Stinging Workers

This weekend I did a bit of research on yellowjackets and I found the Schmidt Sting Pain Index. Is it real? Here is part of it:

2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
2.x Honey bee and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.

I was stung by a yellowjacket a long time ago and it hurt really bad. I was a fully formed adult at the time and I'm not excessively wimpy about pain and I really wanted to sit down and cry. Even though the sound of wailing children is really annoying, don't you sometimes envy them? Haven't you ever been tired and rundown and nothing is going the way you want it to and wished you could just throw your head back and shriek in the middle of the grocery store? I know I have.

I'm glad adults don't do this because the social boundaries that keep everyday life tolerable are disintegrating fast enough as it is. There was an article in the NYT on Sunday about how liberating young people find it to talk about how much money they make with each other. Good for them. I don't talk about how much money I make with my husband. I think the world is just fine with things people don't talk about. Have you ever had one of those awkward conversations where someone you met 5 minutes ago starts telling you about their cysts?

Hm, I'm getting off track here. Back to the stingy thing: for some reason I thought that honeybee stings were negligible. I guess I've never been stung by one.

I finished another story this weekend which was why I did the yellowjacket research. It's hard to have a meal outside at my folks' house because of the yellowjackets but the university extension had a great tip which involved hanging a fish over a tub of water. I can't wait to try it.

This has nothing to do with my story. The story is one I've worked on and off on for quite some time and it's not a terrible story but I'm not sure it's especially creative or has a point but I'm trying to get in the habit of finishing things. Somewhere I have a quote from Ray Bradbury where he said he'd written at least 600 stories but only published 150 (made up numbers because I don't know where the quote is and besides, it's probably 20 years old and he's probably written another 600 stories since then) and he was still learning. At the rate I'm going, it'll take me 85 years to hit 600 stories.

We Got the Beet

I know this is a photo of carrots and doesn't match my title but I usually never plant carrots and these were so cute that I had to try them.

Yesterday I put a garden in. I'm know I'm going to be gone for six weeks but I can't do nothing. I did decide to skip the tomatoes, mostly because Sunset magazine reminded me that you aren't supposed to plant them in the same place every year. I don't plant them in the exact same spot but always in the same general plot so maybe a year off would be good for everyone.

The other reason I went ahead and planted is I bought a bunch of seeds before I knew I would be gone. Plus I found a stash from last year which included about 5 envelopes of beet seeds. I mixed a ton of beet, turnip, carrot, chard and lettuce green seeds in a little plastic dish and then scattered them over half the garden. Then I went to find a rake. When I came back there was already a cheeky bird, going to town. I raked everything around.

Then I went and found all my peas and lemon cucumbers. The past two or three years these have done nothing for me so I planted them all in the hope something will take. I used the same scatter method. I have cages but there are tons of wasps around the shed and I'm afraid to go in there right now so I haven't set the cages out for the peas, should they decide to grow.

If you've arrived at this post looking for gardening advice, I'd suggest you move on. I don't think you'll find anything to help you here.

I raked the whole plot and shoved a few wayward seeds under with my fingers and went in the house and announced to Bob that just about the time I leave he will have all the turnips and beets he can handle. This is a joke because Bob will eat vegetables but the idea of him harvesting root vegetables from the backyard is ridiculous. At least the bugs will have something to eat.

Half Dome



I've been to Yosemite two times. The first time I was very small. How old do I look in this photo? A few months? My Tante Hilla came from Germany and they all did a trip of California-y things. I know they also went to Hearst Castle. Or we, I should say. I've only been to Hearst Castle that one time and remember, well, nothing.

This was in 1964 so make sure to dig the little bit of the cars you can see. As I was preparing this it occurred to me that this was probably Tante Hilla's first visit to California and the occasion was to see me.



We went again when I was in high school. There's no major point I'm making here, just falling back on old photos for today's content.

In other news, I just clued in to the fact that Prince Capsian comes out on May 16. That's less than one month away. I thought I had to wait until December.

To celebrate I did a quick detour to watch the official trailer, fan teaser (first typed fan taser, I think there's a joke in there somewhere), production blog (nice accent, sounds like Narnier), moneybags slap themselves on the back promo, and the dreamy Prince Caspian promo. Didn't the book Prince Caspian have the faintest whiff of wuss? I must remember that wrong.

Tulip Bandit Strikes Again



This is what we saw when we got home from the grocery store last night.

I can't believe I thought tulips didn't last very long. These have been going strong for at least a couple of weeks although they're looking a tad straggly at this point. It's hard not to think someone is messing with me.

Here's the before photo again.



I don't know what to think. These flowers are right by my front door. My neighbor has a big patch of pretty tulips in her yard right by the street. I checked and no one has been picking any of those. If it was kids, why would they just target these?

I'm not really outraged as much as curious. Did the same person come back for more or did someone else see these and think they needed to take some home? I haven't seen any in this color around. I'm going to dig them up in the fall and put them out back with the pink ones. I'll get some more daffodils for the front.

This morning I did a tons of errands. I put on my work clothes so I could pick up some manure and stuff for the garden that I'm planting even though I'm going to be gone for 6 weeks. I know the weather is supposed to be doodoo all weekend but I figured there would be time to sneak out and do a little work.



