Jabober

The neighbor girl, Sarah, came over today to play with the kids. She's 10. They decided they wanted to play school.

Cameron and Allison were really excited. Megan too.

The neighbor was the teacher, obviously, because she was the oldest. And, well frankly, she's been to school.

The first thing Sarah made the kids do was go to recess. Then she had them stand in line to wait their turn to buy their lunch. Then she told them to sit on their numbers to eat their lunch. Cameron insisted that he brought his lunch in a lunchbox. Sarah said he had to buy lunch, cuz that's the way the game is played. So Cam did.

They pretended to eat lunch for what seemed like an hour. Then they all washed their hands, for what seemed like an hour. Sarah spent a lot of this time talking into an improv PA through one of the kids' microphone toys.

I'm not sure why, but I got a big kick out of this whole thing. I don't know what was more amusing: watching my non-schooled kids pretending to go to school, or to hear Sarah spending so much time on the PA making announcements and organzing everything that was going on.

Oh, that and watching them make a huge deal out of pretending to eat lunch, as if it was some mystifying event that they had never practiced before. If only I could get my kids to sit down that long for real lunch, and to be that thorough with the post-meal hand cleaning.

Maybe tomorow, I'll try that. I'll tell the kids we're playing school. Maybe they'll sit still, eat their lunch peacefully, and then wash their hands without being told.

HA! That's funny.

Posted by Tammy at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lappy is very, very sick.

Last night Lappy fell sick, with what we thought was the 24 hour flu. After nursing Lappy back to a seemingly healthy state, Lappy had a relapse and fell into a coma.

I took Lappy to the Mac Doctor today, and it will be there for a week, hopefully recovering. It looks like Lappy will need a heart transplant, maybe even a kidney transplant.

What will I do without Lappy?

Perhaps, this is my chance to get the house sparkling clean, while I try to distract myself from the empty spot on my desk, riddled with orphaned cables and peripherals.

I will also not be playing WoW until Lappy returns. Which is painfully ironic, since Yoshi just started playing again. I'm sure there is a lesson in here for me somewhere.

Posted by Tammy at 07:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On Monday afternoon, after 18 days of writing, I finished my 50k word novel.

When I typed my last paragraph, and concluded the story, I was exhilarated. I can now call myself, with all honesty, a fiction novelist.

I have finished this huge endeavor, but what's more important is that I have learned about my own process of writing, about the ins and outs of weaving a story, and about the pure insanity that is "being a writer".

I have learned that I am capable of writing 2000 words per hour, up to 6000 words per day, given the proper motivation and concentration. In magazines, the average article is 1-2k words. This tells me that I am more capable of being a serious freelancer than I had originally thought.

I also discovered that I’m truly a writer at heart. Everyday, I looked forward to sitting on the couch and writing my story, pulling out details of the characters and painting my picture with letters and paragraphs. The few times I had writer’s block, it wasn’t nearly as painful as I thought it would be. And, surprisingly, I managed to get through all those tough spots without much difficulty. I felt like hugging my Word file when I was done, making me wonder if I have an unhealthy relationship with ASCII.

Being that I spent several years of my life intensely studying literature - critiquing and analyzing and deconstructing - I only now have come to a true appreciation of what it is to be a novelist. I think that all students who want to study literature on an academic level would benefit from writing a book. Even if their story never gets published, even if it sucks, having gone through the process of writing an entire book, from beginning to end, would make analyzing literature a much more meaningful practice.

I realize now that although I’ve read a million books, not having ever written a book and spending so many of my academic years analyzing them, was akin to being a sport commentator who has never played the sport. Although one can do a very good job of it, it’s not until after some serious playtime that one can make understanding comments on the process of a game.

I’ve also come to realize that I like writing fiction - although I’m still green at it, and it’s going to take some practice to get a feel for what’s important and interesting to include in a story. It’s also going to take some time to find my fictional voice. But the fact that I can just make shit up, and it’s OK, is such an incredibly freeing and empowering feeling; I feel like I’ve sprouted Arial wings. I love non-fiction, and sharing information, but I also really like the idea of coming up with something totally whacky and it’s all good, because it’s a work of fiction.

J.K. Rowling was in my thoughts quite often during the process; she served as an inspiration to me. She wrote her first Harry Potter book while her daughter was still very young. And she had never been published before. Thinking of her success motivated me to keep writing. I’m a mom, and I fill many other roles, but I can also be a writer. And I am. Just like my literary sister, J.K..

There are so many more things that went through my head during the process of writing this book. I am sure that as the years pass, and I continue to write, I’ll learn more about my own process and about the world of fiction. And for this I am thankful that I decided to do NaNo. It launched me ahead into the next phase of my writing career, whatever that may be, by allowing me to say, honestly, “I can do it.”

