I'm not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. Perhaps you've noticed that.* Last week, when I was at the cabin, besides the veritable swarm of flies I encountered, I discovered several mouse droppings on the stove and countertop, and deduced in my Sherlockian fashion, that the cabin had a mouse or mice. So, I laid out a trap here on the counter for it, baiting it with peanut butter, and then locking everything up and heading on my way.
Do you know where this is going?
Well, it did occur to me, over last weekend, that if I did catch a mouse in my trap, that there would be no one going to the cabin to clean it up until next Wednesday, when I would be doing it myself. And that's a bad thing, isn't it?
What I didn't count on was how bad one little mouse could stink after a week, and what would be the condition of the body. Honestly, in the past when I'd caught a mouse in a trap, they'd been fresh, floppy things, or they'd been long-dead, desiccated things, neither of which are that big a deal. But this one . . . boy howdy. It had somehow entered a state of half-liquification, its body fusing with the countertop, and smelled up the entire top floor of the cabin. When my brother would put out traps to catch skunks or woodchucks or gophers, he would sometimes make special trips up here just to get rid of the carcasses . . . and I can't even imagine how it would be if he decided just to let it sit.
Well, I did clean up the mess as best I could, opening the doors and windows, and spraying everything down several times with disinfectant, glass cleaner, and then wiped stuff away and tossed some of it in the toilet, and tried to flush it down. But hey, the water is off, so when I flushed, it didn't go down. I had to go downstairs, turn on the water and electricity, then try it again.
Now it's been . . . wait, several hours? How did that happen? I guess I've been editing podcasts, but that's no excuse. My day is done and, uh oh, I'm starting to feel melancholy. It's to be expected, of course . . . the changing of the seasons always does that to me. And when I got here, the dirt road was almost entirely covered in fallen leaves. Yes, the trees are colorful and lovely, but it strikes me as ponderously sad, knowing winter is coming, knowing I spent (misspent?) another summer, and now, the cold comes. I won't be up here much more, I realize, and I do love it here.
Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In October: 938
I spent a couple of songs on my phone (let's say, one "American Pie") gathering logs for the fire and stacking them up on the deck by the door. It is one of the activities I participate in here when the season first starts and when it ends, but it wasn't really all that necessary this trip. Even so, I've still got several logs ready for next week (or in the unlikely event somebody else comes up here on the weekend or sometime). And there is something enjoyable about gathering wood for the fire from the ground, something that speaks for my pioneer/explorer/cave-dwelling ancestors, who depended upon that cut wood to stay alive and cook their meals.
I spoke to someone yesterday about the changing of the seasons, and she seemed to think that sadness and depression were something you could just turn away from, like Freddy Krueger at the end of the first ELM STREET (my analogy, not hers). "Choose happy, that's what I say," she told me. I had heard those two insipid words before, and it sounded as correct as "I can haz cheezburger." But I've no doubt that it works for her, that you can just elect to turn off feelings of the blues.
But hey, everything works for her.
And hey again, here I am, in a place that gives me joy (it better, I drive two hours to get here every single week, and always coming home smelling like a campfire or an unwashed Call of Duty player). And I'm still writing, exercising, and blogging every single day, which may not matter to most people (and indeed, sometimes I wonder why it matters to me), but is a hell of a lot better than saying, "I set all these goals for myself, and wouldn't you know it, I failed at every single one of them."
Push-ups Today: 61
Push-ups In October: 407
I just did my push-ups for the night, and they were harder than they've EVER been. I can't imagine that it was the elevation to blame there (after all, I did my sit-ups with absolutely no problem), but by about the forty-fifth one, my arms started to say, "The Enterprise cannae take much more of this, Cap'n!" Sad. I might have to start splitting my push-up sessions in two, maybe half before my sit-ups and half after.
I had a pretty good friend, years ago, that told me that they weren't ever going to have a family of their own, so they lived for their work. The work they did was their children. I never forgot hearing that. And I'm reminded of it now, pretty much a full year into this mid-life crisis, and having written 300,000-plus words. I hope some of it is good. It would be nice if people read it and enjoyed it.
So, I finished editing a story I was assigned for StarShipSofa. It feels like the first two chapters of a novel, and if it doesn't turn out to be that, then I wasted my time reading and editing it.* Then I edited the sketch I wrote for our next Delusions of Grandeur show. When I get back tomorrow, I'll send it to Marshal and see if we can record on the weekend.
I also saved and formatted the third of three Rish Outcast episodes that I recorded over the year (starting in January, I believe), that have been dropping on the Patreon feed. It used to be that they would get an episode five to seven days before the regular listeners do, but I've somehow fallen so behind that they now get them five to seven weeks earlier. Since I've got nothing more to present between now and Halloween, though (and whoops, I still have to edit that episode, from September of 2019), so the regular feed might catch up.
Words Today: 484
Words In October: 5719
I'm going to have to resign myself to not getting a thousand words a day this month. I've just got too much other stuff going on. As long as I write every day, and get a couple of thousand word days in, I will hold my head up high. Well, five foot nine or so, anyway.
*I often wonder just who the devil reads my blog each day, and what they could possibly get from it. Sure, I try to make it entertaining, but I KNOW I don't manage that each and every post (perhaps only one in five), and I've obligated myself to doing this every day (until the day I don't get it done, and I finally stop), but it is strange to imagine what someone else thinks when they read these words.
**Renee says she doesn't have to do any audio editing, and I simply don't understand that. Sure, her sound set up is a hundred times better than mine (she has a booth with sound-proofing on the walls, and stands up to do her recording, which would almost certainly prevent me from falling asleep every other recording session), but I still find mouth sounds and clicks when I edit, as well as times I say the wrong word, stammer, or the chair squeaks (of course, that wouldn't apply to her), apart from the many relines and performance issues that occur in every audiobook, and the many, many, many, many, relines and performance issues that plague my own story presentations.
I don't understand how you wouldn't have to do a pass fixing things you didn't even realize were problems, but she said that due to her short deadlines, no book can be perfect. I'd like to think that I'm as good as Renee is as a narrator--as good as anybody in the world--but it may be that she's just a professional and I'm not.
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