have trouble with. Like learning how the blasted thing works^ & then employing it in a confident & forthright manner for its intended purpose. HOWEVER. HAVING STRUGGLED THROUGH ALL THE DETAILS VIVIDLY DESCRIBED IN THIS FOOTNOTE TREE, I got to the end where I actually had the thing put together, drilled into the wall^^, & ready to roll, & the final instructions tell you cheerfully that you need a six-figure number for the security code, & they (cheerfully) recommend that you choose a memorable date. & THEN THEY TELL YOU YOU CAN ONLY USE EACH INDIVIDUAL NUMBER ONCE. So, how many people have memorable dates that fulfill that requirement??? My birthday has four ones. Peter’s birthday has three ones. Our wedding day has two zeroes.
^ this laborious process frequently begins with CHOPPING the thing out of its abstruse packaging materials without damaging the thing itself, which can be complicated by not being sure which bits are partof the thing itself & which are seriously non-ecological protective swaddling. This exercise almost certainly then progresses to seriously uninstructive instructions. It’s bad enough when a single sheet of pronouncements is provided, rejoicing in such expressions as Exquisite advantageous living endowed by elegant appliance we wonderfully supply! It’s worse when you have a bound tome about the size of the first volume of LOTR with two pages of tiny illegible type dedicated to each of 1,000,000 languages, most of which you’ve never heard of, & as you’re flipping despondently through, it occurs to you unnervingly that the Polish or Chamicuro pages look more understandable than the English.+
+ This is English I’m writing, isn’t it?#
# I should still have the hiragana & katakana alphabets on my computer & theoretically a few basic kanji, but I GUARANTEE small temporary blog hostings don’t support them. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. THAT’S MY EXCUSE for not attempting to scare you to death. Which would backfire when some genuine Japanese reader emails me to say that I just wrote There are koalas in my soup. Which would not have been what I was trying to say.=
= I would not have been discussing soup at all, but I would at least have said, there are Nihon ishigame in my soup.
^^ OF COURSE I had help. If I tried to do this the wall would’ve fallen down. Or possibly morphed into a roc & flown away, which would have been a lot more interesting, but I still need a wall.
§§ & winds it, like rainbow confetti, through the branches of the ancient pear tree