End of Summer - Back in Action!

So, haven't posted since the beginning of the summer. Given a six and eight-year old, I'm sure you can all understand. Let's cover a few major summer changes.

We got a puppy! After nearly a year of talking about getting a dog, we've finally done it. This is a huge step for me, since I didn't have a dog growing up. For all the companionship, I'm not sure I was ready to tie my life down to a dog. S_ told me to get over it. Which was probably a decent strategy.

Here he is. Milo the Maltese. He's now ten eleven weeks old.

 
But we will keep his hair short. One of my conditions to S_ for getting a dog.

1. I must be able to PICK UP the dog in case I must run out of the house in a fire.
2. I will not be the portly gentleman walking "Puffball" or "Pookie" or "Mr. Anything."
3. With the exception of Halloween and, perhaps, a jingle bell at Christmas, no cutesy clothes. And this extends to barrettes for the Maltese. Thus, the short hair.

Not housebroken yet, but we're working on it.

School starts tomorrow. L_ in first grade and I_ in third grade. We know L_'s teacher, so no worries there, but I_'s teacher is a bit of a mystery. Even after meeting her, I couldn't tell you anything about her. Underwhelming is the best word, I suppose.

Included in this post is my 18 millionth resolution to post more often. (sigh) I will update the summer reading sidebar, at least.

There and back again + sickness

Went to Atlanta this past weekend for work. I had to attend the American Association of Applied Linguists convention for a recruiting event on applied linguist careers in the federal government. The event went well. We actually do hire applied linguists where I work and will be looking to hire a few this year. I was in Atlanta for less than 24 hours, but did manage to finally eat at the Varsity, after all the raving gtchaos has done about it over the years.

I had been sick before I left and felt even worse when I got back. I decided to take some time off. I'm just feeling very worn out right now and as much as work need me, I feel like I'm just at the breaking point at the moment. If I don't take some time off, I'm just going to get sicker and sicker. I have some work I can do from home, so I'll just work on that for a few days and take some of my built-up leave.

In other news, I am working hard on preparing a sample to send to Viable Paradise for submission. I'm writing more than I have been for awhile, so that makes me feel good. I have to send them 8000 words, which is not that much; moreover, it needs to be the first three chapters, not 8,000 words from the middle of the work. My goal is to have something to them by the end of April, so I feel good at this point, that I will have something ready.

New Year, New Resolutions

Happy New Year 2010!

After the Snowpocalypse of a few weeks ago, we actually had a white Christmas this year. Unusual but really nice. As for Christmas morning, the offspring went nuts. All I can say is Barbie Camper FTW! I actually used I_'s digital recorder to capture the sound of Christmas morning, so I'll try to post it here once I figure that out.

For my resolutions in the new year, I want to continue to get control of our bills and debt, get serious about writing the L_ story and lose some weight. J_ has offered to do the P90X with me, but I have to be more fit before I start. S_ and I have also talked about having another baby this year. I really want one. The other two are getting too big.

Project Fill-In-The Gaps

Not sure if I dare to take on Moonrat's Project Fill-in-the-Gaps. Reading 100 novels within 5 years is not a problem. It's just that some of them are books I have actively avoided my entire life, "classic" status notwithstanding. I've only read two so far, Watership Down, and The Chocolate War. S_, of course, has read two-thirds of the list.

