life is great!

I try to be useful

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In my continuing attempts to be useful to people, here are three things I’m glad I know.

1) If you feel the urge to sneeze but need to hold it back (because, say, your beloved spouse is sleeping right there in the room with you), tickle the roof of your mouth with your tongue. It won’t prevent every sneeze, and sometimes it will only delay it, but it works.

2) If you are sick of having the whole roll of aluminum foil pop out of the box when you pull on it, check the sides of the box. There should be a bit of perforated cardboard there. Just punch it in so it sticks into the center of the roll and the problem is solved.

3) This I got from an emergency room doc (who posted it online–I didn’t go to the hospital for it): if you have persistent hiccups, here are three steps to stopping them. First, take a tsp of sugar. That should stop 95% of hiccups. If it doesn’t work, try remedy two: half-tsp of salt. That covers up to 98%. If neither of those work, go with one tsp of vinegar. That should polish off the last two percent.

I should mention that I’ve never had that three-step remedy fail. The only iffy part is getting my son to take it.

They did it

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The Senate health care reform package just passed the house with 219 votes, three over the 216 they needed.

Finally! It’s not the reform I would have chosen, and it’s not perfect. Hell, it’ll never be perfect. What it can do, though, is save thousands of American lives every year, and prevent hundreds of thousands of medical bankruptcies.

Tomorrow, I will be happy and at peace. Tuesday, I’ll contact my representative and senators about cap and trade. Or Medicare part E (for “everyone”). Or immigration reform. Or for expanding the insurance exchanges to be national in size.

It’s good. It’s fine. For once, I’m pleased.

Pleasant things

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A neighborhood library branch (not mind) is having a writers event tonight. It’s some sort of reading and talk, along with an open mike. I was seriously tempted to go, just to see what it was like. If it was fun and well-attended, I would have introduced myself to the library staff and offered myself for future events.

Then I decided to run the authors’ names through a search engine. They’re all poets.

Just typing that make me shudder a bit. I don’t know if anyone out there has ever heard a poet reading their work on, say, NPR, but they always have the same unnatural, deadening cadence. Gah! Instead, I will go home to my family, share dinner with them, and maybe watch the last of the NOVA dvds we picked up at the library (“The Last Extinction!”). That will be pleasant.

You know what else is pleasant? Woolgathering for a new book. Everything is still made of potential and none of the characters have turned up dead in a burning orphanage. Yet.

An unhappy reminder

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For those folks who change their clocks twice a year, this is a friendly reminder that Daylight Savings Time starts this Sunday, March 14th. Set your clocks one hour ahead.

Because we all need an hour less sleep at the end of winter.

Watch the green lava!

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I did my first voice-over job today. The writer/director trusted me quite a bit when he gave me this role, and I hope I did a good job.

My son made his first Lego stop-motion animation all by himself. He even did the editing; I’m planning to ask him for tips on using iMovie later. Comments on YouTube are disabled because he’s eight, but any kind words would be welcome here.

Reader, I lol-ed

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I’m pretty critical of Republicans and conservatives on this blog, but I want to give a fair shake to the whackawoowoo Democrats we see.

For instance! Democrat Kesha Rogers won the primary for 22nd District of Texas (covering Galveston and some surrounding areas), running heavily on a single issue: President Obama must be impeached.

Candidate Rogers is a proud Larouchite. May I quote the statement her campaign made after her victory? Wonderful.

The victory in the 22nd Congressional District yesterday by LaRouche Democrat Kesha Rogers sent an unmistakable message to the White House, and its British imperial controllers: Your days are numbered. Kesha’s campaign hit relentlessly at a single theme, that President Obama must go, that his attacks on this nation – with his dismantling of the manned space program, his efforts to ram through a fascist, killer “health care” policy, his endless bailouts for Wall Street swindlers, while demanding budget cuts which will increase the death rates among the poor, the sick, the elderly and the unemployed – are not acceptable, and will not be tolerated.

Skeptics said that LaRouche’s approach is impractical, it won’t work, that Democrats will never support someone who is calling for the President’s impeachment. Obviously, the voters of the 22nd district disagreed with those skeptics, as Kesha received 53% of the vote against two opponents. As Kesha told the Galveston Daily News last night, when a reporter asked if she expected support from the Democratic Party in the fall election, “I am leading a war against the British Empire. I’m not worried about what Democratic Party hacks say or do.”

Read the whole thing, if you like. FYI, the acronym “LYM” stands for “Larouche Youth Movement.”

The 22nd district is Tom Delay’s old district.

Here’s her introductory video. I can’t watch it because I’m day jobbing, but does she really promise to “take our troops out of the war zone and put them into space”? Look out, British Empire!

Foreign rights

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The announcement just went up on Publisher’s Marketplace, so I guess I can announce it here: My agency has sold French language rights for Child of Fire and Game of Cages to Bibliothèque Interdite! Whoo-hoo! That makes two foreign language sales (so far) Russian and French.

Profitez des bons moments!

Because it wouldn’t be a blog without complaining

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I still feel like crap. My throat is still raw and I’m exhausted all the time. There are so many things around here that need to be done and I can’t keep up with them all, especially since I’m running myself ragged. If somebody doesn’t vacuum the living room carpet soon, it’s going to rise up and destroy us all.

I’m still doing my writing, because that involves sitting and being in a weird trance state. Raising a kid, though? I’m failing. Not that he minds doing whatever the hell he wants–most kids get to watch a lot of TV when they get sick. Mine pops in Three Stooges and Addams Family DVDs when I get sick.

Tired. Bed now, if I can get the kid to wash up.

Dang-it

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I was about to post a link to a one-star review in honor of John Scalzi’s latest post on the subject, but I see I already have, way back in November. Ah, hell.

So instead, I’ll post this: The book I’m reading is The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston. It’s an interesting book–excellent in a lot of ways, and mildly disappointing in others. I get the impression it’s made for readers with buttons in different places than I have.

But that’ll have to wait until after I finish reading it. What I wanted to mention was a scene about two-thirds in where Protagonist’s Best Friend is talking to Screwed-Up Protagonist about his screwed-upness. SUP has a Mysterious Terrible Event in his past that has him acting like a contemptuous jerk throughout the book, and PBF takes the brunt of it. Eventually, PBF says this:

I read these books on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, they described you pretty smack-on.

And I was immediately thrown out of the story. My brain went straight to “Author did research. Research in book” and suddenly it was like I was smelling plastic flowers.

Which isn’t fair to the author, because the scene is completely earned and totally in character, but who ever said reading is fair? It was a clunker moment, and it hurt. I’ll want to write more about this book later.

Let me wrap up with this: After I wrote my “Review-down” post on Saturday night, I started feeling pretty rotten. Wisely, I announced this to my family and went to bed at 10. By 4 am, I was up again, thanks to muscle aches and a sore throat. I gargled with Listerine, took some Tylenol and played Meebling until the drugs kicked in (no link to Meebling, because your life is made of time, and both are so very precious). Then it was back to bed until–no kidding–ten am when my wife dragged me out of bed. Sleep! How good to see you again!

I still feel sorta awful, and I’m going to see if my good buddy Bed Rest can do anything about that.

Obsessive behavior

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I’m at the library, working on my book at the moment. (I just couldn’t stay in my apartment any longer). The guy sitting at the table with me is apparently concerned about hanging boogers, because he has been exhaling sharply ever 5-20 seconds.

And he’s been doing it for 45 minutes oh I am so not even joking. Time to get the hell out of here.

(NB: I had a productive day.)