Is It Time To Go Yet? How About Now? Now?

In general my cats are pretty good alarm clocks, and they'll start bugging me within fifteen minutes of when I normally get up. They do still need to work on the concept of daylight saving time. The dogs, though, have really narrowed down their time-telling skills to one specific point in the week.

Every Tuesday at 4pm, it starts. The whining. The watching. The jumping up every time I move. Only on Tuesdays. And always starting at 4pm. Unfortunately, we don't leave for agility for another two and a half hours, so it's really annoying. Impressive, but annoying.

George being bullied by Crow the cat

I know they're having hot winds and wildfires in the southern half of the state, but up here it suddenly got cold two days ago. (That's cold according to Woodland standards -- it's probably still considered balmy if you live in a place where white stuff falls from the sky, but I had to put on a scarf. And I thought about finding my gloves.) My dogs love the cold in small doses. Two days ago it rained, which brings up all the distracting smells. All that stuff combined meant that there was more excitement than precision at agility tonight.

I know I always laugh about my dogs doing the exact same things incorrectly which means I'm the one at fault (true!), but they're different in a lot of ways. Ginger runs the course, her little fluffy tail wagging the entire time, and I really need to indicate where she's going well in advance or she'll just run somewhere at top speed. So if she's coming out of the weave poles, I had better have already told her the she's going out over the jump and then off to the teeter so she can plan her path or there's going to be trouble. She's usually a lot faster than George because of that and yet... we have evenings where she just flips me the metaphorical middle finger and wanders off to do her own thing. It doesn't happen very often any more, but there was a period of about two months a couple years ago where I was ready to strangle her on a weekly basis.

They eventually worked it out

George has a different approach. He continues to get more confident, but he always knows exactly where I am and listens when I call him back on course. He won't yet run too far in front of me, so I can't stay still and direct him -- I have to get a lot closer to all the obstacles to keep him going or else he turns around and comes back to me. We're working on it. He has started to memorize courses -- he got a little goofy tonight and skipped one obstacle, then ran the next four in the correct sequence while I watched him without directing him at all.

So yeah, we had a good time tonight and I think my fingers may thaw out at some point before we go to bed...

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Maybe Just Stick To The 'Three Rights Make A Left' Rule

I think I caught a glimpse of my own future the other day, and it's a little bit scary.

So I was running plodding along on my usual route down Gibson to the one stoplight I need to get through in order to make it to the edge of town.

(I realize this makes my town sound even smaller than it is -- we have 50,000+ people and many, many stoplights, but I happen to live about one mile from commercial fields on the south end of town and that's where I try to spend most of my running time.)

Anyhow, as I was huffing and puffing my way down the street I noticed cars braking and swerving around a car that was stopped in front of the intersection at a green light. This part of Gibson is two lanes in each direction and this intersection has a left turn lane, so the only reason to stop in the number one lane on a green light is car trouble. And I'm an expert at car trouble! I mean, I'm an expert at commiserating about car trouble -- I can't actually fix anything. I'm so useless with cars, the last time I tried to put air in my tire I somehow ended up with lower pressure than I started with, but I'm totally blaming that on a broken air machine or something. Yeah I don't get it either.

As I got closer (slowly, slowly!), I saw the car only had one of its emergency flashers on, otherwise known as the left turn signal, and about that time I realized that this car wasn't experiencing motor difficulties, it was experiencing driver difficulties. As in, the car was stopped at a green light in the lane that goes straight, waiting for the left turn light to turn green. However, the left turn light wasn't turning green because there wasn't a car in the left turn lane.

The light went through three cycles that way, with that car sitting, waiting for the left turn signal to turn green. By the time I ran past them there was a car next to them in the left turn lane, so I didn't feel obligated to help. (Yeah, I'm not sure how exactly I was going to help either -- I mean, clearly this driver wasn't going to be able to parallel park their way into the left turn lane, and the big dog and I probably couldn't set off the sensor.)

I did sprint past the front of their car, though, because I figured at some point the driver was going to give up on the stoplight completely and gun it and it would be my luck to be right in front of them when it happened.

This picture is completely unrelated, but isn't Ripley cute?

So that's what I'll be like about thirty years from now, but instead of my spouse sitting next to me in the car distracting me to the point I don't notice we've been sitting at the same light for over five minutes, it will probably be a dog or cat. Let's just hope they get the kinks worked out of self-driving cars soon...

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The End of Civic-isation

This year I finally replaced my car. The "thinking about replacing my car" saga had already been going on for a few years when I wrote this gem back in 2012:

Anyhow, what will likely happen is that I'll just keep driving my Civic until it suffers from some catastrophic break down, at which point I'll walk to the nearest car dealership and buy the first thing I see.

I'm not going to say I can always accurately predict the future or anything, but... it turns out that I know myself pretty well.

On a day when the temps were around 110 F, I was driving back from the Walnut Creek office, cruising along at 80 mph in the fast lane in my 2002 Civic with 250,000+ miles when suddenly I had no acceleration. Also, every single light on the dashboard was lit up. It was also making a sort of funny noise, but at that point I was more worried about the fact that my speed was dropping.