Here's the list -

1. Native Son, Richard Wright
2. Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
3. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
4. Watership Down, Richard Adams
5. Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
6. Middlemarch, George Eliot
7. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
8. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence
9. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles
10. The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
11. Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon
12. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
13. Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
14. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
15. Foundation, Isaac Asimov
16. House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
17. Persuasion, Jane Austen
18. Chocolate War, Robert Cormier
19. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
20. Dead Zone, Stephen King
21. Underworld, Don DeLillo
22. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
23. Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
24. Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
25. Bless the Beasts and Children, Glendon Swarthout
26. The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd
27. While I Was Gone, Sue Miller
28. American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld
29. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
30. The Radetsky March, Joseph Roth
31. Digging to America, Anne Tyler
32. Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
33. War & Peace, Leo Tolstoy
34. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
35. A Light in August, William Faulkner
36. The Conservationist, Nadine Gordimer
37. The Good Terrorist, Doris Lessing
38. Memoirs of a Good Daughter, Simone DeBeauvoir
39. Carry On, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse
40. The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong-Kingston
41. Gotham, Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace
42. A Fable, William Faulkner
43. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
44. American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
45. Finnigan’s Wake, James Joyce
46. Sophie’s Choice, William Styron
47. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver
48. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
49. The Plague, Albert Camus
50. Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathaniel West
51. White Teeth, Zadie Smith
52. Charming Billy, Alice McDermott
53. Summerland, Michael Chabon
54. Farming the Bones, Edwidge Danticat
55. Silence, Shusaku Endo
56. Ulysses, James Joyce
57. Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima
58. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
59. The Known World, Edward P. Jones
60. Kokoro, Natsume Soseki
61. The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
62. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
63. My Antonia, Willa Cather
64. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
65. The House of Spirits, Isabel Allende
66. Herzog, Saul Bellow
67. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
68. The Boat, Nam Le
69. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
70. Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
71. Hounds of Baskerville, Arthur Conan Doyle
72. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
73. Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
74. Possession, A.S. Byatt
75. Under the Net, Iris Murdoch
76. Housekeeping, Marilyn Robinson
77. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
78. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Haruki Murakami
79. Runaway, Alice Munro
80. In America, Susan Sontag
81. The Stories of John Cheever
82. God’s War, Christopher Tyerman
83. Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
84. A Model World, Michael Chabon
85. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
86. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos
87. A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
88. American Pastoral, Philip Roth
89. The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
90. The Book Borrowers, Alice Mattison
91. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
92. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields
93. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
94. Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
95. Empire Falls, Richard Russo
96. Rebecca, Daphne DuMaurier
97. March, Geraldine Brooks
98. The Second Sex, Simone DeBeauvoir
99. Gilead, Marilyn Robinson
100. Werewolves in Their Youth, Michael Chabon

Maybe as money is tight this year, I will use this as a library list. Perhaps not... Economic times will have to get pretty dire for me to read Ulysses.

Resolution on resolutions

The establishment of the remainder of my 2008 resolutions has been challenged by the nefarious schemes of others to take down my first resolution of 2008 - namely, No Drama. I have lanced several drama boils that were in danger of festering in complete disregard to my decree. I even put a bigger sign in my office, goddammit.

1. Erstwhile snoring-phobic elderly employee comes to my work colleague upset because her computer is giving her an error message that she cannot understand. The message - "It is now safe to turn off your computer."

Thank you. I'll be here all week. (sigh)

2. My daughter has a rash and after generous application of required ointment + talcum powder, she asks me "Daddy, Does my v@g!ina look like a clown v@g!na?" I couldn't help myself and burst out laughing. Now, she thinks that clown + v@g!ina is the funniest two word combination in the English language. It is a little stressful to have her popping up around corners shrieking "CLOWN V@G!NA!" and falling on the floor in hysterics. I swear, how does this happen to me?

3. Wife + mother-in-law + grief over father-in-law's recent passing + huge stack of confusing paperwork = nuclear explosion.

In spite of this, I am sticking to my resolution. I already interrupted one work colleague by saying "I'm sorry, but we cannot continue this conversation. It's violating my "No Drama" new year's resolution.

Other resolutions include:

1. Get the bills under control. Finances this past year have been among the scariest in my life. Now that the wife is working and we have a second paycheck coming in, I hope to relegate them to merely nerve wracking.

2. Reading more mainstream fiction and non-fiction. I have always been a genre fiction kind of guy, but since I'm trying to write more this year, I want to broaden my perspective. Black Hawk Down is my first entry. It's my metro read, so it will take me awhile.

3. Keep up on this blog. Ummm... not sure how I'm doing on this one.

The Year of No Drama

OK, I've been working on my resolutions for 2008, and my first one is

1. NO DRAMA

2007 was a drama fest - work drama, personal drama, family drama. Enough for both 2007 and 2008. I've put up a big sign outside my office door. 2008 = No Drama. I can tell I'm going to have to smack some people around to make it stick, but if that's what it takes...

UPDATED, 5:45 pm

Dammit! I need to get a bigger sign. I already had one employee crying in my office. (sigh. I hate it when they cry.) She was in agony because the person in the cube next to her fell asleep and his snoring was keeping her from working and she didn't know what to do and she didn't want to cause a problem but she was just sitting there and she couldn't work because his snoring was so loud and how could she do her work and couldn't I understand how difficult it had been for her and....

I swear I'm not making this up. How could I possibly...? I swear I'm going to make people sign a release form before entering my office. "I will not be bringing any drama into this office under pain of torture or being seriously yelled at."

I'm making a bigger sign.