Life in progress

Category Archives: Random


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Wasp Invasion!

I’ve had all kinds of bugs in my house: when I moved in we had pantry moths; it took two years to get rid of those. We’ve had flies, fruit flies … we even had a spate of lady bugs one year. Since spring this year, I’ve had an overabundance of snails slowly making their way around the front outside wall of my house. And now, this …

Two mornings ago I was in my kitchen, chatting with my son, when he pointed to the floor and said, is that a dead wasp? It was. They were. About two dozen of them, some still alive and walking around stupidly, but most were dead. They were all around my kitchen table, in the windows and on the table.

Yesterday morning I only found two, both dead.

This morning, I found out at least what was killing them. When I came downstairs to prepare Alex’s feeding pump at 5:30, I turned the light on. By the time I went back upstairs, there were a couple of wasps flying around the kitchen light over the table. I left it on, as I do, and went back upstairs only to realize I’d forgotten my phone. When I came back down, there were about half a dozen wasps, all flying around the unshaded incandescent bulb.

I deduced that the heat from the lightbulb is killing them. When I finally investigated, after Alex had gone to school–if I tell him about it, he’ll never sit at the table again–I found about a dozen, this time as many alive (but stupid) as dead. Problem is, I have no idea where they’re coming from.

So I’m guessing my best bet is to leave the light on, and hope they die when it gets cold outside. Because I ain’t hanging around in my kitchen to see where they’re crawling in while they’re alive and active.

Or maybe I’ll just go live outside with the snails.


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Random to the Ninth Degree

It’s been a while since I just rambled about my life in progress. Some of what I have to share has to do with my blog as well, since what is life without the Internet? Seriously.

  1. Yesterday I spent an hour trying to change the size of Alex’s Youtube movie on his screen, because he said it was too small. I tried the settings in his account, I tried the settings on the computer, I switched computers, I switched browsers … I even downloaded a new browser onto his laptop, all the while with him screaming in my ear and signing “fix it! It’s too small!” For an hour. All to discover he wasn’t having a meltdown over the size of the movie, but rather the brand new Youtube logo on the top left corner of the screen. Ah, the joys of living with a kid with OCD.
  2. Alex goes back to school on Tuesday!!! (To understand my excitement, see above.)
  3. I’m so busy with my new freelance editing business, I need a schedule to fit everyone in.
  4.  It cost me $73 the other day for the dentist to look at my sore gums and tell me I need to rinse my mouth with salt water for a week. I suppose it could have been worse.
  5. I have a book signing at Chapters on October 1st in Kingston, where my novel is set!! Equally nervous and excited!!!
  6. As of tomorrow, there’s a change coming to this blog. I’ve started scheduling my fiction series, “Scenes from the Second Seat on the Right.” The scenes will appear once a day for the next year (there are 365 of them). Some are funny, some serious, some downright sick, most are realistic, yet some are pure fantasy. If you want to learn more about them, see the link in the menu at the top of my blog page. I’m happy to be posting them here, but at the same time I’m a bit worried that I’ll lose followers over them. We’ll see.
  7. The internal battery in my laptop is almost dead. It gives me a warning every time I turn it on. Is this important?
  8. Alex goes back to school on Tuesday!!!
  9.  I need a vacation.

So, what’s new with you?

 


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#SoCS – I’m actually nervous

When I started writing books, I thought, Bah! This is easy! And it kind of was for me. It was like writing a short story but not stopping at the short part. It was like writing a really, really long short story. Not really rocket science.

Little did I know the rocket science part was coming.

It started with the editing. First I had to figure out how to do that, so I read a gazillion articles, blog posts, advice columns, took courses … you name it, I did it. I still often consult the wise advice of others. That kind of learning never stops if you know what’s good for your novels. Then, finally, I decided after much intense deliberation to self-publish. I was told I’d have to market myself even if I went with a traditional publisher, so why not do it and keep the royalties to myself? So off I went on a new learning curve.

Articles, blog posts, advice columns … I haven’t taken the courses yet, but I’d be tempted if I wasn’t still learning the editing stuff. Yet what I read in these marketing columns, over and over, is that the most important part of marketing is a newsletter. Which brings me to today.

And why I’m nervous.

I have a newsletter. So far I’m the only one who’s signed up, but I have a “welcome” letter all ready to go for the next person who does. The next bunch of people, in fact. This is brand new territory for me and I’m kind of beside myself, because if you sign up and you read it–or worse, if you don’t read it–we can’t talk about it because it’s a one-way street.

I’m actually more nervous than I was when I released my first novel. Crazy, isn’t it? Ah well, here we go. Worst case scenario, I’ll close up shop and go back to the easy stuff: writing novels.

Click here – the signup form will open in a new tab. Thank you!

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Click the link to read all the other entries (you’ll find them in the comment section) and join in yourself! https://lindaghill.com/2017/08/25/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-aug-2617/


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#ThursdayDoors – What the …

Just a quickie for Norm Frampton’s photo prompt, Thursday Doors. I’m looking for suggestions on what this might be all about. It’s been there for weeks.

