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Company Gifts

Friday, April 25th, 2008

Next month I have one of those milestone anniversaries with my employer and for my years of service, I received a catalog from which to choose a gift. I don’t get my commemorative pin and a gift, I had to choose one or the other. So I combed through the catalog and discounted most of the items as being things I wasn’t interested in, but they had a pair of binoculars and I don’t have any of those.

Yea, I thought, getting more excited, binoculars. Then I could bird watch (turkey, hawk, etc) from my house or deck and get a good view. I could also check out my garden when it’s wet and rainy (like today) without getting my feet wet. Cool, I’m going to choose binoculars!

But before I made the selection, I thought, wow, I don’t know much about binoculars. I should check out a few reviews and see if this pair/brand/magnification is decent. I went to Amazon first since they carry everything and so many products have reviews. Do you know what I found? The company gift was for sale for $13! Gee, thanks, NWA, but no thanks. I’ll buy my own binoculars and I’ll pick something that’s halfway decent.

I guess I should be grateful I get anything, right? But I figure by the time they buy in bulk and get their discount, we’re probably talking, what? $5? Maybe $7? I went with the commemorative pin instead. After all, there might not be an NWA after the merger mania dust settles.

I spent the evening at the hospital again. My dad looks better, but progress is slow. I want him to be better now. I’m still exhausted and I think my mom is, too.

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Gone With the Wind

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

We’ll have to chalk this up as Wednesday’s post early–or maybe Monday’s post late. It has been one hellaciously busy week, so far and it shows no signs of letting up.

After a week off, I returned to the Evil Day Job (EDJ) on Monday just in time to hear the NWA/Delta talk really take off. I also had to catch up on all the work that piled up in my absence. If y’all have turned on a television lately, you know that after months of talk, the merger did get announced. Oh happy day. Not. Today we had two meetings to tell us basically what you’ve all seen on the news.

Anyway, let’s move on to Adventures in Gale-Force Winds.

It is really windy here today, blowing steady at 30 and gusting up to 40mph. I arrive home and go to back in the garage when I look to the right and see a piece of downspout from my gutters nearly in the street right at the edge of my yard and my neighbors. I put the car in park, jump out, and grab it before it blows away.

I decide I better check the other gutters and make sure those downspout extensions are still attached. They are, but as I’m staring out the patio doors, it finally registers that my wind spinner is gone. I have that thing on a shepherd’s hook and it’s never come off before, but it did today. I decided to check email first, then I pulled on my shoes, put on a jacket, and went to reconnect my downspout. I put a rock on the inside of it to weight it down and began the search for the missing wind spinner. I found that in the middle of my backyard.

I walked over to my parents’ house, and after about an hour, I returned home–and discovered my downspout was missing again. Sigh. So I searched and searched for it on both sides of the street, but I couldn’t find it anywhere.

Instead, I noticed that another long rain spout was knocked off and the cap from my porch railing was off, and oh yeah, my welcome mat (which is fairly heavy) was folded up against the bottom of the door.

Now I’m sitting here, listening to the wind whip by the house and wondering what other pieces are going to come off before they finally die down. At the very least, I’ll be out buying a new section of downspout soon.

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Let’s Fight Off Monday!

Monday, January 28th, 2008

Have y’all seen that commercial from Monster.com? The one where people grab satellite dishes, coffee table tops, mattresses and whatever else they can get their hands on and race to the top of a hill. They hold up their items like shields, trying to fight it off, but the sun rises anyway. The tagline? Stop Fighting Mondays.

I love that ad–and I feel that way right now. I wish I could grab up something and fight off Monday. It’s another five days at the Evil Day Job (EDJ) and this week also has a dentist appointment. Talk about way down on the fun-o-meter.

No movie reviews this weekend. My disk from Netflix arrived with a big ol’ crack in it, and so I was forced to rewatch Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. The original is the best and most fun. :-)

I just missed seeing a show on the National Geographic Channel last night about Special Ops soldiers. I caught like the last 5 minutes. I can’t believe I was watching HGTV and coverage of some multi-state garage sale when I could have seen a show about Spec Ops. Sigh. I hope they repeat it.

