Category: Blog

Turning Up the Heat

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog


Our weather really shifted this last week. I think it did all over, the hot late summer temperatures abruptly giving way to chilly and damp.

All last week we had overcast, with rain coming and going. SO not like usual New Mexico weather. We’d wake in the morning to 50F temperatures and all day long it would barely reach 70F. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, because our house is passive solar and we warm well past that during the day. However, that requires the participation of the “solar” aspect, and we weren’t getting any.

It was getting darn chilly in the house.

I considered turning on the heat.

Decided no no no.

I have this friend in Boston who used to try to go every fall with not turning on the heat until Thanksgiving (last Thursday in November, for you non-US folks). She lived alone in an old apartment and Boston is an expensive city. It’s also a coastal and fairly northern city, so that’s getting pretty cold. I would tease her about it, how she’d have to spend the money she saved from not turning on the heat on cold medications instead. It was partly a game for her, too, I think – to see how long she could last. Now she lives with her husband and they’re expecting a baby soon. I should ask her where she stands on the heat thing now.

It’s a kind of stubbornness, I suppose. A refusal to capitulate to the changing season too soon. But also, I hate to be wimpy. After all, it was about 68F in the house. Some people set their air conditioning to that level. It’s not that cold, I kept telling myself. Why change the temperature of an entire house when I can put on a pair of socks and a thicker sweatshirt?

Still, yesterday the sun came out and it felt really good. I might have baked in it a bit.

And it’s supposed to be solidly in the upper 70s this week, so I dodged the bullet.

Maybe I can make it all the way to Thanksgiving…

The Happy Whacker

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

This is David happily using his new super-duper weed-whacker.

See, we had a weed-whacker that we brought with us from Wyoming, but it was meant for stuff like, well, grass. Soft stuff. Not desert stuff. Desert stuff is all impenetrable woody stems and thorny exteriors. The plants guard their precious water stores by making it exceedingly difficult for anything to munch them. Turns out this also goes for being chopped down.

Now, I am not the one who thought the chopping needed to happen. I think this is one of those male/female things. Just as he doesn’t notice his bank statements sitting on the counter for weeks on end, I don’t look out over our property and say “Curses! Look at those bushes. It offends my eye to see them!”

(Okay, he might not have used that exact phrasing, but he did say that it bugged him to see it. He said this in a way that invited me to agree that I could barely sit on the patio for the irritation of seeing all those bushes just growing out there.)

He pulled out the trump card, though, by pointing out predators could use the overgrowth for easy cover to stalk the kitties.

I agreed something needed to be done and he happily settled in to research the ideal chopper-downer tool. Boy, did he find some. Did you know you can easily spend $2K on a big bushwhacker? Finally he picked out a bushwhacking lawnmower that was “only” $329. I balked. He mentioned predators again. I whined about the expense for something we use once a year. He agreed to look at attachments for the weed-whacker.

I’m a cruel, cruel woman.

Finally we went to Home Depot and perused the weed-whacking options. We found the ideal solution in this kind of cool Ryobi Brush Cutter. (You may not care that much, but for those who like to ogle power tools, and you know who you are, there it is.) It’s nice because it has a manly big blade that cuts through woody interlopers like butter. And you can get other attachments for it, which pleases me, for the next time we discover there’s some power tool missing from our lives, leaving a big black hole of aching despair.

He spend the rest of the long weekend happily trimming down the ugly shrubs and dead cholla.

It does look much better now.

 

Dread, Procrastination and Bad Hair Days

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

You, my faithful blog-gobblers, know I’m all about the “write every day” thing.

I know. I’m militant. I stand by this.

But.

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned the days when this doesn’t work out so well. Jami Gold wrote an interesting post today about giving yourself permission as a writer, on a number of levels. One of the things she touched on was the off-day and letting that go.

Everyone has off days.

You know what I mean. The Bad Hair Day. Those days that, for whatever reason, things just don’t flow right. If we weren’t committed to dealing with careers and families and things like keeping fed, we’d likely just crawl back into bed on those days and hide under the covers.

Few of us have that luxury though. We are committed to things that must get done every day, so we forge ahead, painful and unproductive as it may be.

That’s my point with the write every day thing.

For some reason, writing – maybe any creative endeavor, I don’t know – brings with it Dread and Procrastination. These evil twins perch on a writers shoulders and whisper of other things that need doing. Dread worries that the the plot line is muddied, that everyone will hate the book anyway, that maybe this is all a Terrible Mistake. Procrastination wonders what people are saying on Twitter, if any email has arrived and, oh, there are dishes in the sink! The twins have a common goal: to keep you from writing. I don’t know where they come from, but every writer seems to have some form of these nasty buggers.