It’s empty apart from the clear liquid – the darkness inside is just a reflection.

Guesses?

To join us in Thursday Doors, click on the following link. There you’ll find links to all the other participants and the rules to participate yourself! https://miscellaneousmusingsofamiddleagedmind.wordpress.com/2017/08/24/thursday-doors-august-24-2017/

 


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One-Liner Wednesday – We’re Wild Here

I may be reserved in my fiction writing, but here at home we use adjectives with wild abandon.

(The original message was “Dead Bee under counter no stinger,” spelled out after my son stepped on a bee in the kitchen in the middle of the night. Leave words on my fridge and they morph over time.)

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If you would like to participate in this prompt, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a pingback, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post, and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.

NOTE: Pingbacks only work from WordPress sites. If you’re self-hosted or are participating from another host, like Blogger, please leave a link to your post in the comments below.

As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a pingback from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.

Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”

The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:

1. Make it one sentence.

2. Try to make it either funny or inspirational.

3. Use our unique tag #1linerWeds.

4. Add our very cool badge to your post for extra exposure!

5. Have fun!

#1linerWeds badge by Dan Antion

 


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#SoCS – The Occupant

The obligatory eight-legged occupant is back in my kitchen this year. Every summer, a small spider moves in and makes a web far enough away from where I normally walk that I leave it, thinking why not? It’ll eat the occasional fly and I won’t have to race around my kitchen with a tea towel chasing it (the fly). By July my occupant is medium-sized and by the end of August it’s a giant, sitting in the middle of its web patiently waiting for its next meal. It’s definitely more patient than my kids, I’ll give it that.

Except this year I have two eight-legged occupants in my kitchen. They’re about six feet apart and so far I’ve seen neither stray from its web. I just hope one of them doesn’t decide to visit its neighbour.

If I have hundreds of eight-legged occupants in my kitchen next year, I’m moving out. I already have hundreds of six-legged occupants in my kitchen. Fruit flies have six legs, don’t they? They’re too small to dissect, and anyway, by the time I’ve gotten one to slow down, it’s flat.

This post is going downhill. I’d better put an end to it.

Awesome new badge up there ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 😀

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is a weekly prompt that I run … and sometimes I even participate before Sunday gets here! If you’d like to check out the prompt and read some of the other posts (which you’ll find links to in the comments) click on the following link: https://lindaghill.com/2017/08/18/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-aug-1917/


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#SoCS – High Times

High time I got around to writing my SoCS post, eh? I have 24 minutes ’til Sunday. I finally have time to myself. Got my glass of wine and my brand new container of Pringles that I just opened but suspect are somehow already stale. The expiry date is on the bottom of the tube, but it’s too dark here on the couch to read it. I can get up and hold it over my head near the light – I just sat down though. Time to be lazy. High time, in fact.

High time too that I changed my Gravatar picture. It’s now a selfie I took (hey, selfie isn’t a typo according to my spellchecker!) a year and a half ago in my hotel room in Akihabara. (Spellcheck doesn’t like that word.) I figure I’ve been depicted as a mannequin in a Santa hat long enough.

Update: the further down I go in my tube of Pringles, the fresher they get. And I’m out of wine. Be right back.

Miss me? Of course not. I wasn’t gone long. Okay, where was I? Oh yeah, highs and lows.

I’ve been measuring my days, of late, in terms of productivity and I don’t like it. My best friend (hi John!) always says that it’s a good day if he’s been productive and it kinda bugged me when he said it. Because good days should sometimes consist of doing nothing. (I almost wrote something rude – something my dog probably wouldn’t have appreciated.) The reason I feel this way is because if I do do nothing or get little done no matter how hard I try, I get stressed. And what good does it do to get stressed out about something I didn’t do in the past? There’s nothing I can do to change it.

I talk about this now because I have an entire week to look forward to of having Alex, my youngest, home with me. I’m going to get fuck all done (thanks, wine) and I don’t want to get upset about that because I know me, and I know I’m going to take that upsetness (thanks again, wine) out on my poor innocent angel. (Ha! I’ve gotta stop drinking. Oh look, Pringles!)

Okay, so my kid can get downright obnoxious when he wants to. But he mostly does it when I’m trying to ignore him and get my own work done. I know, I know, I can’t expect him to behave and do his own thing if I dote on him. He needs to learn to play and do things independently, and respect that I can’t always pay attention to him. But there’s a fine line there, I think. I’ll just have to be happy knowing that productivity, this week, is gonna be low.