Posted by Tammy at 07:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My book now has 35k words. Only 15k left. I am starting to have confidence that I will finish the 50k before the end of the month.

And no, you cannot ask me what it’s about. So don’t even think about it.

Posted by Tammy at 04:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We went to the mall today for lunch. Santa was there.

It’s not even Thanksgiving yet, and Santa is at the mall taking pictures with the children.

Not only that, but Santa was singing Christmas Carols, into a microphone.

I am still flabbergasted.

Posted by Tammy at 01:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Periodically, we get ants in our master bathroom. This morning, I woke up and there was a mass of ants coming from a hole under the counter tile, streaming around the bathtub. There wasn’t anything obvious they were trying to get at, so I assumed that they were attempting to use the bathroom as an ant highway. Or, they were thirsty.

I started cleaning the tile and the tub. As I got around to the kids’ bath toys, I ran them under the bathwater and started swishing the ants down the drain. There was about a half an inch of water in the tub, and I noticed that one of the toy’s handle was teeming with ants. I thought that the ants were using this toy as a life boat, so I ran it under the water again to get the ants off, and tossed it back into the water.

I looked down a moment later, and again the handle was a fluid black mass of ants. So I rinsed it off again, a little confused. Instead of tossing it back in the tub after cleaning it off, I held it in my hand while rinsing off other toys.

I felt something crawling on my hand.

I looked over and the handle was entirely black with ants again!

I quickly tossed the toy back in the tub and ran my hand and arm under the bath water to get the bugs off me.

I looked a little closer at the toy, without touching it. That’s when I saw it. A hole. The ants were coming out of the hole.

I first ran water over the hole, and a million ants spewed out. Then I shook the hole in the bathwater, and even more ants ran out (including very large ants which I think were queens.) I stuck the handle in a cup of water and put it aside. All this ant displacement was filling the tub with bugs and making it harder and harder to get rid of the rest of the ones that were around the outside of the tub.

I cleaned the rest of the tub and Yoshi came in and rinsed the ants out of the hole. He said he got them all.

Later that afternoon, I went back in the bathroom to check on the ants. Again, ants everywhere. This time, I knew right away where they were going – to the toy with the hole in the handle.

I rinsed off the handle, stuck it in a cup of water and cleaned off the rest of the tub while I tried to figure out what to do about the ants in the toy.

When all else was clean, I decided to bang the toy against the tub to dislodge the ants. Every time I banged the toy, hundreds of ants fell out of the hole into the tub water, and went down the drain.

I must have done this a dozen times, and the number of ants did not decrease. There were infinity ants inside that thing. Including many queens, and other stuff which I could only guess was food or bits of their hive or something.

Well, I gave up. I stuck it in a plastic bag, took it outside and threw it away in the trash.

I single handedly flushed away about three million ants, all residing in our kids’ toy. The scary thing is, that toy was only about one inch in diameter. If that many ants were living in this teeny toy for only a few hours, how many ants are living underneath our sink in the bathroom?

I get the heebie jeebies just thinking about it.

I have to say that seeing those ants cover the toy with their little black bug bodies, dislodging them by the hundreds and watching them go down the drain, was one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever done.

Now, I feel like I have ants crawling all over me. I need a hazmat suit.

Posted by Tammy at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I haven’t been blogging much recently, because I’m using whatever spare concentration I have to write my novel. I’m 8800 words into it. (That's about 20 pages in MS Word) So far, the process has been interesting, to say the least.

I’ve come to the conclusion that anyone who like movies, books or TV, should write a screenplay or a novel. Weaving a plot, and defining characters is not easy. Writing this novel is giving me an even deeper appreciation of my favorite authors. Heck, I have come to realize that anyone who can write a book, period, even if it’s crap, is worth lauding.

As a side note, there are already people who have finished their NaNo book, writing 50,000 words in a few days or less. The record time of completion of a NaNo novel is 20 hours. I’m not quite sure what to think about that.

Posted by Tammy at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Mind at Night, by Andrea Rock, is a fascinating read about the history of dream research. It explains what we know about why we dream, how we dream and what we dream. Among the many interesting points they discuss, they have an entire chapter discussing lucid dreaming.

I’ve been a lucid dreamer for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I thought everyone dreamt that way. When I’m dreaming, I am often aware that I’m am indeed dreaming, and not quite as often, but still rather frequently, I can control the story that unfolds in my dreams.

It’s interesting to me because how they describe the typical lucid dreamer in The Mind at Night coincides with my experience. They did studies to prove that people were indeed aware in their dreams, including pre-determining eye signals, and using breathing patterns to talk to the researchers from inside the dream. What they found out was that people who have lucid dreams tend to have them during the later portions of sleep, close to when it’s time to wake in the morning. People who wake up in the middle of the night, or near morning, and go back to sleep tend to have lucid dreams more often. Lucid dreamers tend to be creative and/or problem solvers, and often used their dreams as one of many ways to come up with new ideas or experiment.