Right when I got to the garden store it started pouring rain and everything was covered and I said screw it. Better luck next weekend.

Outrage!
Every night when I get home from work (assuming it's still light out and not raining sideways), I got to my flower bed and admire my flowers. I often go to the backyard, too. Why grow them if you're not going to enjoy them?

Tonight was I was startled to find this:



What? You don't see the problem? Count the flowers.

Now here's my shot from Sunday:



Yes! There is a tulip bandit on the loose in my neighborhood.



What giant turdhead.

Process
I told the writers group I would give them a draft of my story by last night, no matter what, so they'd have enough time to review before our meeting Saturday. I'm not a perfectionist but I don't like to throw something out there if I feel it isn't ready. It was a good lesson in how hard I can push myself when motivated. The story is thin in spots but it has a beginning, a middle and an end and I stuck to my self-imposed deadline.

I very rarely write after work, especially days like yesterday which was very busy and research intensive. I was tired and fuzzy headed but as soon as I got home I went to the computer and hammered away. Later I did my taxes on my dinner break. It's nice when you can surprise yourself.

I often hear writers talk about having a daily word goal. I've even seen widgets on blogs for tracking word counts.

Word counting, in terms of a daily goal, doesn't work for me since I have very little trouble writing words. That can't be a big surprise if you're here. The 13th of this month is my 12 year anniversary of starting my website and for the most part it's all original words.

The discipline for me is sticking with it until the story and characters work and sometimes that means writing in circles for a little while. (Or longer.)

A typical writing cycle for me goes: get new idea, rabid excitement, research and tons of writing, get stuck, dread the writing chair, avoid writing, hate myself for avoiding it, despair, force myself to go back to it, find what interested me in the first place, finish story.

For the record, there's a bale of stuff in my files that's still waiting for the part that comes after "despair."

Some writers talk about outlining first and others talk about just sitting down and writing it and see what comes out. I do both. I write a bunch and then sit back and look at what I'm doing and where I'm going and try to map things out a bit and then jump back in and write some more.

The story I finished this week is one where I knew how I wanted it to end but wasn't sure how I was going to get there and who I was going to take with me. Last Friday I worked all day especially on the protagonist. But later as I was thinking about the story, I realized that this wasn't the right protagonist for this story.

Saturday I scrapped more than half of what I already had and started all over with a new take on my protagonist and worked with that until last night when I got to the end.

The story before this one I had a title I really liked but no idea what was going to happen. At first the story that came out didn't fit the title. Also I had intended to use it for my Clarion West submission so I was trying to fit it into a specific length. In the end, I made it fit the title and keeping it shorter eliminated a stupid side part that wasn't working so I guess the advice is: find what works best for you and trust your instincts.

There's A Party in My Paella
I've never made paella before so my strategy was to read as many recipes as I could find and then distill them into the easiest possible procedure. I ended up printing out 4 recipes that looked promising.

I worked on my story all day Sunday and the last thing I wanted to do at the end of the day was cook something more complicated than frozen pizza but I had all the ingredients and I was hungry so I went for it. None of the recipes was easy and they all seemed to demand that I get a lot of pans dirty and so a lot of processes and I was having none of that. Try to spot my short cuts.

I warmed up my new pan and, in this order, I threw in: chopped onion and red bell pepper, cubed chicken breasts, chopped spicy Italian sausage (no chorizo and I didn't want to go to another store) and then a half bag of Trader Joe's frozen mixed seafood surprise which what they get at the end of a fishing expedition when they clean out the bottom of the boat.

I realized I should have saved the vegetables for later but never fear. When done, I scraped all this stuff into a bowl and set aside in the warm oven and then made the sofrito which is onions, garlic, tomatoes and in my case, the last 3 spoonfuls of salsa in the container because it needed to be finished up. Once that smelled delicious I added my rice and mixed everything together and then added my saffron infused Swanson's chicken broth. I had bought smoked Spanish paprika specifically because I thought I needed it for paella and none of my recipes called for it so I added 1 teaspoon.

I waited until the cooked rice started pushing up in the middle of the pan and then spread the meat mixture plus some peas and shelled edamame because why not? over the pan. Then I moved the pan around on the burners to make sure it was getting thoroughly heated and after a half hour I turned the heat down and covered with foil and let it sit for a bit.

Keep in mind that I had been writing since I woke up so in addition to cooking I was running back and forth folding laundry and scrubbing the bathroom sink and generally enjoying the life of a woman who has it all (except for children, pets and a ski chalet in the Austrian alps).

The end result: delicious! My recipe needs work including being less timid with the saffron and paprika and I think I have some hot paprika somewhere and if I can find it, I'll throw some of that in next time, too.

Meanwhile, I was so tired on Sunday night I read 2 pages of my book and then turned out the light and then tossed and turned ALL NIGHT LONG. It was clinically awful. I thought it was because Bob wasn't home but three people in my office reported terrible sleep the same night so now I think the aliens are wearing us down before they start their invasion.

Last night I saw Marjane Satrapi at Arts and Lectures and she was fabulous. I very highly recommend Persepolis 1 and 2. But that means that I left the house at 6:30a and didn't get home until 9:30p which is close to the world's longest day.

Now it's Tuesday and I'm feeling tired and frazzled but apparently still capable of writing a long rambling blogpost. Is this a marketable skill?