May Sweeps - Day 115

Today is Memorial Day.  My brother-in-law's brother was at the cabin with us, and he got up and left at seven.  Something about this place lends itself to getting up early.  I am, most decidedly, not a morning person.  But even I have a tendency to rise early there, occasionally before the sun comes up.  Can't explain it, since I can't even blame the uncomfortable bed this time or the kids running around making a racket.

The cabin is great.  It's packing everything up to leave it and coming home (and unpacking everything again) that's not-so-great.

I mentioned the other day that I wanted to get a new phone this summer, one that has a good camera to take pictures on my hikes and to record (even) more songs at storage units, yes?  Well, I told my sister this and asked how much something like that would cost, and she floored me by saying, "Probably around eight hundred dollars."  I found that to be so high as to be obscene (that girl I like boasted in December that her phone cost over a thousand dollars and I felt like taking her over my knee . . . which is kinda appropriate, since I'm nearly sixty years older than her), but took comfort in the thought that my sister was probably out of her mind.

So I asked my cousin the next time I spoke to him how much a phone with a good camera (that could actually run apps on it) would run, and he said, "Oh, about eight hundred dollars."  Guess I'd better sell a lot more Star Wars guys.  Sigh.

Anyway, back in the mountains, the kids thought it would be fun to dig a cave through the mass of snow that was piled on the western side of the cabin (all the cabins had snowpiles there, which I assume was from their roofs, and it doesn't melt because that side gets less sun?).  They dug it about three feet deep, so I used a shovel to get another foot or two in there, and the kids were fine crawling into it, but when I did, I found it cramped, cold, and only when I was in there did I discover that the two year old had used it as a urinal.

Not as pleasant as it looks.

I suppose that will all melt soon, but it would've been fun, as a kid, to dig a big tunnel through it, from one end to the other, since the pile was about twenty-five feet long and about five feet high.  My nephews are slightly less ambitious, I guess.

I was talking about music yesterday.  Today, in the ten minutes they played the radio while we swept the floor and packed up our bedding, I heard the same Harry Styles song, that tuneless Tik Tok-bait Doja Cat garbage, and the "when the bones are good, the balls don't matter" song I complained about yesterday (said I would never listen to it again, and now I am a fat, big-nosed liar).  These were the same three songs that played yesterday when we were approaching the cabin.  How in the PLUCK does that happen?

Ah, I know what you'll say: It's corporate radio, Rish.  They have a list of songs they are supposed to play, and they do as they're told.  

That don't make it right.  Same station played the Weeknd "Blinded By The Light, Revved Up Like A Douche Another Runner In The Night" song twice in ninety minutes . . . but because I love that song, I didn't change it.  Still, they narrow their minds every day, and we fall back.  They do this no-attention-span-shit and we fall back.  Not again!  The line must be drawn here!  This far, no further!

Also, while we were still on that earlier station, they played the new song by Dua Lipa, and it was super obnoxious, somehow intentionally-dissonant, designed to make oldsters like me try to kick it off their lawn.  But I liked it, Bossk help me.  There's just something about that woman and her songs.  Sex still sells, I guess.

As I mentioned yesterday, I opened my "Podcatcher" work-in-progress, started last October or November, and then abandoned after Abigail Hilton didn't like my story "Murder Maze."*  I had it all outlined pretty darn well, up until the "should it end here, or should I try to come up with something better?" note that was inspired by my conversation with Abbie.  Well, I still don't have an answer . . . except that I'm not going to end it as I originally planned . . . but I did get a lot of words written on it.  And that counts, unlike yesterday's work (which I did count 400 words of, which may or may not have been accurate).

I went for a walk and recorded yet another Rish Outcast episode today.  There were some spring peepers frogs that were going absolutely nutmeg with their songs, and I was worried that it would ruin the audio of my podcast, so I recorded some of it, spoke a few words, then played it back to see how loud the frogs were.  Problem was, the real frogs were so loud that I couldn't tell how loud the recorded frogs were.  But I heard my own voice on the recording, so I went ahead with it.  We'll see in June if the file is unlistenable or not (like that Doja Cat song).

I also sat down under the sun and read for an hour or so.  It was great--one of my favorite parts of going to the cabin--and while I was sitting there, four different kinds of birds flew down and picked at the mud, trying for worms that were dumb enough to poke their . . . heads(?) out: a robin, several sparrows, a woodpecker (it had a red head too, cool-looking bird), and a pair of finches.  That was enjoyable, but I stayed out too long and now my forehead, nose, and cheeks are all sunburned.

Oh, and I mentioned the not-so-great part of leaving the cabin earlier.  Apparently, everybody and their truck was out camping for Memorial Day, because the canyon road was like the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles on Tuesday.  It took over an hour to get through the canyon--which is usually a ten minute breeze--but I rolled the windows down and we enjoyed all the greenery and the breeze and the Oldies station on the radio (which now plays music from the Eighties, trying to convince me I am as old as everybody else--but me--keeps saying).  

The two year old eventually had had enough of the traffic jam and began to wail in the back seat, wanting to be held, and if he'd been my kid (or my sister hadn't been in the car with me), I totally would've gotten him out of the carseat and put him on my lap (we were, after all, speeding along at a brisk six miles an hour).  But that's just me . . . and I've learned from experience that other people, upon seeing me with a nephew on my lap, will call the police and give them my license plate number.  Leave your laws off my body, asshat.

I didn't do any more running up in the mountains, after the disaster that last night's run was.  So that means I need to put on some shoes and do it right now.  Will you excuse me?

Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups Total: 1285

So, I did my run, and it was a heck of a lot easier than last night's, so it must have been the elevation, right?  While I went, I was trying to figure out this plot detail on a script I'm rewriting.**  The deadline's Wednesday, and I knew that if I could just figure out the action beat (and its consequences), I'd be able to write it easily.

Well, I think I may have it, so I sat down for twenty minutes and wrote that part out.  It may not please the powers that be, but it feels pretty good, and it counts as words.  Wow, a lot of words.

Words Today: 2380
Words In May: 25,884 (that actually brings me back up to a 1000 words a day average)

*Okay, that's not 100% accurate.  I also was too afraid to write it the last time I was at the cabin, meaning to resume work when the sun came up . . . but I never did.  I'll ask the judges if I can legally blame Abigail Hilton, or if that's just me making an excuse.

**I finally had a meeting with them the other day, and while they claimed to have liked my first draft, they wanted to change its tone, raise the stakes, as they always say in the biz, and that felt like I'd have to start from scratch.  But now, with just altering a little bit at the beginning, putting in this new scene in the middle, and replacing the ending with what I just wrote, I think it might let me keep the majority of what I wrote, but still give it more action and consequences.  We'll see what they say when I hand it in.