Got Refinanced -- Training Going OK I Think -- Two by Two -- Mini Vacation Soon?

The value of our home has certainly taken a beating in this market, but (a) it had gotten ridiculously high during the bubble and so is now merely reasonable and (b) was enough for us to refinance and get our bills more organized and less expensive interestwise. Plus this interest is tax-deductible. So there is great rejoicing. And the place is mostly clean—wowza!

Had my first "real" training session for Kaplan yesterday, where we spent the whole time doing "teachbacks" -- we teach a section of the test and get feedback. It went so much better than I thought it would. (When I told Doug that, he just rolled his eyes. Then I said, to be funny, "I don't think I flunked," because that's what I said all the way through grad school every time I had a test . . . then got 100 percent. He doesn't understand my insecurities, which is very sweet of him—not to understand why I wouldn't feel confident about my abilities.)

I'm also working on a GRE book for Kaplan Publishing right now, so I'm getting a GRE immersion experience!

Two by two: I saw two bunnies under the birdfeeder at the same time the other evening. That means baby bunnies! Also, last summer we had a small reddish squirrel join the big gray ones we're used to seeing, and the other day, I saw two red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus; see also the U of Mich site here) chasing each other along the fence. That means baby red squirrels! Still not seeing many birds, just the ubiquitous house sparrows, a pair of house finches, a male cardinal, and the odd robin looking for bugs.


Photos © Patriot Plaistow John
I desperately need a change of scenery, and although Doug travels for work, he'd like to get away without working for once. I think we're going to go on a little jaunt to Madison, WI, for a couple of days. Enjoy the restaurants on State Street, cruise the art galleries, walk around the lakes, visit the Oldrich Botanical Gardens . . . As long as we can work our schedules so we can both get away when the weather is good there—it all needs to come together . . .

Haven't updated about the fish for a while. Maybe it's about time for another long, geeky tropical fish update?

New Job (in addition to, not instead of)! Entire Main Floor Clean!

I think I'm the anti-Twitter. I save up my blogging for weeks until I've got a bunch to say, and even then it's not likely to set anyone atwitter (pun fully intended).

New job: On February 2, I posted that I was exploring an opportunity that would build on both my copyediting and human resources experience. Well, I got the gig! At least, I qualified for training for the gig, and if after all the public speaking experience I've had I can't figure out a way to get through training, I'll be really disappointed with myself. So I finally feel comfortable talking about this thing. (Geez, Paula, just out with it already!)

I've been hired by Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions to teach (to train to teach, at this point) the GRE test. I've worked on quite a few test-prep books for Kaplan Publishing, and of course I did tons of training of a variety of material for a range of audiences when working in HR. I genuinely enjoy standardized tests (yes, I am a geek!), and I find teaching very energizing. I figure doing this will get me more contact with people—freelancing at home all the time can be pretty isolating—and let me flex different skill muscles. Although I don't need the money, there's nothing wrong with extra cash flow, either, and there's probably a benefit to having an income stream apart from the ups and downs of the book publishing industry.

The hiring process was elaborate. They clearly take the selection process seriously and won't scoop up just anyone with high test scores. First I applied online at the website. They invited me to come in to audition, but I was also informed that since my test scores were over five years old, I needed to take a practice exam at the local office to show that I still had the stuff (stuff being defined as "top 90th percentile"). I scheduled the audition and took the practice test—my scores were fine. For the audition, I gave a five-minute presentation on how to plan a garden; I had fun with it. Then I was invited to come in for an interview. And then I was invited to train. I think they audition pretty much continuously, and there were eight people at my audition, but there are only four of us in my training cohort. This makes me think the process is pretty selective.

Now I'm going to get scored on a detailed array of performance areas at each training session, and I have to score at a certain level by midpoint in the training or I wash out. It's a bit daunting! I need to get used to working from the Kaplan teacher's manual. It's actually an awesome tool, but as with any tool, one needs to learn how to use it well.

So hopefully sometime in May I'll have news that I've passed training and I'll get to help aspiring grad students do their best on the test.

