Wednesday, 11/26/14 1:30 pm.

Advice of making a whole, goals, turkeys, & lentils

The Wrimoer was finally settling down to the day’s writing. She had been very gung ho to get going right after breakfast. Clearing away the breakfast dishes had led to its own track of activities. She had actually gotten herself ready for the day. In that process she had also done her journal writing. 

The night before she had updated the spreadsheet where she kept track of her Nano writing project’s progress. There were only 8000+ words left to go and five days in which to do them. Since she was now usually writing more than 2000 words a day, usually at a sitting, she should easily complete the challenge. Part of her just wanted to get done with it and see if she could knock through it in two days. That would be very special circumstances though.

She thought she might have finally figured out just what was so compelling about doing this challenge. How did it manage to keep her so engaged and focused, even though she was so often wanting to give up on it? First it was that it was clear obvious steps one had to do to accomplish it. For her she took it at the simplest level – just worry about writing the words. Don’t worry about how good they are. Just worry about getting that quantity done. There was, she had found out, a lot to be said for just working on the quantity, albeit for a while. The work almost had to be done on a daily basis  - it had to be kept up with. If one got too far behind one would either be overwhelmed with what one had to make up, or one might not be physically able to make it up. One’s wrists or any other ergonomics could easily get in the way of doing more in a day. One could not count on being able to make up a lot in one session. If one had to make upp a deficit, it would have to be spread out over several or many days. That made one’s daily target quota that much more than the big amount it already was.

These were not the main things she got out of it. She had found that it was also very important to be able to see this creation growing. The word collection! It was no different than seeing a piece of knitting or needlework develp. Perhaps she had already written this. She thought she might be getting a better picture of how she could apply this to other creative ventures or practices. It did matter that she had a tangible creation each day. In this case, because she had finally made use of the spell check and grammar check in the word processing software, she was now able to have somewhat finished day by day drafts. She had been posting the earlier drafts, though they had not gone through these little checks. Yet. She hoped she would at least be able to get to that in the not too far future. Knowing how easily the checkers worked, allowed her to try more typing without looking at the screen and without trying to correct too much as she went along. The problem was that if she typed too slowly and evenly, she tended to forget what letter of a word she had just typed. It almost needed to be typed fast while she still knew what word she was on, and what letter had just been written.

The heater mystery was not solved yet. It had come on just before the Wrimoer sat down to the writing, or actually quite a bit before. But she had had to set the thermostat higher than usual in order for it to be able to come on and stay on more than an initial moment. It had gotten too hot in the room. She did not even have a sweater on. And still the heater ran. 

She was getting her nights mixed up. It was the previous night, she thought, that the heater had run continuously for many hours. She had worried that something could catch fire if it kept running at such a temperature.

The wind had finally shifted. The nor’easter had started not too long ago. It was coming down thick and heavy, a fat wet snow. The kind the crows seemed to cluster with. A small flock had just flown overhead and were sitting high in a tree across the street. She had not seen many crows this season or even this summer. Where had they been?

Where she used to live, when the weather was like this, they would show up in the yard on the south side of her building, usually a group of three, and spend a lot of time sitting in the trees there. It was the backyard. Where they sat now up in that tree, was not a protected tree out of the winds. The winds did not blow yet. The roads were still wet. She could hear by the traffic sounds. She guessed the temperature was hovering around freezing if the snow was sticking this way.

Her best guess about the heater’s behavior was that the winds immediately blew out the pilot light, or there was some kind of discrepancy between the called for temperature and what the sensor of the heater said. But what situations would cause the reset button to turn itself off? A failure to ignite, or a pilot getting blown out. A backdraft perhaps? How did vents that faced the more common winter winds stay lit? 

She had tried to eat an apple for dessert the night before. It had been macintosh apples she was cooking up with cranberries for that wonderful dessert. Those apples were very sweet and tart and crisp. This kind of apple that she had tried last night, a kind she usually liked very well, empires, was getting mealy. She would have to cook it up with the cranberries. But two bites into it, she had had a pain in her chest as she had never had before. It scared her. She realized quickly that it was part of whatever gave her that swallowing problem, the only solution to which was to drink some plain water. It happened when one at a bit too much in one or two mouthfuls of a kind of food that would fill one’s esophagus. If one had swallowed any air before hand, as one was prone to do if one was with company and talking, or one was excited about the meal one was about to eat, that air in the stomach wanted to come up as a burp. If food was on its way down and there was no place for the air, one had a plumbing situation just like ‘air in the pipes’. Only drinking a few swallows of water would force that food down so that one could then burp. Before one did that though, the chest pain could be very intense and frightening. It was not a choking, as it was not happening in the airways. It was happening in the foodway.

