Thursday

… or, one very, very sad sammich (by Jocelyn)

Rule #1 of The Friday sammich is this:  You do not get a Friday sammich on Thursday.  The sammich is a creature of habit and it counts on, no.. it lives for being a sammich on Friday.  What will happen if you have a Friday Sammich on Thursday is you’ll have yourself one very sad sammich.

(Turkey & Gouda)

I tried my best to console the Thursday Sadwhich.   We discussed how signs of zombies! I showed it the outline for a story I’ve wanted to write forever  (Thanks Heather!!) and I read to it (A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again, by David Foster Wallace.)  Alas, my attempts were moot because the Thursday saddwich was sad.

It really wanted just to be left alone.

Poor Sammich.

Sammich’s just aren’t the same without Heather.   Lacking the great company of a Friday Sammich with Heather  I chose to have cake.  Cake  which is a most excellent stand-in for a Friday sammich on Thursday because (a) iNot unlike the Friday Sammich it is layers,  and (b) it is chocolate.  While chocolate doesn’t make great conversation or inspire you to write daily or put a bounce in your step,  it is still chocolate… and it was delicious.

It was a gorgeous sunny day today and surprisingly warm after a few days of straight-up cold.  As I took the incolsable Friday Sammich on Thursday for a walk, look at what I saw around the corner: Evidence of hoodlums! Dang kids today (giggle).  Hope some (*snicker) one gives them a good (tee hee) finger shakin!

So the good news/bad news is…

The bad news is that the moose safari is off. There weren’t enough people signed up, so the tour company cancelled it. They found something with a competitor that I could have gone with, but I was starting to think about bears and that scene from the Anthony Hopkins movie where the bear eats the guy, and I said, “no, thanks…it’s okay.”

The other bad news is that the film thing fell through. Again. Three times now. I gather that this is very much an LA thing, and while I had always thought that Jack Bauer was the LA thing, promises of short movie deals that then fall through are more the reality than running around yelling ‘DAMMIT’ and ‘WE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS’ and saving the world in less than a day. Still. I suppose either could happen…just not to me. Yet.

But. The good news is that I finished the gloves for my trip to the Banff, which is good because it’s quite chilly there right now. And the better news is that I’m going to the Banff Centre. And the money I’d been mentally saving for a trip to LA for the shoot and a swanky dress for the Oscars? I’m going to spend it on fudge.

That’s really the way it goes, I guess. You get the not so great news with the pretty great news, and you just take it as it comes. The film thing? It’s certainly not the end of the world. I’m disappointed, but there will be better things, I’m sure. And it says something when three directors say they’ll take on the story but have to pull out because of time commitments and whatnot. It was really nifty to even get the offer, and I couldn’t be more pleased with the direction my writing is taking.

Tomorrow, I’ll be on the bus for Banff. The 3-Day Novel Contest runs this weekend, and I’ll be tucked away in the Banff Centre, typing ’til my fingers bleed…well, not quite. But by the end of the three days, I’ll probably be running around the campus saying ‘DAMMIT’ and ‘WE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS’ and trying desperately to finish the manuscript.

Jocelyn the Wonder Sammich Reporter will be guest posting through the weekend. I’ll be posting, too, but as I’m supposed to be writing a thirty-five thousand word novel in three days, my blog posts will probably leave something to be desired. Or be utterly incoherent. So enjoy, and say hi to Jocelyn, and wish me luck for a completed novel manuscript!

Mittens and outlines.

Finished mittens!

They didn’t take all that long, owing to their small size. I’ll be taking them to the Banff Centre with me – they’re for @babybanff, and I think they’ll be just the thing. It gets a bit chilly in the mountains: snow in the upper elevations over the weekend. I’m trying to finish knitting myself a pair of gloves for the same reason. I’m up to the pinky finger on one glove. Don’t know if I’ll finish on time, but I’m trying!

Meanwhile, the writing of the 3-Day Novel Contest outline has started. I’m not going to do a highly coordinated outline, though. This is more a rough sketch of where I want the story to go, and what it’s going to be about. It may or may not include character outlines. Probably not. My strategy is going to be to give the story a good deal of thought, and to then let the development of the characters and plot move forward in a fairly organic manner.

I’m getting excited!

Monday? Is today Monday? Man, I love being on vacation.

Mittens for a certain baby in Banff are finished, but I shan’t post any pictures until they’re on his hands.

In other news, I love being on vacation. I’ve been on a serious loaf – watching dvds, knitting, and surfing the web a lot. I can’t shake the feeling that I should be answering calls or writing up reports or researching a term paper. I think that feeling is slowly dissipating. I’ve resisted the urge to check my work email. Well. I checked it once, but that was Friday night, and there was only spam, so it only counts for half, right?

I got a call from a senior librarian at Athabasca University – that’s where I’m doing my MA – thanking me for a card I’d sent with my books. It’s a distance ed program, so the library ships your books out to you by mail, and you send them back the same way. I thought it would be nice to include a thank you card with the last batch, since I’d requested a lot of books for the final term paper (and lots of them were pretty heavy). I guess that tickled the librarians, and they wanted to know how my research was going.