Clean house! Yes, we buckled down and got the entire main floor plus most of Doug's office upstairs cleaned up. Doug even brought up hundreds of books from the basement and put them on the beautifully custom-finished shelves in our living room. Who knew bookshelves could be used for books instead of assorted junk? He also brought up our framed art and hung it on the walls. Books! Art! The place looks like the residence of civilized, settled beings rather than squatters and various beasts.

What brought on this burst of domestic activity? Our local bank contacted us about refinancing our debt. This involved having a property assessor come to our home. This meant getting the place presentable. One end of the upstairs and the basement are still royal messes. We have to come up with some compelling deadline to get us to tackle those. The cool thing, though, is that as messy as the place was, cleaning it up only took a few days of intermittent work. (At the same time, I was working on copyediting projects, and Doug was getting things done for Avalanche.) So it can be done! Yes we can!

Funny thing: So much dust and hair and fur were covering every surface that picking up and even dusting and vacuuming stirred a lot of it into the air. A few hours later or the next day, after the air had settled, there would be a coat of dust over everything again. I'm just continuing to vacuum—we've filled a lot of vacuum cleaner bags!—and I'll probably dust thoroughly again in a week or so. Eventually maybe we can triumph, even over the Cubby Bear hair. The beautiful boy makes our blue and green carpets a nice tan. He also adorns our walls with his lovely slobber when he shakes his head.

My eyesight: Great news! After getting my retinal dystrophy checked out, I went ahead and got new lenses for my glasses with my new prescription, and I see great now! Hopefully my eyes have finished changing with regard to close-up vision for a while.

The hard part: I didn't need new frames, so I just sent them in to get the new lenses fitted, figuring I'd get by on an old pair of glasses for distance vision and take them off and move my eyes close to things for close-up reading. Ugh. Bad decision. For one thing, my distance vision has changed more than I realized. For another, the take-'em-off-to-read approach works great for, say, curling up on the sofa with a book for fun. But for copyediting, where I might be going from hard-copy manuscript to computer screen to style guide in rapid succession, it was horrible. After a week of that, I was so stressed out! But now I really-really-really appreciate my up-to-date progressive lenses that make everything sparkly clear at all distances without effort.

More good news! British researchers have had very promising results treating macular degeneration by "replacing a layer of degenerated cells with new ones created from embryonic stem cells." It works well in rats, and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is now funding the clinical trials in humans. If all goes well, the treatment will be ready as a one-hour outpatient procedure in six to seven years. Go stem cell research!

Fun:

• The Pearl Carpet of Baroda is just so freaking gorgeous! If I were still running a role-playing game set in a world I created that was a kind of Renaissance-Italy-meets-Ancient-Egypt, this would so be there.

• I love the idea of having chickens, for the home-grown eggs and just because they're cute, and urban chickens are a thriving trend. But we don't have a heated garage, a necessity for our winters, and the dogs would probably stress out the chickens (chase games are so much fun!!!) This video provides a good education on the pleasures and responsibilities of urban chicken keeping.
  

Ghost in the Machine, Pain in My Arm, and Bunnies in the Yard

So one day, the TV starts displaying closed captioning. There's a button on the universal remote with both words and symbols indicating that it's for closed captioning, so we try pushing it. Nothing happens. We try lots and lots and lots of things. Nothing. So how did it get turned on in the first place? Presumbly one of the dogs had something to do with it, but damned if we can figure out what they did. Both cable TV and DVDs give us printed words as well as sound, and neither of us is hard of hearing. During Australian Open tennis, the printing covered up the score line. This is apparently not a unique problem: when I searched for an answer, I found this person.

For me, the situation has an additional wrinkle, in that I tend to mentally copyedit everything I read and the captions have an awful lot of typos. Aargh!

I've been working out for a couple of months now, gradually building up the intensity. I've tried this many times over the past few years. Usually an injury or illness stops me, and then I don't get going again. But this time it's going pretty well. I started on the exercise bike in front of the TV. Then when I could do five days in a row at a decent intensity without feeling much soreness, I moved up to step aerobics. I've been gradually increasing the length and intensity of those workouts, and just last week I added my homebaked version of BodyPump (a weightlifting routine set to music, with ~5-minute sets for each muscle group). I think I had a mild hamstring pull in December, and then I got the stupid ankle-nerve thingie last week (see last post), but I've kept it up. It feels really good.

