26 years together. Several homes. Three children. Two grandchildren. Too many ups and downs to count. And my brother and his spouse can FINALLY be married, legally, in the state they reside in. 

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-16gaymarriage-pg,0,4056472.photogallery?index=12

My brother is the dark haired guy. You can only see the top of Jon's head. Madison is the little girl and Adam is the big lug hugging them all in the foreground. Michael called me on his way home from this event. "It's been a long road," he told me, in so many words. And it's not at its end yet. This is just another battle won. I couldn't be prouder of them. He and Jon have been crusaders since the 1980s. They had laws changed when they jointly adopted their son. They married every time the challenge came up for them to do so. In a church. In New York when the mayor of New Paltz was granting marriage licenses. They've spoken at rallies, led parades, done the whole lecture circuit thing, wrote a book. This, of course, has no small part to do with their love of the limelight--but if they were shrinking violets, they would not have done all they have done.

So here's to, Michael and Jon and all those still fighting for their rights. Keep putting up a good fight. 
http://gaywired.com/Article.cfm?ID=19008  (Michael, Jon, Madison (and Adam in the background) being interviewed yesterday after the event. Theirs is the last video on the page.)

Last week, while in Virginia, my friends and I did some group writing thing every day. One of the things we did was the Six Word Memoir. The book by the same name was sparked by Hemmingway's six word story challenge (For sale. Baby shoes. Never used.) There are some famous and some not-famous contributors. It was fun to read them aloud. Then we did some of our own. I came up with a bunch, but here are two of them:

Strayed from the path; stayed sane.

Laughed often; did not cry enough.

So do you have a six word memoir in you? Care to share?

I'm on # 32 my 34 lecture series and what do I learn? The word 'hello' was not in use until the mid to late 1800's; and came about only because of the telephone. 


A couple of interesting tidbits: Alexander Graham Bell wanted to use the word, 'ahoy,'  and operators were first called 'hello girls.'

The middle section of this second draft is something like a word jumble. I have all the words necessary to complete the jumble. I have most of them in place. But once in a while I'll find that a word I inserted into a fifteen letter column is, in fact, not the right word at all; so I erase it and try one of the other fifteen letter words and hope, ten or thirty pages further, I won't find out that that word doesn't work either.

So it's a lot of back and forth right now. I get lots done, but it doesn't seem that way. Not until I hit that final third of the book will the words start falling into place the way they did in the first third. At least, that's what I hope. 

 I'm heaving a great big sigh of relief here. It's been a whir of houseguests, vacation, prom, more houseguests and mother's day...did I mention house guests? I sent the last of them packing this morning. Thus, the heaving sigh.

Now I want my life back! I want my quiet house to write in, my cats to keep me company, and my darling family to come home in the afternoons/evenings when I'm ready to greet them after a happily productive day writing.

So I'm home now until June 26. That gives me about a month and a half to revise in peace and cat-li-ness before school lets out and the next vacation descends. Yeah, I know--you all feel SO sorry for me. But I'll tell you what I told my mom--if it were just me and Frank, the vacations would be just grand. But it's not just me and Frank. It's kids with us, kids staying home, cats, parents, siblings, nieces and nephews. It's nuts. The old, "I need a vacation to recover from vacation" is NOT an exaggeration.

Puerto Rico is going to be fun, but I get home on July 4th, and Girl Scout camp starts July 12. It looms over me like a vulture waiting for just the right amount of decay to set in before pecking away at my innards. I feel like no sooner do I get my feet under me but I'm forced to run again. It's exhausting. It's too much squeezed into too little time. Even for me, who rolls with whatever comes her way, it's overwhelming.

Once Girl Scout camp is over in July, I am DONE. No more volunteering! Maybe I'm getting old but I just don't want to do it anymore. It's time for someone else to step up to the task. I will actually look forward to a week on the beach in August, because I'm not coming home to chaos for once.

I keep thinking things will settle down eventually, but I'm starting to believe that life just doesn't happen that way.

Ok, so I'm with my 'dolls,' down here in VAB. We're having a discussion about writing and genre and lit fic and how the writing is so different in many ways. I won't go into the whole thing, but one point was that in plot driven, genre fiction, there tends to be a little more 'tell' than in character driven, lit/mainstream. It doesn't matter if you agree or not, that's not the point. This is; one of the women explained the 'phenomenon' thus:
"In literary, mainstream fiction, you have a more sophisticated audience. They're expecting better quality of writing. Genre fiction is written for people who want a story, and don't care as much about good writing."

Um....well....yeah.

Short post to say, if the internet connection at the beach sucks, I'll see you all in a week! 

My daughter handed me the article The Feminist Reawakening by Amanda Fortini; not because she is saying I need to know these things, but because she is again apologizing for once calling me 'militant'.