The reason you sit down to write every day is to shake Dread and Procrastination from your shoulders.

Wherever they draw their power, it’s thwarted by habit. By ritual and sacred space. They fade away in the face of it until their little voices can’t be heard. That gives you the space to write. Whether that goes well is something else entirely.

Sorry.

But, I offer this. Those days when the words don’t flow and you stare at the screen? They totally count.

That’s writing, too.

If writing was only tippy-tapping words onto the page, then monkeys *could* do it. What we do is story-telling. We fit words to the story, yes, but that’s only one piece of an enormous subterranean process.

Hence the staring at the screen.

And the gazing off blindly into the distance.

The dreamthink.

So, I totally agree, Jami. Sit down to write every day, if only to shut up Dread and Procrastination, but I like your idea of Permission. What happens once you engage is all good.

No matter how your hair looks.

The Sweet Pea Cure

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

So, it looks like my blood pressure is creeping up again. Not coincidentally, the day job has been crazy awful busy.

Consulting is a funny business that way. It’s all feast or famine. Flood or drought. And, while it’s wonderful to have a bunch of work, and therefore money, coming in – this much is overwhelming. It tumbles you over and drowns you.

Yeah, I’ve been forgetting to breathe from my belly. I might also have slacked off on meditating. And, um, taking my selenium and hawthorne. I sit at the computer and work for hours straight without getting up.

The thing is, when life is peaceful and going along at a doable pace, my blood pressure is just fine. It’s when the stress cranks down that I get into trouble.

Isn’t that true of most everything? The true test of your relationship is not how well you partner with each other when everything is great, but what happens during the poorer/worse days. Sure you can write a novel over the course of years, with infinite time to screw around with it, but can you write one under deadline with editorial pressure? You can be pleasant and accommodating to other people when you’re happy and feeling generous, but what about when you’ve had a lousy day?

So, when David wanted to check my blood pressure the other day, I let him, even though I didn’t want to, because I knew it would be high. I can feel it when it’s high, in the flushing in my cheeks and pounding in my head. Can anyone else feel it?

David sent me out to take a walk and on my way back I cut some sweet peas and put them on my desk. Now when I smell them, I remind myself to relax, to breathe, to go take a walk.

This, too, shall pass.

Meet Bunny Rodriguez

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Harry’s Roadhouse is one of our favorite local restaurants, just up the road from our house. It features prominently enough in my life that I already had a subject tag for it on the blog. Well, last Friday night, we went to Lobster Night at Harry’s.

They do this in the summertime on Friday nights. They fly in fresh-caught lobsters from Maine and cook them that night. Major treat for us landlubbers. You have to make reservations ahead of time because they want to be sure of the exact number of plane tickets needed for the lobsters. I’ve long been meaning to sign us up, but never quite got around to it.

Well the weekend before last, we went to Harry’s for breakfast and I saw the sign on the door saying that Labor Day weekend would be the last lobster night of the season. I said to David that we should do it and he said great. I told the host when he seated us that we wanted to sign up and he promised to send the signer-upper to us.

She visited us during breakfast, wrote down the reservation name (David’s last name) and my credit card number. She put us down for two lobsters and reminded us that we were reserving lobsters only and would have to wait for a table, as is always their practice. All is good.

When we got home, we saw neighbor Doug out walking his dog. We’ve barely seen Doug and Susie all summer – another thing we’ve meant to do – so I suggested that we invite them along to Lobster Night. I go chat with Doug, give him the scoop. Amazingly they’ve never been either, though they’ve lived here much longer, and he’s excited to go. I tell him to call, reserve their lobsters and maybe mention they’ll be joining us.

So, later that same day, Doug calls me and says Harry’s doesn’t have our reservation. He told them Dave, Jeffe, David’s last name – nothing. But he made their reservation. He says for me to call Kathleen and make a new reservation. I don’t want to do this, because I know they already have one for us. I figure Doug somehow failed to communicate the proper information, so I blow it off.

The next morning, Kathleen calls me. Smitty, she says, invited us to join him and Susie at Lobster Night, but she needs a reservation from us. Now, Doug’s last name is Smith and everyone calls him Smitty, even Susie. But he’s never asked us to call him Smitty, so we don’t. I tell Kathleen we already have a reservation and had invited them to join us, in fact. Oh ha ha ha, Smitty said something like that, but she can’t find my reservation anywhere and will we be joining Smitty or not?

I say we are and all is, once again, good.

We get there Friday night and it’s a gorgeous evening. David and I get there first and he puts our name in for a table. He comes back and says they asked if we were with Smitty. We have wine and sit outside to wait. Doug and Susie arrive. We have a lovely time.