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The Front Fell Off

Saturday, January 26th, 2008

Yesterday was actually a pretty entertaining day at the Evil Day Job (EDJ) and a pretty good one overall. One of my engineers managed to pick up a new nickname–Nostradamus–because he was talking about how the NWA/Delta merger has been in the works for a while because of studying our redesigned logo. It was a planner who tagged him with the name, but I think it might stick. At least I’m going to do what I can to make sure it does. :-)

Then came the highlight of our day–and yes, it takes little to make the highlight reel at the EDJ, but this is funny anyway. A maintenance specialist at Continental sent one of my guys a link to a video. It’s about two minutes long and the five of us were laughing out loud as we watched. It’s called The Front Fell Off and it’s definitely worth watching.

I hope you find it as funny as we did.

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Eight Is Enough

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

My RITA books arrived. Eight of them! I think the contest needs more judges or something because that’s a lot of reading when I have writing to do. I think I have about 6 weeks to read, which should be enough time, but I’ll have to double check my instruction sheet to be certain.

It’s supposed to be hugely cold here this weekend, which would actually be a perfect time to curl up in bed with a book, but it’s also a prime writing time for me. So guess what I’ll be doing? Yep, writing. I signed up for my chapter’s Book In A Week–we do it every month–and I’m behind on my goal. I’m going to need Saturday desperately.

The newspaper here had an article on hard-to-kill houseplants and it’s got me thinking I should get a few more plants. And then I remind myself that I didn’t want a jungle inside my house. I have two poinsettias, two amaryllis and 1 lucky bamboo plant. It’s already starting to get jungle-like, although the red poinsettia has been dying almost since the day I brought it home.

If y’all have been hearing the merger talks between NWA and Delta, you know things are not calm and peaceful at the Evil Day Job (EDJ). The last thing I want is to relocate to Atlanta. For one, I just moved into my house about 18 months ago and for another, Atlanta is having a horrible water shortage. Why would you want to move more people into that city? Anyway, I keep reminding myself that there’s no point worrying about it until I have to, but there are days that’s tough.

And some person who’s name was “unknown” on caller ID woke me up at 1:30 this morning when he tried to logon to the Internet using my phone number. Argh!

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New Website!

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

It’s official; the new website is up and functional! Yea! There’s still some work to be done. One of the pages has an awkward layout and there’s other little things that need tweaking, but the major work is done. :-) You can take a look at pattioshea.com and let me know what you think. If it totally sucks, I can reload the old site, but I’m really hoping it’s okay and I’m totally excited to have something new.

New Year’s Day was spent at the Evil Day Job (EDJ). Sigh. I can’t believe they make us work on a holiday like this. There was one other person there yesterday since only my union lost this particular holiday–the other unions and management lost other holidays–and there are only like five of us from this union on the floor. It was nice and quiet and I was actually able to take my lunch hour without ear plugs. :-) Too bad I wasn’t writing yet because it would have been perfect.

Today I begin the new book. I’m actually looking forward to getting started and I probably would have kicked off on Monday if I hadn’t gotten bogged down in my brilliant idea to redesign the website. :-) No tweaking it for the rest of this week. I have to clean my house and write. The site can wait till Saturday evening or longer. Unless it sucks and I need to reload the old one, of course.

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Didn’t Make It

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008

I fell short of having the new website ready to load. I have two more books to do pages for and some links to set up yet; I was this close. If only I didn’t have to go to the Evil Day Job (EDJ) today and I could stay home and finish this morning, but I do, so that means needing to wrap up this website tonight. Tomorrow begins the onslaught of the New Book.

So speaking of books, how did the galleys go? I’m sure you’re all wondering, right? I made 12 corrections. That’s an incredibly small amount. The part that’s scary is that 11 of those changes are to fix my stuff, only 1 change is for an extra word.

My mistakes include the point of view debacle where in the middle of my hero’s POV, I have a paragraph from the heroine’s POV. Why? Because during copy edits I needed to add the paragraph for explanation, thought I was in the heroine’s head and didn’t double check.

My other lulu of an error was having two full moons in approximately a two week period. I almost missed that, but as I made my last read through on Friday at the EDJ, I thought, “hmm, didn’t I mention the full moon once before?” A quick little search of my WordPerfect document when I arrived home showed that sure enough, this was the second full moon in the book. I changed the first reference to starlight because I needed the moon more in the second scene later in the book.