Part of me was glad my girls did not know the sort of anti-female crap I endured as a kid, as a young woman; and didn't understand what it was I found offensive about calling a woman who stood up for the rights of women 'militant'. I was glad such concepts were alien to them, because it meant they never felt it themselves. Still, I made ours a feminist household. Doing so while being a stay-at-home-mother (a career choice somewhere between waitress and gas station attendant on the prestige scale of career choices) was not easy. It was a damn hard thing to balance. But I raised two boys and two girls who not only honor the position of 'mother' as highly as they would any high profile job, but are all feminists to the core.

It is SO still there though--the connotations of 'feminist. It hides behind success of those visible few. Yes, we've made strides, but it almost feels like being appeased.' Shrew. Shrill. Agressive. Bitch. Militant.' They shout, "See, our Speaker is a woman! See, that bank executive making four million a year is a woman!" But the ratios are still horribly skewed. Is it better than it used to be? Yes. But, as the article says, we haven't made it as far as we thought we had.

I had an idea, one that I think Hillary should implement when she becomes president: All kids, male and female, must take a women's studies course before they graduate high school. All male college students should have one requirement for a women's studies course as part of their core curriculum. It certainly couldn't hurt, right? And just think how much it would help. History is required. What is history but the study of man's impact on the world? It's only fair, don't you think? (While we're at it, there should also be a requirement for race relations but that's another subject.)

My daughter, the one who once called me militant, has already apologized a million times for her teenage comment. When she was a senior in high school, she took an AP Psychology class in which they studied how advertisers work on the brain. Her teacher showed a bunch of commercials from the 70's--all of them having something to do with 'the little woman' and her place in the home, catering to her man, all while looking lovely and keeping fit. She came home that day and apologized. She does so over and over again, with things like the article. Last night, she called me quite upset about a newscaster referring to Hillary Clinton as "feisty." 

"Am I wrong to be offended? Feisty is something small and viscious and cute baring its fangs! They would never refer to Obama or McCain as feisty, would they?"

My work is done. And I am pleased.
Should you be interested in the article: http://nymag.com/news/features/46011/ 

Seven Mays ago, I took my first ever writer-related trip--alone. Flashback to the October before, when I decided that, at 37, it was time to actually DO something on my own. I never had. I married at 18. Had my first child at 18, was widowed and had my second child at 21, was married for the second time at 24, inheriting a 16 year old in the process. At 25, I had my third child, and at 27, my fourth. Yeah, no "Terri" time.  Not until they were all in school, at least part of the day. That's when I started writing.

The more I wrote, the more of myself I reclaimed. It took until 2002, but I finally decided it was time to actually DO something on my own. I researched writer's workshops and found a 'posh' one on Bald Head Island. Gourmet food, massages, lovely little waterside inn, a big name writer to mentor the group. It was amazing, pampering...and expensive. But what the hell, right?

I did that for three years. Then it got beyond expensive, so the same women, who all met during one or more years of the Bald Head trip, decided we'd rent a house on our own. Now we go to Virginia Beach every May, rent a house for the same price ONE of us would have paid for the Bald Head trip; and we write. And watch movies. And chat. And drink wine. And make Sonic runs. And walk on the beach. And rescue sea stars. And write and write and write.

For some, it's the only time they write all year. One of us doesn't write at all anymore (she never really did but was a workshop junkie!) She bakes instead. Scrumptuous goodies all week. I cook four nights (but never have to wash a pot or pan!) and we go out or have leftovers the other nights. Attendees this year are: the heiress, the globetrotter, the medical writer, the retired journalist, the marketing executive, the writing professor (and author), the interior designer, the nuclear engineer...and me.  Yeah, hard to hold my head up when we're talking careers! But we rarely do. It's all about writing. It's all about spending this one week a year together. And like I am in my own house, I'm everyone's mom. Even to those several decades older than I am.

So, in honor of the company I will be enjoying next week, I've managed to upload a new userpic for the occassion.   Because we all met on Bald Head Island, and because Bald Head is known as a turtle sanctuary, I got the turtle inked a few years ago, in honor of my "Dolls"  (a nickname I won't go into because it won't make sense to anyone anyway.) It actually inspired the rest of that tattoo as an undersea mural of sorts to my writing LIFE.

That is where I will be next week, if I vanish from LJ world. The house is supposed to have wireless but I never have much luck with actually being able to use it. Nice life, eh? I sort of like it. /g/

At 76,799 words, I'm about halfway through my second draft. So far, so good. I've cleaned out some stuff that is no longer relevant to the plot. There was not as much as I thought there would be in the earliest chapters, more than I thought there would be in middle-ish chapters. I have added a POV character that I suspected would need adding, that I was nervous about adding, but it turns out I was right. She needed to be included. She's adding a depth to the story that was otherwise lacking. I'm very pleased. She is also allowing me to get some cool details in to add to that depth. There is only so much you can do through the eyes of two characters.