The lobsters were absolutely amazing. As good as being in Maine.

As we leave, Kathleen asks us how everything was. She is the same lady who came to our breakfast table. I say amazing, wonderful and I hope I just don’t get charged for a second set of lobsters for the lost reservation. She laughs and says oh no, no, no – that one disappeared.

We get home, I pull my phone out of my purse and there are two voicemails, missed calls from a local number. Yeah, I knew what this would be. Both are from Kathleen, the first saying they hadn’t seen us and to be sure to come or we’d lose our lobsters. The second, about 45 minutes later, saying something similar and to please call.

I call, ask for Kathleen. She gets on the phone and I say, hi, I was just there eating lobster and on our way out we chatted about this lost second reservation that you left me two voicemails about.

Oh! she says. Oh! I started to wonder about that after you left. The thing is, I had your reservation attached to the name “Bunny Rodriguez.”

And no, David’s last name isn’t anything CLOSE to Rodriguez.

But it’s all good. She sold the lobsters to someone else and she apologized for the confusion.

All of these various names. Plus, I have a new secret identity now.

Bunny Rodriguez, at your service.

Hope, Faith and Summertime

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

This photo is for Hope, who sent me this amazing and beautiful iced tea maker from Teavana, in celebration of continuing summer enjoyment. That’s a strawberry-lemonade herbal blend that’s just delicious. Note that my morning glories are climbing right up the post now, too.

I love when an act of faith is rewarded. Gardening is very much an act of faith. We put the seeds in the ground and hope they will eventually bear fruit. We can water and fertilize, trim and coax, but ultimately whether the plants flourish or wither is up to the vagaries of the universe.

Writing is like this, too. In some ways, it feels like an even greater act of faith to me, because we spend so much time and effort laboring alone for something that may never see the outside of a drawer. Even a really excellent book may never be well-received, for any number of reasons. And yet, we continue to hope, to believe. It’s like that old saw that went around a while back about women over forty having a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than of getting married (which turned out to be completely fraudulent data, by the way) – we look at the statistics and resolve to be one of the lucky ones. (It helps to know that those statistics are often damn lies, to paraphrase.)

I think this is part of it though. In gardening, writing and other works. It’s good for us as human beings to invest faith in the universe. To express hope through effort.

Perhaps it’s what we’re here for.

Story Intrusion

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

This is Isabel’s favorite summer snoozing spot – on the east side of the house, in the shade, where she gets a lovely little breeze. It has the added bonus of a wall she can put her back against or, as she is here, press with her back paws.

Yes, I have to go pet her all the time. The cuteness is too much to resist.

The other evening I was out on the patio, too, reading Zoe Archer’s Blades of the Rose bundle. (For those of you not snapping up every ebook deal you can find, a “bundle” is like a digital box set. In this case, I was able to get all four of the books in her Blades of the Rose series for the price of one book. Fab deal. The only thing is, Kindle measures reading progress by percent, not page numbers. So, when you’re reading four books essentially at once, you’re stuck in the low percentages FOREVER. 3%. 4%. 5%. I have to get over it… But I digress.) While I was reading her lovely story, bits of The Middle Princess started floating through my head.

This is a good thing. First, it means that Zoe’s stories are inspiring and put me in the best frame of mind to create my own stories. I think it’s really a high compliment to the author. Second, it means that Middle Princess is talking to me and that part of me is connecting to the story even when I’m not actively writing. I don’t know how other novelists do it, but I really need that kind of ongoing flow, especially since I can’t work on it all day long. It’s also a lovely, dreamy feeling.

The phenomenon reminds me of REM intrusion. REM is Rapid Eye Movement sleep, of course, or dreaming sleep. What’s really interesting about sleep-deprivation studies is that they all show that the main effect of sleep deprivation is sleepiness. This seems silly until you think about it. The symptoms of sleepiness – feelings of fatigue, intense desire to sleep, blurred vision, murky thinking – all intensify the more sleep is missed. With sleep, the symptoms disappear again.

The really measurable effect of sleep deprivation is when REM sleep is lost.

Studies have been done where people were allowed to sleep as much as they liked, but were awakened whenever their brains kicked into REM. This has dramatic and rapid effects. People quickly lose the ability to make rational decisions instead of emotional ones. The most minor problem becomes insurmountable. After a few days, the need for REM state becomes so desperate that the brain spontaneously goes into REM even while people are awake, called REM intrusion.

Yeah, you actually start dreaming while you’re up and about. Puts a whole ‘nother spin on hallucinations, doesn’t it?

I kind of wonder if Story Intrusion (my term) isn’t similar, though less pathological. I hope.

Maybe I’ll go have a nap by the side of the house.