Then yesterday, I guess I overdid it on the tricep extensions, because I woke up to agonizing pain in those muscles. I couldly hardly push myself to a seated position to get out of bed. (The Rottweiler snuggled up against me like glue didn't help.) It took a few hours, but I finally sorted out the pain enough to figure out that, instead of being muscle soreness (of which I have none, I'm happy to say), it was injury. The left arm has pretty much cleared up, but the right tricep doesn't want to extend. It contracts just fine, which makes me think the problem is a tendon/ligament thingie rather than a muscle thingie. Yes, I'm right-handed. Dressing myself and feeding myself present real challenges. Fortunately, there's no problem working at the keyboard. Unfortunately, I was going to do housework today and really can't. So I'm writing this.

I won't be doing upper body weights again for a while, but I should be able to do step as long as I'm careful to keep my arms straight-ish as I move them.

Rabbits have always been attracted to the spilled seed under the birdfeeder (birds are messy). After we put up the privacy fence around the backyard about five years ago, we got a lot fewer rabbits in the backyard. One night this winter, though, we spotted a bunny under the feeder. I started filling the feeder at dusk every day and intentionally spilling a tablespoon or two of seed on the ground. Bunny came back, started coming back more often, and now comes every night. In fact, there may be more than one bunny -- I think I'm seeing at least two, one larger than the other, but only one shows up at a time so it's hard to tell. I've never had a steady "relationship" with a bunny before, so this is fun. I'm looking forward to baby bunnies in the spring.

Fun:

• I haven't yet acquired this book, but I must: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. This novel "features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. . . . [It is] a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead."
• This new study published in the journal Science may explain why copy editors and proofreaders (and many English teachers) use red pens (or the electronic equivalent). Apparently, the color red may help people focus on detail, while the color blue may help us be more creative. Although I can't help wonder, given the tasks the study used, if the connection has more to do with red = verbal and blue = spatial. Anyway, interesting stuff. I had my office walls painted peach (a mild red tone) and the ceiling an intense blue-green, so I think I've got some inspiration for whatever kind of thinking I want to do, depending on where I look. :-)
• If the zombies invading Regency England don't give you nightmares, this might: Titanoboa cerrejonensis was probably about 45 feet long, snacked on crocodiles, and was the biggest land animal on earth for about 10 million years. It was named for its size (genus) and the Cerrejón coal mine (species) in northern Colombia where at least 28 skeletons were found.

Merry [Holiday of Your Choice]! Five Rooms Clean!

We're utterly secular people, but we celebrate Christmas, a holiday celebrating family ties; generosity; and warmth, light, and love at the frigid yin of the year.

My Christmas present to myself: cleaning the bedroom. So we have the following clean rooms (and, yes, I have kept the others clean -- it's much easier, I've discovered, to clean a room when you last cleaned it a few weeks ago rather than a year ago):

1. Main floor bathroom
2. Kitchen
3. Dining room
4. Paula's office
5. Bedroom

That's five -- count 'em 5! -- rooms! I think that's a record since moving into this house ~16 years ago. Next up: the living room. It's the largest and hardest room to do, but then the whole main floor will be clean -- I may faint!

The bedroom doesn't actually have a bed in it. Around the time we got our current two dogs, who are bigger than any previous dogs, our mattress was also giving out. So we got a king-size bed to accommodate everyone. Then we got the main floor of the house remodeled, including having the hardwood floors refinished, and moved all the furniture downstairs to accommodate the work. Moving the king-size mattress down the stairs wasn't terribly hard. (You know what's coming.) Moving it back up? Haven't yet found a way to do it. We've have a bunch of friends over to apply brute force, but I'm afraid someone would throw out their back or slip on the basement steps. The mattress is not only large and heavy but also floppy, and the stairs are steep and narrow and have a low ceiling. So the box springs are stacked against one wall of the "bedroom," where they serve admirably as a shelf, and the mattress lies on the lower-level floor in front of the TV, where it's actually quite comfortable to sleep, especially in the summer when it stays nice and cool downstairs. Someday we'll buy a new mattress and have it delivered to the bedroom, from where we will never move it.