I saw 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall' last weekend. Funny. Cute. But funny. There is a line spoken by Jack McBrayer's (Kenneth from 30 Rock and essentially the same character portrayed in the movie) character, Darald. He's a newlywed, and a virgin, honeymooning in Hawaii. Flustered about sex and not being able to get it right, he says, "Why would God put a playland so close to the sewer system anyway?"

I'm still laughing over that one. I thought it was hilarious--though I do have a teenage boy's sense of humor. Superbad was one of my favorite movies last year. /g/

I got it now. I am now set to 'no default picture,' but I'm not going back and inserting a pic into all those posts that WERE set to a default. I'm not that desperate to waste time!

So thanks to all for the help!

Oh, wait! I just figured out that I can set the default but also choose to change the pic! Horray! I'm not lame after all!!

Due to a troublemaker who shall remain nameless (hem-hem-- lindakays) I figured out how to upload, download or whateverload my crow tattoo as a userpic. Only problem is, it changes all my prior post userpics to the crow as well. Is that supposed to happen? Sigh...I'm assuming that whatever icon I was using when I posted to OTHER people's LJs stayed the same, as all of yours stay the same in mine. Or, I'm totally lame with this thing and it doesn't matter anyway.

 

Thanks to my much more computer savvy daughter, I was able to set my skychair as my new user-pic. Bask in its glory! Now I shall go park my butt in it for a while. Ahhhh...summer.  


Later Edit:  Due to a troublemaking friend, I switched my user icon to my crow tattoo, so the beloved skychair is NOT visible. If only I knew a bit more about this thing called cyberworld....

 (Yes, I am happy to have my skychair swinging on my front porch again. Did you guess?)

Dang it! Spring's here! All hail the return of the ATVs across the street. There is an empty quarry back there--a haven for motor bikes, three wheelers, four wheelers, trucks and yahoos of all sorts. The noise is maddening. The dust is infuriating. There are NO TRESPASSING signs everywhere. It's chained off. Fenced off. Police patrolled. Yet still they come. If someone gets hurt, guess who gets sued--yeah, the person who owns the land and put up "NO TRESPASSING" signs everywhere, because that's just the way our legal system works. 

And it is MY job to call the police. I'm supposed to, anyway. I haven't yet. I make my husband do it. He's the 'mean' one. I don't want to be the "get off my lawn!" person. They're just having fun. But dang it all! What about me? Do I really have to live with that droning whiiiiiiiiiine for the next six months? Do I have to have my house power washed on a monthly basis or forget what color it is? Do I have to dust every day? Isn't the cat hair enough?? I ask you!

Worst of it is, the teenagers start hanging out back there, doing what teenagers do. Drink. Ok, I was one of those teens once. But then they start racing around that quarry in their trucks; the quarry with cliffs and big rocks and holes that appear out of no where. It's hazardous enough in the daylight. At night. Drunk. I shudder to think what might happen.

Much as I DON'T want anyone to build a development across the street to ruin my beautiful wilderness, part of me wishes someone would.

While at VP, the instructors talked (briefly) about certain redundancies in language, mostly having to do with legal matters, and why that is so. I am sure there is also a term for this redundancy and that I've heard it countless times by now, but I can't seem to recall it or chose tag words for google that bring it up for me. Strange how I can remember huge amounts of information, then lose the details that pull it all together, huh? 

Anyway...

 I'm trying to compile a list of these (giving myself homework here) in an effort to better understand where these things might have come from, who would have used them, why. The time period. The class. The influence. These things are all supposed to come together to give a better picture of where such terms were born, how they became universally used, etc. I am certain there is a list online. Absolutely. But as I mentioned earlier, I can't seem to come up with the correct key words to peg into google. If you have a link, or you know the term, the game can end here. If not, do you have any of these word combo/redundancies for me?

Aside from 'cease and desist', I have 'love (Germanic), honor (Latin) and cherish (French).   'To have (old English/Germanic) and to hold' (old English/Dutch.) How many can we come up with? Any and all welcome, even if they don't end up 'fitting' with the gist of this. I want to discover origins, even if they are 'modern.'

Man, I'm a geek.

  garunyagot me. Now I will get five of you. Here's how this works. (As he tells it, you might have seen this one before, but it's new to me, so Yay!)

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people and post a comment to  garunya's blog (your tagees will post to mine, etc.) once you've posted your three sentences.

The Five Chosen are:
 e_underwood
orogeny
writerknv
gregvaneekhout
jeffsoesbe 
Here are my three sentences, from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (which I am NOT reading by was closest on my 'to read' pile beside my bed):
'I came to them in a flock of ravens!'  What does that mean, I should like to know? Who came to who in a flock of ravens?

(I really need to read this book.)