She had had an incident like that at a friend’s dinner once. It had lasted a half an hour before she either accidentally decided to drink some water, or remembered the advice of another friend – ‘drink water’. From then on she never dared be without water at a meal. It seemed it needed to be plain water, though why she was not sure, or even if that was actually true. Perhaps someday she would put that to the test too. 

The Wrimoer had been imagining all sorts of shelters she could possibly make for that rival cat. The recent ideas were to make some kind of tent out of old wire coat hangers or small branches. Her eye caught sight of the big lampshade to a long ago broken lamp she hoped someday could be fixed and used again. That shade was formed around a wire armature and was much like something she had been wondering about. 

2:24 pm 1357 words

She had come across a piece of advice the other day, which she found very inspiring. It talked about the onerousness of doing chores and how dissatisfying they could be because everything just got messed up and dirty again and so quickly. The advice was to make sure to do something with one’s chores that one would be able to look at for a week. It should be something decorative and/or creative. Perhaps something like a flower arrangement, but it could be any kind of arrangement done artfully. It could be a pile of junk arranged in a design. This spoke to the need she had to get some kind of creation completed at the start of her day’s off. She had finally realized that – that she needed to get that done on her first day off instead of leaving it till the end. Her Nano writing was not yet satisfying that need. It needed to be a smaller but more whole complete effort than such a thing as the Nano writing. It was great that she was working on this, but it was her days of the previous winter when she had done those quick illustrations and papercuts along with the little sometimes stories, that had been so satisfying for her.

Doing her calligraphic turkeys over the past two days had been good. They were certainly quick enough to do. She did get to share them though. The sharing them was what also spurred her on. It was not that she had to, just that she did so enjoy that part too.

She was eyeing her word count instead of writing as she tried to think what else she could say at that moment. This writing session she had done again without a list of ideas. She had not written a list of ideas for this day. She had done that for the other day – but had she had it in hand when she went to do her writing? 

2:37 pm 1691 words (67 minutes)

Dinner the night before had been another delicious surprise. It was partly a very odd leftover that she had not liked when she first prepared it. Two nights before, she had tried to cook up some lentils. She had let them burn, but not yet too badly. She had melted some cheddar cheese over the lentils still on top of their burned bottom layer. When the cheese melted, she scooped off the good lentils into a container. In a smaller saucepan she heated some crushed tomatoes with a bit of sugar and a dash of lemon juice. This then went over the serving of lentils in her bowl and got some grated Parmesan. It had been ok but not that great. She had only eaten half of that. 

What she did with the other half was the surprising discovery for her. She made up a serving of fettuccini with more crushed tomatoes, dash of lemon juice, spoon of sugar, and beef ramen seasoning. When this was cooked, the leftover lentils went on top in the pot, with more cheddar cheese to melt over it with the cover on. When the cheese was melted, she put that all into her bowl. The lentil tomato sauce tasted so much like meat sauce. What a surprise for her.

Her turkey she had bought a couple weeks ago when they first came on sale in one of the supermarkets. Since it was frozen and she had bought it early, she had put it right in the freezer. She had not taken it out. It slowly grew in her mind that she did not want to have to cook anything at length. It would be nice to be able to decide on a whim whether she wanted to or not, but here she was not willing to commit herself to having to cook that bird. She might have to do it over Christmas.

The previous year the other store had been out of the sale price turkeys when she had wanted to get it. By the time they did have it, it was just a few days before Thanksgiving. There had been hardly any time to defrost it in. As it was she had spent quite awhile trying to speed up the defrosting. That was perhaps part of what kept her from tackling it this year. She had had two years of making the best turkeys she had tasted in over 15 years, since the last time she had cooked a roast of any kind. She was just so good at it. No one else’s compared to hers.

The Wrimoer was very glad that she had taken care of getting gas in the car while she was out the day before. She had wanted to put it off and just get home quickly after her class, but she managed to talk herself into getting that chore taken care of. If the weather were to be bad the next day, there would be no taking care of putting fuel in the car then. If she wanted to maybe go out to her Thanksgiving invitation, she certainly would need fuel for that. It would be a hindrance to have to worry about that extra chore if she happened to be trying to go any kind of distance by a certain time. If they got as much snow as the 8” predicted, one might not have to worry about whether one would go out or not for Thanksgiving. 

She had always wanted to try one of those big public Thanksgivings put on by a local church. It was mostly for very low-income people she thought. And that was what kept her away. Such a dinner, though open for anyone, was populated by a specific demographic. She assumed it was not a well-mixed crowd. The fast food places were very narrow in their demographics as well. That almost kept her away from those places too. People did not mix themselves up very well. They wanted to stick to their own types. She preferred diverse groups of people.

3:07 pm 2378 words 97 minutes= 24.5 wpm spell/grammar check – 3:18 pm