Bootsie the cat loves to "help" with all the cleaning. I swear she engages in parallel play. Whatever I'm doing, she likes to be right next to me doing something similar. When I was sorting clothes onto a shelf, for example, she sharpened her claws on the shelves and then jumped up, kneaded the clothes in a pile, and jumped down, echoing my motions. When I was picking up bits of paper and tissue from the floor, that's when she ran around batting at bits of paper. She also loves to plunge into small dark spaces, and dresser drawers are no exception. Leap! Dig-dig-dig through the clothes! Up over the back of the drawer! Into the great dark unknown of the dresser innards! Finally emerge with a wild look in one's eyes!

Fun:

• A Very Scary Solstice "finally merges the wonderful tradition of merry holiday carolling with the cosmic horror of the Cthulhu Mythos. The result is a CD and sing-along songbook that features twenty[-]five holiday favorites infused with a liberal dose of madness, horror and otherworldly blasphemies." Three free MP3s are available. The juxtaposition of the tra-la-la melodies and Halloween lyrics works . . . unspeakably.
• I haven't yet checked out Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog myself, but it's by Joss Whedon (Buffy, Angel, Firefly) and it made the top-ten TV show list (despite not being on TV) of some critic or other who was on NPR and sounded like he had good taste.
• Finally, here's a posting at MightyGodKing's blog titled "MGK Versus His Adolescent Reading Habits." Check out the hilarious Photoshopped covers of fat-fantasy-novel classics (anticlassics). The comments by readers are interesting, too. (Thanks to Barbara Davies, who in turn got it from Ursula K. Le Guin's site).

Four Rooms! And some fiction writing news!

Yes, I got four -- count 'em, four! -- rooms clean at the same time. My office is amazing without all that crap in it. Now I just need to get together with Doug and move my real desk -- my nice wooden desk with the credenza with the shelves and cubbyholes -- back upstairs (it's still in the basement from when we had the first floor remodeled -- almost two years ago), and I'll be in heaven.

Now in progress: The bedroom! It shouldn't take long. Cleaning it mostly involves picking up the clothes that are on the floor and then doing the broom-and-vacuum thing.

Fiction news: I recently got the check and contributor's copy for a story I sold ages ago. Felt nice to get things like that in the mail again! The anthology, titled Men on the Edge, is a collection of stories about gay men who participate in extreme BDSM. Oddly, I think this is one of the most emotionally sensitive and nuanced stories I've ever written. I reread it when the book came and had a marvelous moment of "Wow. I wrote that? That's really good." Felt nice. If you want to see the cover and find a link to the publisher, go to my erotica page.

Politics: I'm excited about most of Obama's cabinet and subcabinet team, but I am disappointed with his Secretary of Agriculture appointment, Tom Vilsack, former governor of Iowa. I'm worried that our agriculture policy will continue to be agribusiness as usual without thought to the many, many environmental and personal implications of what we grow.
Fun:

• LogoDesignLove.com has a piece showing the evolution of the Barack Obama campaign logo. I actually don't care much for the logo. The colors feel all fake and "wrong" to me. And I've never seen an American flag in it except when someone else points it out. To me, it looks like a sunrise viewed over a plowed field, which is all very bucolic but also awfully traditionally Americana for a "change" campaign. Just shows what I know, or don't know, I guess.


• Here are more of the challenged ballots from the Minnesota Senate race, in which votes are still being counted and recounted and re-recounted. We may be done by the end of the year . . . ?


• MSNBC has a darling story up as video about service dogs for disabled veterans being trained by other disabled veterans. What really grabbed me was when the vet said he couldn't sleep at night -- until he got his dog-in-training. With the dog in bed with him, no more trouble sleeping. Awesome.


• Here's a seasonal video about eggnog, the germs that live in it, and the utility of adding alcohol -- all in the interests of advancing science -- from Science Friday.