Well. When I told him about my post-modernism course, he had some good suggestions. But when I said that I thought my next reading course would be in Marxism and neo-Marxist cultural theory, he got quite excited…evidently, he’d done quite a lot of research in that area for his own degree, and he said he could help me with the reading list, and then gave me some titles to think about. And then? I got some handy tips on the 7th edition of the MLA handbook (no more underlining!). If I ever go Turabian, he’s got me covered.

It probably doesn’t help that I’ve been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes back to back to back, but I couldn’t shake the image of Giles talking to me on the phone. Sans accent and discussion of creepy demons, though I suppose Turabian sounds like some kind of mystical being…

Sunday.

Have you voted yet for ‘Wei and the Penis Bin’? Have you voted twice? Five times? Keep voting!

A quiet weekend. No homework. No writing – I’ve been vegged out in front of the TV with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Lots of it. And knitting. I love being on vacation. I have a feeling I’ll start reading for my postmodernism course tomorrow, though. I keep eying the stack of textbooks and thinking about the twelve thousand word paper due at the end of the course, and then I keep thinking that I should start the reading now.

And I’ll start outlining for the 3-Day Novel Contest tomorrow…just one week to go! I’m really looking forward to a return trip to the Banff Centre. I tacked an extra day onto the residency to make it a week; gives me time to explore the new library and stare out window at mountain ranges while eating dinner (and thinking of Anne McCaffrey’s Crystal Singer books, of course – for some reason, they always comes to mind when I’m in the mountains). I’m hoping to finish Don Quixote by the time I leave – if I can put aside the dvd watching, I think I’ll probably be finished soon.

Miserable cold and wet weather here. It snowed in Banff today. I booked a three hour moose safari for the first day in Banff, but I fear it may be in jeopardy if this weather continues. Hmm.

Saturday.

Day one of vacation: reading (finished ‘Half Portions‘ by Edna Ferber), reading (started ‘Don Quixote‘) and watching episodes of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ (starting season two this evening) while knitting.

Heavenly.

We nommed and we nommed.

The Friday sandwich was thwarted: the sandwich place was closed for repairs and maintenance (I double checked the health inspection reports for the city, and no, it wasn’t shut down for vermin or something of the like). Jocelyn was meeting me for dinner, so we shifted gears and went to the Oriental Peking Palace.

Standard selections. We opted for spring rolls, dumplings, lemon chicken, fried rice…and decided we’d be adventurous and order one strange sounding thing without asking any questions.

Deep fried sesame shrimps toast. Frankly, a thousand times more delicious than I could have predicted.

We nommed, and we nommed, and we drank many tiny little cups of Chinese tea, and then we sighed, and leaned back, and decided that our lives were forever changed by the shrimps toast.

And then Jocelyn went home, and I ambled on back to the apartment…

…to begin SEVENTEEN DAYS OF VACATION, BABY!!

Awesome.

So, Fiction Daily featured ‘Wei and the Penis Bin’ for their story of the day. How cool is it that?

Don’t forget to keep duking the vote for the story. If you’ve voted…heck, vote again! Vote at work! Vote on your phone! Vote, people, vote!

In other awesome news, the short film project is back on. I shall be googling ‘how to write a screenplay’ tonight. More details as I have ‘em…but for now:

SQUEEEEEEEEE!!!

And that was Wednesday.

At least it’s Wednesday. I trooped in to work this morning and spent several hours catching up on emails and whatnot – this despite checking my email on Tuesday night, which I did to see if a pregnant crony had finally had her baby.

She hadn’t, though she did very early this morning, though I think 3am is still the dead of night. She called me this morning to tell me, positively euphoric. Downright giddy. It was funny to listen to her giggling about it.

There’s still time to vote for my short story, and you can definitely vote more than once. I mean, I have, so why can’t you?

And that, folks, was Wednesday. I’m going to spend the evening knitting and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer just because I can (and because I have no homework!).

Tuesday.

The four day weekend has done wonders: finished the term paper, finished knitting a scarf, finished reading a book…it’s been nice. I watched some movies – Avatar, Fragments, and Julie and Julia. The first two were okay; the last not so much.

I have three days of work this week, and then I’m back on vacation for fourteen days. I have a feeling I’ll probably wish I’d just taken the full three weeks off, but this should help keep the workload a little bit more balanced for my return.

There’s still time to vote for the Bartleby-Snopes story of the month. Mine’s the one with genitalia in the title. Somebody’s left a comment on the poll about it being sophomoric. I’m not sure I agree with that. Juvenile, maybe. But sophomoric? Dang! Can’t win ‘em all, I guess.

Anyhoo. The poll seems to reset its cookies once a day, so you can vote again, if you like. And vote often. That Ron Yates dude has a thirty vote lead on me.

Such was Tuesday.