In case you forgot, I’ve been taking a class on Tuesday nights at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium down in San Pedro since October. It’s a class to be certified as a docent and be an on-board naturalist for whale watching tours.

Well, the test was last week and they have rather high standards. You can’t just pass the test, you have to get an A (95 right out of 105). Well, I did just fine, as I found out on Tuesday at the last meeting of the year. YaY for me!

I will say that even though I went in knowing a lot about the basics of whales and other marine mammals, I did learn quite a bit. And some of it was stupid stuff that you’d think I’d have known. I thought all whales used echolocation - but it turns out it’s only the toothed whales, not the baleen whales. So those blue whales, those largest animals ever on earth - they’ve just got their eyes to depend on down there in the depths. Kind of humbling.

Starting in the new year, I’ll be going out on weekends on whale watching tours. I’m a little nervous about getting the info right. After all, it’s one thing to learn all this stuff in a classroom, but another entirely to apply it out in the field.

What’s great about it, for you gentle readers, is that I’ll have lots to post about and maybe, just maybe, a few cool photos.

If I don’t get to post again soon, please have a safe holiday and keep those you love warm and close.

I’m in a blog slump. I think I was all written out after November.

But my best excuse at the moment for not blogging more is food poisoning. I think I got some bad fish at lunch on Thursday and by Thursday night my belly was not happy. I won’t go into the gory details, but lets just say that I had gone 12 and half years without throwing up - a damn good run if you ask me. Man, that’s unpleasant. Anyone who does that more often than every 12 years has my sincerest sympathies.

The fever broke on Saturday night/Sunday morning and I’m feeling much more like myself though I think I’ve lost about five pounds already.

I’m woefully behind at everything and this little respite has not helped in the slightest. I’m behind on the holiday plans, behind at work (even with the site launch pushed a week) and I am seriously lacking in enthusiasm.

I know, I’ll probably feel better with a bit more energy. A little food would probably be a good start.

Ooh, I’ve been playing with excel again (and maybe a little photoshop).

I mean, if I’ve been keeping copious records of my writing time and results, I may as well do something with it.

The NaNoWriMo 2001-2004 Wordcount Daily Status Chart

I don’t know what this chart tells up. Click on it for fullscreen goodness. I think it says that I consistently finish. And my novels are a different color each year. And I do less writing at the beginning of the month than at the end.

So maybe I can’t figure out how I do it, but at least I can show you how it was done.

So here’s the wrap-up I promised.

Every year I want to do something different for National Novel Writing Month.

This year I wanted the NaNoWriMo experience of writing crap. In the sense that I had not idea what I was going to do, I was just going to write. And of course, I did write crap. Probably more crap per paragraph than I’ve written before. I just sat down on November 7th with a scant notion of an idea and just wrote. With no plan and no expectations.

What’s good that came out of it? There’s a good idea there. It’s actually an idea that might make a good play, so I’ll try to work on that.

For those who don’t care to download the PDF (and who can blame you), here’s a brief synopsis of what the story might be:

Maddie Fairfax was born with the unfortunate name of Kendra Gross. Sure, it wasn’t Ima Pigg, but it was bad enough that she thought that it was holding her back. So she changed her name to something less offensive - Rachel Watson. A nice bland name and she became a nice bland girl. Not happy with the bland life she thought long and hard this time and changed her name to Maddie Fairfax.

Maddie Fairfax was a big hit. She became a top residential real estate agent in Los Angeles with her face on bus benches and money in the bank. What she didn’t consider was that this was a new era. She boarded a plane in Las Vegas and when she went to catch her connecting flight, she found that she was no only on the no-fly list, but of such interest that she was immediately taken into custody for questioning.
And she’s held in the basement in an interrogation room for 72 days. She was eventually released, but of course changed slightly from her long isolation on Christmas Day. She heads to her parent’s house, who of course try to get her to go to Washington, DC to testify before the Senate about abuses of power by the Patriot Act. She visits with the Senator and before she starts off on her long drive across the country, she decides to go back home and change her name back to Kendra Gross.

Okay, the plot could use some work. But that’s what I wrote.

Next year I think I’m going to do a bit more work, maybe start over again with a tried and true plot. Maybe an adaptation.

Equally interesting are the stats:

Maddie - 76 instances
Maddie Fairfax - 50 instances
Rachel Watson - 42 instances
Kendra Gross - 29 instances
Los Angeles - 44 instances
Las Vegas - 25 instances
I - 2802 instances
name - 115 instances
and - 1773
alphabet (all forms) - 3 instances

counts
50,236 words
212,839 characters
1,485 paragraphs
4,508 sentences

averages
sentence/paragraph - 3.0
words/sentence - 11.1
characters/word - 4.0

readability
passive sentences - 2%
Flesch Reading Ease - 79.7
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level - 4.8

Finally, amount of time to write: 30.5 hours. No wonder it reads at less than a fifth grade level!