3.5 Rooms Clean, Bunny, and Near Tragedy

We had a near-tragedy in our family. Jennie Cocco, a long-time family friend, was leaving Doug's parents' house when her vehicle's accelerator stuck. The house fronts on a canal, and her car went into the water. Fortunately, two men, one on either side of the canal, witnessed the accident, jumped into the near-freezing water, and helped pull her out of the car and to safety. She was treated for hypothermia and released later the same day. Needless to say, we're all quite shaken at the near miss. The accident happened very quickly on a road she's driven for 25 years. Here are the news stories here (no family members appear in them -- nobody in the family is a Joe the Plumber type, looking for 15 minutes of fame):

• Newsday


• WABC (New York Channel 7)


• WCBS (New York Channel 2)

To continue the saga of my housecleaning efforts (yes, this feels trivial after the above, but life is made of tragedy, trivia, and hope -- no?), I made slow progress on my office, getting out most of the stuff that didn't belong in that room and sifting out the papers that needed shredding from the rest of the office paper recycling. Then I got a big copyediting project, and now the three rooms that were clean are dirty again (though not as dirty as before). So I'm giving myself credit for three and a half rooms. I may have a couple days of light to no work today and tomorrow, so my hope is to reclean the bathroom, kitchen, and dining room and perhaps finish the office. Maybe I'll get four rooms clean at once after all?

Last week, Doug pointed out a bunny who was visiting under the bird feeder, eating spilled seed. Our backyard used to be a regular thoroughfare for rabbits, but since we put up the privacy fence, they don't come in as often. They probably don't like coming into an enclosed area where they can't see around them for some distance. Anyway, I've been making a point of spilling some seed on the ground every evening, and bunny keeps coming back. The dogs go out a couple of times a night and give chase, but bunny doesn't seem to view this as a deterrent.


Yesterday morning, the elder of my two Colombian ramshorn snails decided to take a nap -- on his side in the middle of the tank. I thought he was dead, but he was still curled up tightly in the shell, and I've read that when they die, the curling-up-tightly muscle relaxes. And no one was eating him, including the loaches, whose natural food is snails. So I left him there. Sure enough, he's crawling around now like a healthy snail. ???

I should go out and shovel. It looks like we got 6 inches of snow last night, but it's –5°F. Perhaps the snow fairy will come and take it away. Or maybe I should get out there and shovel. Brrr.

I cleaned the dining room!

And this blog continues to be boring -- LOL!

I now have three clean rooms at once: the bathroom, the kitchen, and the dining room. Next up: My office. Will Paula make it to four at a time? Check back later to find out!

I also reorganized my Web site. For one thing, I took the Market List down. I had a long run with it, from 1999 to 2007, but I'm obviously not maintaining it anymore. It was time to take it down. If I begin writing and submitting again, I'll probably do a market list in that same format, which I found easy to use, but I'll probably keep it just for me, leaving me the freedom to include only those markets at which my work might find a home rather than every paying market I hear of. But I left up a bunch of links to other market resources.

I also highlighted my full-time profession as a freelance editor/writer, giving it its own page with a link from the home page. As I've been casting about, seeking another client or two to buffer against the coming hard times, as well as to challenge myself, I realized that my Web site didn't reflect much of a professional presence. It was still set up to promote my fiction, and nothing's been happening on that front for a while. The overall effect was kind of dopey.

Every November, I go through a couple of weeks of finding the cold weather almost unendurable and not knowing how I'll survive when it gets even colder. And then, overnight it seems, I adapt. Today I was taking out trash and replacing outdoor floodlights in a T-shirt and feeling pretty comfortable. Yay!

I cleaned the kitchen!

What did you think this post was going to be about? Last week, I cleaned the bathroom. Next up was the kitchen. This week, I cleaned the kitchen. Since the kitchen also functions as a mudroom for the dogs when they come in the the backyard, this is actually pretty exciting news. Especially having a clean floor. And clean walls next to the door, where they shake their jowls after eating grass and rooting around in the mud. Amazing what I scraped off those walls!

Next up: The dining room. This is the room where the mail piles up. We get an amazing amount of mail.