This late and tipsy post is brought to you be Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Click the link to find everybody’s posts in the comments! https://lindaghill.com/2017/08/04/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-aug-517/

P.S. The Pringles aren’t supposed to expire until Sept. 2018, so the top must have been open. I’m gonna die!!
Waiter! More wine! I wanna go down happy …


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Bloggy Changes

Changes are hard, aren’t they? First you’ve got to deal with the difficult decision to make changes (assuming you’re in control of them – not being in control is a totally different beast), and then there’s actually going through with them. So I’m here with a little smidgen of a rant, and a bit of a request for opinions on my proposed changes to this blog.

Actually, the changes will be to both of my blogs. I’m trying to figure out how to make my fiction blog look more like an author blog. In doing this, I feel the need to remove the fiction from it that’s not in line with the books I write. So I’ll keep the romance, the horror, the poetry, and some of the humorous stuff, but I’m considering moving things like my Second Seat on the Right series over here and rerunning it for 365 days like I did the first time. Despite the fact that I’ve written 960 pieces of fiction and poetry over there in three years, I’ve had 10 times fewer views than I have here on lindaghill.com with a total so far of 1,675 posts, this one included. All this to say, expect some daily fiction here starting in September. Some of you may have read it before, but it’s been a while. What do you say? Are you up for some funny short fiction?

The second change I’m thinking about is a harder one. It’s to do with the Stream of Consciousness Saturday badge. You see, I change it every year, but this is the first time that the creator of our current badge is still around. Every other time I’ve had to retire a badge, I’ve done it with the knowledge that I wasn’t removing a possible point of exposure to an active blogger. Here are our past badges:

Badge by: Doobster at Mindful Digressions 2014-2015

John Holton 2016-2017

It’s time for a change as was stated when I posted the competition for a new badge last year, but I feel kinda bad for John Holton.

What do you think? Read some fiction? Design a new badge? Why does changing stuff around have to be so hard?


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#SoCS – Bizarre Bazaar

One of the books I’m reading right now is The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King. I remember the first time I looked at the title, I wondered if he was talking about bizarre bad dreams because these two words cause a glitch somewhere in my noggin’ that makes me not know which is which. Or which has which meaning. If I think about it for a few seconds, I remember which is witch; I’m sure people all over have those words.

Did you see what I did back there? It was deliberate. Honest.

I wonder if it was some kind of witchery that made whoever came up with the English language (or any language?) invent words that sound the same that are spelled differently. You know, just to confuse us. Someone who, one day, was at a bazaar maybe and picked up a clementine and a tangerine and thought, “Well that’s bizarre. Two fruits that look the same and taste almost the same but have different names. I can come up with a language that’s that confounding!” And so English was born. From a little orange. Which is something else altogether.

And that’s the sort of post you get from Linda when she’s tired. 😛 Because really, she loves making up stories. They just sort of … fall out. Or leak out through her fingertips. Why the hell am I referring to myself in third person all of a sudden? It’s like I’m not me. Sometimes when I write fiction, I’m not me. I disappear and stuff comes out of me. Bizarre, isn’t it? Stuff of words and language and characters and sometimes it’s like I’m being taken over by something outside of me, something that guides me. Sounds scary, but it’s not. It’s freeing.

I wonder if this is how horror writers write. To think up something that we’d never do takes a certain je ne sais quoi. I know this because I write horror, but when I started this paragraph, I was thinking about Stephen King, who started this whole idea for a post in the first place. Damn it, Stephen! Yeah, I know it’s not his fault, but what to do?

But back to the whole “how am I able to come up with horror ideas that I’d never do in real life” question. I think it comes from fear. Fear of having things done to us by others who are capable of them. And with a vivid imagination comes a lot of fears, I’m afraid. Ha! I’m afraid. Get it?

Probably time for bed.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Click the following link and join in! And while you’re there, check out some of the other posts in the comments. https://lindaghill.com/2017/07/14/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-1517/

 


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#SoCS – Insanity Reigns

Well, I’ll give myself a pat on the back. This is two weeks in a row that I’ve missed my own prompt on the day it was supposed to be posted. My excuse this week is insanity.

It’s funny. I’ve been driving myself nuts with all the preparations and advertising and stuff for my book, and what have I been wishing for? Those nice, calm days when I was busy editing someone else’s work. Which is crazy for me, because normally I’m not happy unless I’m writing. Somehow I must know this, even when I’m not conscious of it and you wanna know how I know? Because I signed up for July’s NaNoWriMo camp.

Because I have nothing better to do. HA!

I’m totally rambling tonight. Can you tell? And I haven’t even been drinking. Not since the cup of coffee I had at dinner, at least. I did just put a bottle of white wine in the freezer so I can have some before bed though. Kind of insane, if you ask me.

I should probably rein in all this craziness. But that’s me. I can’t stop challenging myself and I have no idea why. It’s almost as though if I slow down, I’ll waste away to nothing. So I just keep piling it on. I may just explode one day. Though I should probably implode – less messy. And the last thing I need is more housework on top of everything else.

This post is brought to you by Stream of Consciousness Saturday on Sunday morning because I’m such a rebel. Click here for details: https://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2017/06/23/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-2417/