They also said the people who meditate are more aware of their presence in dreams, and can often manipulate their content. Tibetan Buddhist monks use lucid dreams “as a spiritual practice [which] advocates maintaining conscious control of content and viewing reality on an equal footing with dreaming. From the Buddhist viewpoint, to be enlightened is to be aware always of how much of life is illusion in both the dream state and waking.”

In my dreams, I can’t completely control the content like some of the examples given in the book. But I can lightly steer the content in a certain direction. And, if the content becomes to intense, I am usually able to purposefully wake myself up to stop the dream before it goes in a scary direction.

If you have any interest in dreams or consciousness, The Mind at Night is a great read to explain what we know scientifically about dreams, which is quite a lot. These studies into dreaming also help us understand consciousness and we are beginning to see how it is that we are self-aware.

Posted by Tammy at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I found this wonderful website tonight:

http://www.mindwareonline.com

When learning is fun, everyone wins. I think that I know where we'll be shopping for the children in our life this holiday.

Posted by Tammy at 08:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I did something crazy. I signed up for NaNoWriMo. Basically, I signed up to write a 50K word novel by the end of the month. Now, I’m four days into November, and I have 400 words written. You can see I've just launched myself full throttle into this gig. What was I thinking?

The good news is, however, that since I have NaNo looming over my head, it inspired me to quickly wrap up the December issue of CHS. With that out of the way, I can then properly procrastinate with things like washing dishes, organizing the closets and scrubbing the bathroom with a toothbrush.

It’s not that I don’t want to write the book. I do! Very much. But one of the biggest hurdles is the thought that what I’m going to write will be awful. And I just can’t stand that. I need to get over it, and just do it. If it’s awful after I’m done, I’ll go back in December and un-awful it. Right?

Last night, I finally came up with the story line that I want my character to follow. I’ve had the character in my head for a while, but wasn’t sure what her “turning point” would be and how that would play out. Now that the storyline, and even the ending is decided, and CHS is mostly done, I’m hoping to start tap-tap-tapping away like a maniac.

That is, once all my email is answered, I’ve gotten Amme to level 45 and I’ve cleaned the whole house. THEN, I’ll be ready to write.

Posted by Tammy at 03:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dealing with insurance is crazy. We have Cigna POS (point of service), which is very much like an HMO, but with a less incriminating name. I went to make an appointment for Allison to go to the dermatologist, but when I talked to the receptionist, she said the doctor was not “in network.” She was unable to tell me what that meant in terms of coverage, so I called my insurance for the first of many conversations with them today.

Getting to a live person through the Cigna phone system takes about five minutes. Even when I got to the point where I knew exactly which number to press before the automated system had time to give me my choices, it still took a few minutes to reach a human.

I finally reached a person who couid answer my questions, and I found out that for out of network specialists, we have to pay up to $600, then 50% after that. For in network doctors, we pay $30 per visit.

After I talked to the insurance, I realized that the dermatologist with whom I have an appointment next week might not be in network either. So I looked it up on the Cigna website, and indeed, he was not on the list. (Nor was my primary physician which made me nervous. But I was assured by the insurance company that our primary physician was in network, just not listed on the website because he is a Disney “exclusive.”)

I called my primary physician, then Allison’s doctor, then the insurance again, then back to Allison’s doctor, then both dermatologists, then I IM’d Yoshi, all the while checking and double checking the Cigna website for information.

After about an hour and a half of calling everyone, asking many questions and trying to figure out the best way to choose a dermatologist, we had a breakthrough. I randomly picked a name off the Cigna website and asked Allison’s doctor if he was a good dermatologist. She immediately replied with an energetic, “Yes! All the doctors and nurses in our office go to Dr. Kay. He’s great with kids and adults.”

He’s in network. And his office is about 5 blocks away. Thank goodness this all ended on a positive note.

I also found out, in all of this, that the MRI I had on my knee a couple of weeks go is 100% covered. I pay nothing for that!

Insurance is so complicated. It’s really up to the patient to make the phone calls and get information. I’m lucky, I did the MRI and didn’t even ask if it was covered. I assumed it was, or someone would have told me in either Dr. Marsh’s office or in the MRI office. I also assumed that about the dermatologist. If I had used the dermatologist without asking questions, I would have had to shell out a ton of cash.

So, I got lucky that Allison’s dermatologist wasn’t in network. It saved me a lot of grief over a potentially expensive situation. And now we’ll both have the same doctor. Even though it was kind of pain to call everyone and spend a lot of time on the phone, the end result is actually much better than before.

Posted by Tammy at 04:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here are the kiddos, dressed up for Halloween!

Posted by Tammy at 04:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)