Bootsie: I'm happy to report that Bootsie the Cat enjoys figure skating. She especially likes it when the skaters spin. They must look like fluttering moths. I watch skating on my computer (though Ice Network), and Bootsie sits beside and behind the monitor and cranes her neck and watches the skaters for minutes at a time. She also likes the cursor, though, so I can't say her interest is really in either sport or in culture.

Work: I've had over a week now with nothing to work on, and I'm going crazy. Yes, I realize that normal people take a week's vacation now and then. In the last year, I've had two long weekends and a few days off here and there. Otherwise, it's been seven-days-a-week busy. But I don't have a job from which I need a vacation! I love my work! Still, judging from how much I slept last week, I guess I did need some downtime. Doug keeps telling me, "It's okay, honey. It's okay." He's a sweetie.

My e-mail's been down all morning. Maybe some authors have returned files to me, or maybe I've got some new projects. Not having e-mail makes me a little crazy. I just invoked my ISP's online chat helpline, and they know about the problem and have no idea when it will be resolved. Bleh!

Fun:

• The U.S. Senate race in Minnesota was so close -- only a couple hundred votes out of 3 million separated the two candidates -- that a manual recount was invoked automatically by law. So folks are counting ballots, and some are interesting. Apparently, filling in an oval next to a name is challenging for some folks. And then there's the Lizard People . . . See challenged ballots at the Minnesota Public Radio site, make your own decision, and see what other people think.
• This is interesting: Nanowrimo. National Novel Writing Month is what I've always known as a "novel dare," in which a group of writers challenge each other to crank out a novel in a compressed time frame. They often blog about their daily word counts and blockages and e-mail each other to show support. Nanowrimo is like that but with global participation. The year 2007 saw 100,000 participants with 15,000 crossing the finish line with a 50k novel. Participants can write by themselves or find others in their local area to meet up with physically. There are forums and other ways to bond (and procrastinate). The point is quantity rather than quality, to break through any blockages and just write-write-write. Since November has been a slow freelancing month for me for the last couple of years, perhaps I should plan to do this in 2009?

I cleaned the bathroom!

Hey, this is a boring blog. What can I say? Although if you knew what the bathroom looked like before I cleaned it, you might be more impressed. Fortunately, no photos exist.

I've started cleaning the kitchen. I can hear the news being twittered everywhere.

Mostly I've been sleeping a lot. I think that weeks and weeks of long hours have resulted in a cumulative exhaustion thingie. I'm not depressed! Doesn't feel like that at all. I'm just really tired, in a physical way.

Or maybe I'm hibernating? After a protracted, balmy fall, winter's set in. The other day, it was drizzling ice -- the ice pellets weren't large enough to be truly hail, and it wasn't wet enough to be sleet. Need a new word. Could use a little sun, too. It's been scarce. Five weeks before the days start getting longer again; five months before the first bulbs come up. Minnesota gardens tend to be a crazy hodgepodge of as many flowers as can possibly fit. That's because by the time spring gets here, we're crazy for color.

Well, if I make enough money the next few months, maybe we can spend a week in Santa Fe like we did a few years ago. That was really nice.

Why do cats insist on being in the way? I swear they have a gift for detecting just what you need to look at and placing themselves there.

Fun:

• The Arbor Day Foundation has this cool map that shows how U.S. hardiness zones have changed from 1990 to 2006. Of particular interest to me is the finger of Zone 5 that has crept up the Mississippi River Valley as far as Minneapolis/St. Paul.
• Have I posted this link before? The FreeRice site started as vocabulary SAT prep and is now available to anyone who wants to test and expand their vocabulary and donate rice to the U.N. World Food Program at the same time. For a word geek like me, it's a bit addictive! I see they've added a bunch of other subjects since I last visited -- must check them out!
• Finally, want to put in a plug for my friend Harry LeBlanc's expressive arts therapy practice in Minneapolis: Arts of Passage. Harry has a master's degree in expressive arts therapy and is getting his doctorate. This form of therapy is a great approach for people who want to explore feelings and thoughts that may be blocking their fulfillment but don't want to "talk about their feelings" or have tried traditional talk therapy and found it unsatisfying. Harry's got a bunch of great resources up at his site -- I think it's worth reading his thoughts about the human condition even if you have no interest in seeking therapy at this time.