The Halloween Party

Barbara Ann wanted to have a Halloween party.  I wanted to do it for her, but didn’t have a clue when a good time would be, so I had gently declined a few times.  I’m not sure what was so different last Thursday evening, but something was and we set a date, or tonight.  It had to be the day before Halloween because I teach a class on Thursday and it isn’t over until 6:00 p.m.  I made up some invitations and gave them to Barbara to take to school on Friday.  We didn’t hear from anybody over the weekend.  I didn’t hear a word during the week, and thought it was only going to be BA, Georgia, and me.  I had put RSVP for directions on the invitation so I could get a headcount.

Well, the calls (or texts) started rolling in this morning.  We ended up with four third graders over to watch A Corpse’s Bride with Barbara Ann.  Since I had gotten Monster University, the girls voted to watch it instead although they didn’t watch much of it after all.  I had planned the movie to be the main activity so I wouldn’t have to do much and since that was what Barbara wanted to do.  Being little girls, they did get bored, especially after the sugar kicked in.  I’m glad I didn’t have any games planned, because they created their own.  They had a ball.

So, with the help of the “Awesomest Big Sister Ever”, I got a chance to shine as the “Awesomest Mom Ever” even if only for a few hours while Barbara and her friends had a ball.  I’m so glad I had this opportunity to share with my daughter a bit of her childhood, and part of the magic that comes with getting to invite a group of friends over.  I hope we can do this more often, although I will try to do it at a time when things aren’t so crazy and work and we can plan for it a little better.  Christmas isn’t that far away, I can see another party in the future, although this one will have a little more planning.

Friendships Hurt

Friendship hurts, there’s no doubt about it, and all relationships hurt at some point in time or another.  We’re human; we make mistakes and hurt each other’s feelings.  Sometimes we get mad at each other and say things we shouldn’t, other times work, school, or other commitments drag us away and we lose touch.  The truth of it is, the only people that can truly hurt us are the ones we care about.  When we don’t care anymore, that person doesn’t have the power to hurt us. Although we all hurt from friendships, I think maybe it’s a little worse for nine year olds.

As adults, we have had time to learn how to negotiate the ups and downs of relationships, when to walk away for a breather or even for good.  We’ve learned how to accept the hurts of friends that move away, or those who disappoint us.  I don’t think though we have to deal with friends that are lost because of others in the way that kids do.  As adults, if someone else in our life or the friends life causes issues, we can exclude the problem person, and if need be, the toxic individual can be removed from the equation all together.

That’s not the case for kids.  When a kid makes a friend that is a bad influence, parents will find a way to distance the kids from, or even forbid interaction.  What’s worse is when the parents can’t get along, and it interferes with the relationship between the kids.  When everyone lives in the same area, at least the kids can still see each other in school and other such places.  And typically, if the parents are just that different, the kids probably are too and eventually they’ll finish things off themselves.  What about when your kid’s best friend has toxic parents?  What do you do then?

When we moved, Georgia was living with Barbara’s best friend’s Mom and helping her out.  The woman had asked to have Georgia stay, room and board in trade help around the house and if she had problems.  She even offered to pay Georgia’s car insurance so Georgia could run errands when her disabilities made it hard for her to get around.  Georgia didn’t have a license or permit yet, so she offered to help teach Georgia to drive.

In making a long story short, Georgia was there taking care of this woman’s emotional needs, I became Georgia’s chauffer, and occasionally hers, and then Georgia had to help make sure there was food in the house and more.  The woman was toxic.  After she was evicted leaving Georgia in the lurch, she ignored Georgia and I’s attempts to reach her, and then months later she comes back and threatens Georgia.

I already had one child abused by this toxic individual; I certainly couldn’t let her have access to the other.  Barbara is crushed.  She cried the entire time home from Boys and Girls club this evening, and cried some more in my arms because she is finally passing through denial and into grief.  She has lost her friend, and won’t be able to see her again.  Friendsship hurt. 

As adults, we have some control over our friends.  When they act inappropriately, we have the sophistication to say something or act in an appropriate way.  We have the power to choose where we visit a friend who is in a toxic relationship and have the ability to leave if the toxic person comes around.  We have some semblance of control.

Kids have no semblance of control when it comes to friends with toxic family members.  They are helpless.  As parents, it is our job to raise our kids in a healthy, or as healthy an environment as we can.  It is our responsibility to make sure our children know what appropriate behavior is and what is not.  They don’t have the cognition to understand how to protect themselves or even get away if need be.  They are at the mercy of the adults around them and if someone is a threat to their wellbeing, whether it is physical or mental it is the job of a parent to protect them from that individual.