Turns out that putting your emergency flashers on will convince some people to let you merge when they otherwise might not be so inclined, and I was able to make it across five lanes of traffic onto the off-ramp before I lost momentum. As a bonus, I ended up in the shade. As an extra bonus, I was right next to a Dairy Queen.

So I had fries and a soda while I was waiting for the tow truck. While I was waiting, I did the math -- 250,000+ miles on a car that was over 15 years old with something really wrong with the engine... In my book that equaled time to get a new car. I mean, what if it broke down again and I was forced to get food in a Burger King, or worse, McDonalds? There's only so far a person can go.

But then I had to find a new car, which turned out to be the first car I drove at the dealership in walking distance.

I'm not really in love with my new-to-me 2016 Acura TLX -- it's pretty, but it's meant for someone with more expensive tastes and a love of stupid gadgetry -- but at least it gets me from point A to point B reliably so I guess I shouldn't complain too loudly.

Still... I miss the old Civic.

Our Last Outing

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Plod By Plod

The Atlantic published an article that I've seen referenced a few times called "Why Writers Run" that makes some long argument full of famous figures in the literary world that writers tend to be runners because running frees up the conscious mind to craft loving sentences or something like that. The implication, of course, is that writers who don't run are pretty much just talent-less hacks. They probably even write genre fiction.*

I write and I run. I don't do either particularly well, although I'm better at both than everyone who sits on their couch watching television instead of doing either. I have four finished novels and a few more that are in various stages of completeness. I also drag the big dog with me three times a week and think bad thoughts when we come back after four miles and I'm too exhausted to stand while he's busy running after squirrels.

This is after a run. He doesn't look very tired, does he?

I'm a plodder. **

I'll certainly never win any races -- my goal is to keep my mile split under thirteen minutes and I don't always hit that goal. (My favorite excuses: I run on gravel, there's a stoplight on the way there, and sometimes I'm running with a bag of dog poop.) According to MapMyRun, I did once have a seven minute mile, but I was also teleporting around the neighborhood at the time, so I have doubts about the accuracy of that measurement. Most people, on hearing of my running times, say "Isn't that about the same amount of time it takes to walk a mile?" To them, I say: No, dammit, why does everyone think that?! It's way faster than walking speed. By at least a minute. Bastards.

I'll probably also never be traditionally published. There are a ton of people out there who are better writers who have better ideas. (Then again, there are a lot of traditionally published books that aren't better written and have worse plots.) I'll still be working on it, next year, but realistically the odds are low. (My favorite excuses: So many to choose from -- editors! publishers! the reading public! the non-reading public!) But I keep plodding on, working on revisions of one while writing the next.

So why do I do either one? Because it's all about me. While I complain quite a bit during the process of both, I like to have run and I like to have written. It's that simple. I don't need "success" in either field for it to have any meaning.

So there you have it. Embrace your inner plodder.

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* That's a joke. I'd read genre fiction over "literary" fiction any day of the week, and I write what I like to read. But I've learned my lesson about being in critique groups with literary fiction people. And poets.
** This is different from being a "plotter" as distinct from a "pantser", both terms being used when describing how much planning goes into a novel before it is written. In those term I'm usually somewhere toward the "plotter" side of the spectrum.

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Digital Graffiti

Welcome to December, the beginning of cutout deer hunting season (according to the big dog who tried to take down a herd of them on a stranger's lawn last night)!

Behold the mighty hunter!

This is also the beginning of Holidailies, so I am planning to post an entry every day this month. (If it is 2020 and this is the last entry on the blog... well, I'll be in good company if my random trawling through the blogspot ranks is any indication.)

In addition to writing in this blog, I'm planning to continue to vandalize improve my workplace, this time digitally. If you remember, I swapped some of my own paintings in for the "art" that was on the walls and waited to see if anyone noticed. That was over five years ago. Those paintings are still on the wall (upstairs now) in the building. I don't even work in that building anymore.

Anyhow, within the last year the company set up an internal website so all the groups would have somewhere to put important communications. Use of the website has been pretty hit-or-miss -- in reality, if anyone posts anything they have to send out a mass email with the link to what they wrote, which sort of defeats the purpose, but whatever.

As I was clicking around I realized my boss had claimed a spot for our group back in April. It still has the standard "this is the page you will customize" landing page, so I know nobody is using it. Better yet, I have write access! I assume this means I have carte blanche to start posting blog entries. I figure as long as their tangentially work-related and I don't waste a bunch of time on them I probably won't get fired. And I'll amuse myself which is really the only reason I ever do anything. This will be the perfect place to make fun of all the engineers. (Nicely, of course, because I'm not really a terrible person.)

I'm taking bets on long it will take for anyone to notice.

Best Garden Accessory Ever

Some day I will actually move this into the garden:

Spirit of Whoredom!

So there's some idiot picketing in front of DragonCon (which I'm not actually at) harassing women, and his sign contains the phrase "Spirit of Whoredom". Anyhow, I think it would make a great band name.

So here we go, the t-shirt design for the first tour:

(Yes, it's good I don't have to rely on my artwork to pay my bills!)

And yes, I do amuse myself. All the time!