Everything else was mostly nitpicky stuff.

Last Friday night, I go to make my final changes to the galley, and I decide I need to refresh my memory, so I look for the cover letter with the instructions on how they want the markups handled. Um, I couldn’t find them. Anywhere. I think in my cleaning frenzy that I mistook the galley letter for the letter that came with the copy edits and shredded it thinking I was done with it. I was left with my memory of what I did the last time I had galleys for Tor. Hopefully, they didn’t change their process.

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Extra Time at the EDJ

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

I had to make up time at the Evil Day Job (EDJ) yesterday. I’d planned to do it today instead, but we have 3-5 inches of snow (blech!) in the forecast and I didn’t want to drive home any later in bad weather than my usual time. That’s one big advantage to starting so darn early–I’m usually out of the office before the freeways become horrible when it snows.

The last hour at the EDJ actually went pretty fast and there were riddles involved. :-) There’s an intern sitting across the aisle from me and he had a riddle he was telling everyone. So then I told the only riddle I remember from when I was a kid and it was hilarious to watch these engineers work. I thought they’d get it quickly, but they over analyzed until they had themselves hopelessly far from the answer.

There was one more great riddle that I know I knew–once upon a time–but I couldn’t remember it to save my life. Not even enough of it to do an online search. I’m going to have to think about this for a while.

In other news, my amaryllis has tiny bugs flying around it and they had to have come with the flowers because I didn’t have any of these things in my house before it arrived. I tried spraying them with hairspray over the weekend, but all that did was stink up my house and I was getting worried about what it was doing to the flowers. What I’d like to do is stick the whole pot outside for a few ours. With our cold temperatures, that should kill those bugs in short order. The only problem? Amaryllis are sissy flowers and I think the cold will kill them, too.

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Yes, It’s Characters–Again

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

I’m completely moved into my new cube at work! Yea! It’s already so much nicer than where I was sitting before, it’s like a paradise. Well, okay, as close to paradise as I can get at the Evil Day Job (EDJ). The only drawback is it’s going to be sneaking on the internet. :-( I have a little less privacy where I’m at now.

My issues with my heroine continue. It’s so weird because she is talking to me. I know what kind of vehicle she drives, I know where she works, I know her family situation, I’ve even found a picture of what she looks like. In fact, she’s been more forthcoming about details than a lot of my characters have been. Except for one critical piece of information–her name. Yep, the saga goes on. And on and on. Sigh.

I guess the argument could be made that with everything I know about her and with the fact that I have a picture, that I should know enough to start writing scenes from her point of view. After all, what’s in a name? For me, I guess, quite a lot. It provides nuances into the character, just like the picture does and I think those shades are important.

I’ve had a few people emailing me name suggestions and I’ve liked a few of them so I’m going to try them out in my head and see how it goes. At this point, I’m getting pretty desperate. The prologue is written, I’ve tinkered with it, now it is time to move forward.

I’m beginning to feel like an echo, constantly talking about this, but this is my writing news right now. I’ve never, ever been in this situation before. I’ve always had characters volunteering their names. I’ve toyed with the idea that maybe it isn’t time to write this book, but I think it is–both characters are talking, both of them are showing me future scenes and that doesn’t happen if it’s not the right time.

And the beat goes on…..

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Moving Day

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

Yesterday at the Evil Day Job (EDJ), my phone was moved to a new cube. Yes, it’s real. I’m really getting a cube as far away from the coworker from hell as I can get and still be in my department! Yea! It’s not foolproof because he’s so loud and because he comes over to this area I’m in to chit chat, but it’s better than being at ground zero. I’m hugely happy!

Of course, while my phone has been moved, my computer hasn’t, and since most of my job is on the computer, I’ll still have to spend time at my old cube until that comes over, too. So while I’m not completely free yet, I’m almost delirious with joy and two big pluses–I’m much closer to the printer and to the restrooms. :-)

In other news, for a little while last night I thought I had my heroine’s name. I even emailed it to a writing buddy, all excited about it. Then as I laid in bed and tried to daydream the scene in her point of view, I realized it wasn’t her name after all. Talk about agony. To go from elation to resignation in one fell swoop was not fun. Ah, well, the search goes on.

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