Friendships hurt. We may be able to protect ourselves when friends are having a tough time.  We can understand the importance of a move for a friend and we can even facilitate visits and phone calls.  As adults, we can learn to work around hurtful parts of relationships, and often can make the choice to step away if need be.  We are capable of working around toxic members of a friend’s family.  When you are nine years old though, you can’t, and you are stuck with the helpless feeling that you have lost your friend, and there is nothing to do about it.  Why do friendships have to hurt?

Living in the Lap of Luxury

            

             This morning after I finished my morning yoga (two days in a row woo whoo!) the cat took over my yoga mat so he could have his turn.  As he was getting good and comfortable which coincided with my trying to roll the mat up so I could put it away, I pointed out to him that “not everybody can live in the lap of luxury like this.”  I looked around my dinky little single wide trailer and suddenly got a kick out of that statement.  Then I realized that I had today’s blog topic.

            As I went to grab the camera to take a picture of said kitty, I was thanking God for giving me a blog topic, and then additionally reminding me to bring my camera for work, I started contemplating this lap of luxury we live in.  I realized that my little trailer house isn’t dinky, my little trailer house is humble.  It is unpretentious, as big as I need it to be, and a whole lot more than many people in this world could ever dream of.  We do live in the lap of luxury here at the Armadillo house, because we truly have everything we need.

            To start with, we have a dishwasher.  Our last home was a lot bigger, but it didn’t have a dishwasher and we had to do all of the dishes by hand.  Wow, what a luxury.  Our little abode has three bedrooms, and there are only two of us, so the spare room now houses the pet rodents, the litter box, and is a storage area for our Christmas decorations, linens, tools, etc.  We have more than enough room for the two of us, and if we did have more room, what would we do with it?  Buy more stuff? 

            The cats (and dogs) get fed twice a day, and the cats have acres and acres to play on.  The dogs have a little dinky yard for now until I get more fencing up, but hey, once that fence is up, their yard is going to be huge!  We have woods to go hiking in right here; we don’t have to drive anywhere.  We even have a creek just about a hundred yards from the house.  We also have some of the greatest trees for building a tree house in, it’s just a matter of deciding which one and then building it.

            When I talked to the cat about living in the lap of luxury, I had meant it.  At that moment, as far as I was concerned I live a luxurious life, and then I remembered we live in an older, small single wide trailer.  I had a moment there where I questioned my luxury, but the Good Lord at that moment gave me the wisdom to realize that I truly do live in luxury.  I can’t imagine living anywhere else.  We may not have a lot of square footage in our house, but we have more than enough outside of our house.  I have a warm comfortable bed; I’m surrounded by loving animals in addition to an awesome little girl.  I have a great job, wonderful parents, and a grown daughter that loves to spoil her little sister.  What more could I possibly want?

            Yep, here at the Armadillo house, we live in the lap of luxury.  God has blessed us well as he’s given us the greatest blessing of all.  God has given us enough.

The Crochet Fix

Barbara Ann has been wanting to learn to crochet for quite some time now.  She’s been begging for a couple of years and I’ve been putting her off, repeatedly.  I just haven’t had time to teach her.  At one point this past summer, my Mother taught her how to do the chain stitch, but wasn’t able to get much further than that.  “Once we’re settled in,” I had said “I will teach her.  I have loads of yarn and plenty crochet needles if I ever find them all” and I had meant it.  As Barbara Ann has been asking lately, it’s been the same old tired excuse.  “Once the house is clean and your room is clean, then we can pull out the yarn,” I had told her on more than one occasion.

Yesterday, we cleaned house.  We finally had a free day, and I was motivated, and… I found a way to motivate Barbara Ann, kind of.  First, since the Halloween costume she believes she must have costs a whopping $50.00 (which includes the wig that has to be bought separately) I figured she was going to have to earn that one.  No clean room, no costume.  Next came the T.V. restrictions during the week, and then this past Thursday at the Boys and Girls club where she goes after her UIL practices, someone taught her the crochet single stitch.  Yep, I capitalized on that one.  I also had resorted to giving her ADHD medication to her on the weekend.  The results were a clean (enough) room.  Then of course she held me up to my bargain with the crochet.

So last night and tonight, in front of the T.V., Barbara and I were crocheting.  As I was diving into the blanket that has set aside for years that I had started for Miss B, my fingers enjoyed the activity and my mind started brooding about the upcoming NaNoWriMo.  ‘I should be plotting and planning,’ I was thinking to myself.  As I contemplated putting the yarn away and hitting some writer spreadsheets for character building and such my mind started wandering away again (as it tends to like to) and some ideas were percolating in my mind.  I toyed with some things I would like to do with my upcoming novel, contemplated how to implement them, and even started considering some written but unrevised works of the past.

Tonight as I continued to crochet, my mind did some more swimming.  Ideas were popping up and puttering out, some thoughts on how I can do things were trying to grab hold, and I had nearly put the yarn up to write this blog, looked at the blank Word page and put the computer up and continued crocheting with my daughter.  More thoughts trickled in and out, and I contemplated the cover contest for NaNoWriMo I had read about earlier.  Then it hit me, like a baseball bat to the head.  This is just what my novel needs, time to percolate, and I continued to crochet with my daughter as I let my brain do its thing.  It’ll come, that great novel waiting to be dreamed up and written, it’s building itself in my subconscious and I need to respect that about my writing process.  I have ten more days to percolate before NaNoWriMo begins, and at the rate I’m percolating, I’m sure I’ll have my start ready to go on November 1^st.

So, I’m getting ready to head back to the internet to post this to my blog and then check out that cover contest.  I can feel the power of the NaNo kicking in.  Just ten short days to go, and it’ll be time to type that first word of my next novel.  I can hardly wait.

My October 20th 2013 resolution

Today is cleanup day, and when I say cleanup day this time, I really mean cleanup day.  We are never home long enough to really get to it, and besides not quite being moved in, we just haven’t been picking up after ourselves.  I’ll admit it, it has been worse than a pig sty and I’ve been embarrassed every time I come home and horrified at the thought that someone might come over.  So, today, we are going nowhere.  The T.V. is now off until everything is cleaned up.  I have set my alarm to go off every hour, so we have an hour of cleaning and an hour off.  I am using my hour off to write, and then maybe read a little.

In my hour (actually it was about 15 minutes before I remembered to set the time so really about an hour and fifteen minutes) I have managed to find floor over a good section of the living room.  In my personal little corner it was mostly trash that had accumulated because I hadn’t done anything with Barbara’s papers from school, mail, etc., etc.,etc.  There was a nice group of stuff in containers hiding the seriousness of it from me, and those have all been relocated to keep that from happening again.

Barbara Ann, being a very creative nine year old has this way of  turning garbage into treasures that trash up the house as they accumulate and then get destroyed.  One of her favorite items to create with is empty boxes.  We are extremely challenged there since we have so many empty boxes around from moving.  The box creations end up crushed on the floor and intermixed with all the creations from scraps of stuff from here and there, not to mention the mountains of drawings this kid creates.  I of course don’t help since I want to save every drawing she does, so I really am working on not creating a monster.

Once I get all the trash up and the floor swept, I’ll be steam cleaning it since I have one of those handy dandy steam mops.  I am not going to bother to wait until New Years to make a resolution; I’m making my October 20^th 2013 resolution today.  What is cleaned up now will stay cleaned up, what is yet to be cleaned up will not be made worse, and I am never letting this happen again. 

There are a lot of things I am working on to better myself as a person, and this is one of them.  Housekeeping has never been my thing, and it’s one thing to let things go a bit and have dirty dishes in the sink and a dish washer that needs to be unloaded and re-loaded.  It’s another to let things go like this and live like a slob.  So, I’ll be heading back to work in about twelve more minutes or less, and taking yet another step towards the better, new and improved, retooled me.

But I Just Wanna Write Something Fun!

With 17 days to NaNoWriMo the other day, I was so proud of myself as I came up with a brilliant idea for this year’s challenge.  I was going to write an anti-love or anti-romance story.  I wasn’t planning it in a negative way, I was going to be writing it as a story of someone learning to accept herself, maybe it would be a love story in that she would learn to love and accept herself.  As I was jotting down notes, I realized I was planning a memoiristic type of tale.  That was good really, I thought.  I saw it as a good message, started drifting away from making it fiction and turning it into a true memoir.  All was well and I was happy.

Two days later, as I’m percolating on this idea and reading some fun fiction people are writing I realized that no, I don’t want to do that, I want to write something fun.  I want to create something and make something new and exciting.  I even decided that this realization would be a great blog topic.  Kudos for me.  I play with some ideas, think maybe I should write the sequel to Hybrid Factor, this great story that really needs to be edited  (Boy have I learned a lot since I started that project)  and now I’m second guessing that one too.  So, where am I on making a plan for NaNoWriMo you may ask?  Nowhere, again.  I’m still trying to decide what to do.

Now I’m reading My Side Of  The Mountain to BA for our bedtime story, and I’m thinking ‘maybe a good kids’ adventure tale.  Ugh! What to do now?  I’m making it a point to read a lot more and I know I’ve got to keep an open mind.  I used to have so many stories buried deep inside, but I can’t seem to remember any of them.  I know I want horses in there, dogs would be nice as well.  I haven’t decided on whether or not I want kids involved.  I also thought about doing Horsieville from an adult’s perspective.  Horsieville is a novella I put together in the spirit of all of these horsie series that are so popular today. Of course Horsieville, much like Hybrid Factor are these wonderful stories penned out, never edited that are collecting dust since they are nowhere near publishable.

The good thing is however, that my creative juices are flowing again as I look at all the possibilities to write.  The old dried up stories are starting to come back to life as I float through ideas.  I have faith that when the time comes I will be ready to make a decision and go with it.  This idea I’ll develop is going to start flowing from my fingertips and become an addiction much like getting stuck in a good book does and I can hardly wait.  The anticipation of the coming month has me feeling excited and I am enjoying my near daily excursions to the computer to tap out another blog post, a little something to get me warmed up and limber.  I can feel my brain percolating as all these pieces of ideas go floating around in my head and I keep doing my best to feed it.  NaNoWriMo is just around the corner waiting for me, and I’m getting my focus on for the upcoming event. 

How about you, do you want to NaNoWriMo with me?  It’s going to be great fun and it’ll give you a chance to get that inner literary genius you have hidden deep down inside out for a lap on its own.

The Hunt

The time has come to find Barbara Ann a counselor.  This comes as no great surprise to me, let’s consider her environment.  Barbara is the product of a broken home; therefore, she lives in two households.  Both households share a major change.  The oldest sister has graduated from high school and moved out, one to college in a faraway town, the other to a nearby town where she works a career developing full time job and a socially developing part time job.  Both older sisters have a ‘Mommy’ complex, which accounts to the matriarch sibling has left.

Here at home, we have recently moved.  Although a good move, it is still a move.  There is a new school, new environment, new friends, and a completely new way of life.  Now that I’ve graduated from college, my evenings after my one (yep that’s right, only one J) job tend to involve Barbara Ann.  There’s no more ‘go watch something, I have to finish my homework’ anymore.  While that is an excellent outcome for any child, she is also now an only child and is expected to take responsibility for her actions, her room, etc.  This is a very positive change, but any change is stress producing.

We are isolated, there are no friends across the street to look out and see if they are home.  There are no annoying neighbor girls that we love to be able to not play with.  There are no kids around at all, just us.  And then, there are the changes at “Dad’s” house.  Now the youngest of three instead of four, the new oldest sibling is severely mentally ill, developmentally delayed, and has a similar working age to Barbara Ann.  The next youngest is the displaced youngest child that has, it appears, really stepped up to the challenge.

We won’t bother going into the ADHD, that is just an add on for now.

So, I figured I’d pick up the phone and call our old family counselor.  She retired.  What about her partner?  She doesn’t see children any more.  So, that leads me to the hunt.  There is the cost of counseling to consider, but Barbara Ann has insurance, so that should be okay.  Notice the important “should” there.  As I get comfortable searching through Psychology Today’s website for  a provider (that search tool recommended by the partner that doesn’t see children any more), I got very comfortable as I saw BA’s insurance on everybody’s list.  I read this bio that could have been written by a combination of me, a working partner (that is an LPC-s), my favorite Psychology professor, and our retired family counselor.  Her approach sounds perfect.  I go to check her insurance, just to be sure, and, whala, she doesn’t take BA’s.  Uuuuugggghhhhh!!!!

The hunt goes on.  I consider bi-weekly visits for affordability and hope the counselor is game.  I start thinking, ‘her dad should help pay for this.’ as if that might actually happen.  A really funny thought just hit me, ‘isn’t Obamacare supposed to take care of just this sort of problem?’ and now I’m trying my best not to crush my computer as I roll on the floor laughing.  Yeah right!

So, I am patiently waiting return messages from a couple of prospects, and I’m prepared to search on.  I’m lucky on this hunt today though.  I spent eight years learning the ropes of a parent in need of mental health care for kids, then I spent three years studying psychology on a university level, have been in counseling myself for over ten years, work with kids with disabilities with my main focus being mental health, so I’m ahead of the curve.  I’m getting ahead of the problems, I am able to see the possibilities and know my own strengths and weaknesses.  I recognize what I can do, and when I need to step aside to let someone else take care of things.  I’m lucky on this hunt because I am seeking help now, when it’ll help, not later when bad patterns that must be changed are engrained.  Thank you Lord for teaching me to change the things I can change, leave the things alone that I cannot change, and giving me the wisdom to tell the difference.

More Obama Care Woes

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  I am all for socialized medicine… just as soon as the politicians have to live with the same healthcare that the rest of the population does.  Seriously, who wouldn’t want to have their health care coverage?  I know I’d love it.  Instead however, our politicians have let us be bullied into Obamacare.  I’ve had issue with Obamacare since the beginning, my biggest issue being that our medical care system is broken beyond repair and anything that piggybacks off of it is just going to make things worse, not better.

The first problem we have is that insurance companies are already deciding our medical care.  It’s the number crunchers that have never been to medical school that tell the doctors when to release someone from the hospital, not the other way around.  There is definitely something wrong with that picture to start with.  Now, we have a medical care plan coming into place that places even more control in the hands of insurance companies.  That really isn’t a good thing.

So, I’m assuming that this gives you an idea of what I think of Obamacare in general. This isn’t my soap box cause though, not even close.  My soap box cause is the pathetic state that mental issues are handled in this country.  I heard once that we don’t have “health care” in this country, but that we have Sick Care.  Mental illnesses are handled so poorly in this nation that we can’t even refer to it as Mental Sick care, it can only be referred to as a farce.

Since I’ve considered Obama Care a sham from the beginning, I only acknowledged what I heard in the media, looked at the generalities of it, and opted not to look into any parts of it.  Then the other day as we were discussing it at work, I made my common statement that if this travesty of a law had done something about our lack of mental health care I would fully support Obama and work towards his next reelection which would entail a constitutional amendment.  Turns out I lied to my coworkers and my boss.  I still can’t support Obama, but I am getting softened towards Obamacare.

I looked it up, and sure enough, Obamacare has a built in parity that gives mental illness care the same coverage as any other medical care.  This is great news!  I’m thrilled with it, it is a step in the right direction.  When I first started writing this blog three days ago, I was all set to praise the glories of Obamacare and just accept the idiotic parts and fix them as they fail, like the Obamacare site was failing.  But as I contemplated and chewed on the information I gleaned from looking at the Obamacare web site, something started nagging at me.

I had told my coworkers and my boss that I couldn’t imagine that with all the online mental health forums and groups I follow, I couldn’t imagine there would be a big boon in the mental health care without my finding out about it.  Why haven’t I heard about this before?  What gives?  There must be something that I had missed, and therefore, I’m going to have to do more research, ugh.  As much as I love research ( I am after all a research junkie) I really don’t like researching anything political.  It takes hours digging through the biased hoopla to find even a semblance of truth.

The thing is, I did something horrible in this instance, something I really am disappointed in myself about.  I closed my mind.  I do my best to stay open minded and not to make uninformed decisions or not try to look at both sides.  Shame on me, but at the same time… better late than never.

My Favorite Child

The other day, my boss told me a story about a Mother she truly admired.  This Mother was a public figure at the time.  A reporter or commentator had asked the lady if she had a favorite child.  She replied “Absolutely!”  The stunned reporter quickly found out that the lady’s favorite child was the one that needed her most at that particular moment.  I had expected something along the lines of “The child I’m with at the moment”, but I was also very impressed by this answer.  I liked it and left it until this morning.

I started thinking about this whole favorite child thing as I was coming back from bringing Barbara Ann to school.  I still couldn’t wrap my head around the whole favorite child thing though, not for me personally.  I just can’t call either of my children a favorite.  The one that needs me the most will get the most support and attention, then later I’ll be tremendously proud of the one that stood by my side and helped me support the one in need, but I just couldn’t think of a time when either of my girls was a favorite.

I mulled the idea of “The child I’m with at the moment” but that didn’t work for me either.  Then I started considering maybe it depends on the activity.  Surely that would cause a favorite, but even that couldn’t start the tinder.  I was struggling because as I thought about this, it just couldn’t be, how can you not have a favorite?  I brooded a little while longer as I tried to master this concept in my mind.  Then I started considering the dynamics of our little family.

The girls are 9 years apart.  Right now, Georgia at 18 is twice as old as Barbara Ann.  They are as different as two siblings can be, behavior and attitude wise.  Georgia is very reserved, keeps her feelings to herself, and shows very little emotion holding in as much as she possibly can.  Barbara Ann wears her feelings on her sleeve, right out in the open.  There is seldom any doubt what so ever how Barbara feels. 

I started considering how I love them each for their unique and individual differences.  Does their age difference make it easier for me to not have a favorite?  Then I started to consider how they each share an equal space together in my heart.  As I visualized this one, my mind’s eye was looking at them in this still beating heart, a real heart, not the cutesy valentine’s one, and they were in distinctly different regions of my heart, each with a matching hold on it.  My mind then started to drift again.

I don’t have much for my personal goals for the girls.  All I want to see is them growing up to be independent adults that don’t need me.  Georgia is already there working two jobs, own car, own place.  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not meaning that they don’t need me at all.  Parents are never truly unneeded, no matter how much we’d like to say they aren’t.  We’ll always seek their approval and support, that’s not what I mean.  What I mean is that they can face a crisis, possibly even alone if necessary and still work through it.  Even when we can do that, parental support and caring makes life so much easier.

So, no matter how hard I try, I can’t choose a favorite child.  The one I’m with gets my immediate and sometimes undivided attention, the one that needs me most gets the most attention, but I couldn’t call either of them my favorite without feeling like a fraud.  Maybe it’s the psychology major in me, I don’t know.  But after all of this soul searching, I now know that when someone asks me if I have a favorite child, I can honestly say without fear of a lightning bolt striking me down that “No, I do not have a favorite child, I love them both equally with all of their special little place in my heart.”

Only 22 days until NaNoWriMo!!!

50,000 divided by 30 = 1666.667.  That means that if I’m going to complete NaNoWriMo this year, I will have to complete an average of 1667 words per day for the entire month of November in order to reach the goal of 50,000 words in a month.  I tried to do it last year, and failed miserably.  Day one started out with a bang and I had managed to get 1666 word down on the computer.  Nothing happened on day two, day three I deleted it all, day four I had my NaNoWriMo 2012 high word count of 2003 words, I had broken out of the rut and at that point realized that I wasn’t in love with my story so I did a quick shuffle and changed gears.  On day five I scrapped it all, changed my story and dug in getting all the way up to 856 words.  Three days later I added the last I had in me making it to my 2012 total of 1647 words.

No, I didn’t remember all these details and numbers, I had to go back to last year’s NaNoWriMo stats to get the numbers with which I could tell when I scrapped my first idea.  At least I got that much out of last year’s challenge, right?  So, if I failed so miserably last year, what makes me think I can do it this year you ask?  Ha ha, I have an answer for that one.

Last year in the month of November, I was kind of busy.  I was pitching my Sr. Thesis idea so I could get permission to do a Sr. Project/Thesis instead of the lame ole Sr. Seminar.  I had to present a proposal and find a project leader.  I had three English classes and two Psychology classes, all of which were pretty labor intensive.  I had counted it up that I had 11 papers to do that semester, 11, and that was in addition to the tests and quizzes and such.  Yep, I was pretty busy.

I also had two part time jobs, well actually three and was part of a research project.  I shouldn’t forget to add the girls, one of which was a senior in high school.  So, I guess I was pretty busy, not to mention my muse was heavily tasked at the time.  I may not have been able to get anywhere with NaNoWriMo, but I did manage to finish the semester with a 4.0 and my sanity, so I guess that must have been my priority then, I don’t really remember for sure.  That period of time is just a bit foggy. 

So this year, I only have one job, Georgia is grown up and moved out so I only have one kid.  My one job has a huge event on November 2^nd, after which a strange normalcy is going to hit as the stress of that big event is gone.  My muse has rested up over the last four months and has been bugging me for the last few weeks looking for something to do, and I’ve got ideas floating around in my head and important lessons learned over the last few years on how to coax my muse into action when it gets stubborn.  The stage is being set for me to succeed this year in the NaNoWriMo.

Like any challenge, I’m going to need to get into training and get myself in condition for the task that lies ahead.  I’m going to have to write, and write often (or actually type if you willJ).  I’m starting my conditioning schedule today with my countdown of only 22 days left until NaNoWriMo.  So here I go, day one of my training schedule and I’m presenting you with 667 words.  Only 1000 words short of making the daily goal.  Not a bad start for a warm-up I say.  Expect to hear a lot until November rolls around, when that happens, well, we know where my muse will be.