Fast Fiction

You may consider this your three month update on the new car.

Gas prices are going up. And so is my mileage. I’m about to top 2,000 miles on my new 2004 Toyota Prius and I’ve gotta say I’m lovin’ it.

When I first got it, the mileage was anemic. About 42 miles per gallon. Yeah, you say, “I’d be pretty damn happy with 42!” But I know I can do better. And I am. I think the car was getting broken in and I seem to have pushed through a wall and I’m at 48 mpg my current tank of gas. So, as the price of gas goes up, so does my mileage and in a sense they’re balancing out. By summer I’m hoping to get about 55 mpg.

My old Subaru used to get about 28-32 mpg. So, I’ve gone 2,000 miles so far on the new car. The old car would have consumed about 68 gallons of gas - at today’s prices that’s $140. But even with my overall lifetime for the Prius at 43 mpg, that’s only 46.5 gallons and $97 in gas. Whee!

This flower has been bugging me since we moved to this house. It’s this huge bloom and it’s obviously not something native to Los Angeles. The plant has taken over a rather remote corner of the yard, back by the fence, beyond the sprinklers.

But here it is, March and it’s in bloom again. Damn, the thing seems really happy to be here. I counted eight current blooms and about another dozen buds. The flowers are freaky huge - about the size of softball splayed open.

I had no clue what this thing was. So I just started searching the net. I did it by doing a google image search for flower bloom.

Anyway, it is a tropical plant (classified as an invasive species in Hawaii) called Solandra nitida or Cup of Gold Vine. Turns out they’re dangerously poisonous, too.

Wow, now I don’t feel so bad about my book sales. Blair’s book, Burning Down my Master’s House was released with much fanfare, being reviewed (not favorably for the most part) widely. The publisher printed 250,000 copies for the first edition. Read more here.

I, on the other hand, have sold 11 copies in my first month of publication. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disappointed by the sales. There’s been no fanfare about the release of the play, I haven’t been on any talk shows, no reviews in the Times. Yes, two more people bought the play since my last posting about this on February 25th. It seems that people who have not heard of me are more likely to buy my book than people who have heard of Jayson Blair.

In case you’re a fellow Los Angeles blogger and haven’t heard, there’s an informal gathering of LA based bloggers at 3rd and Fairfax (the Farmers Market) on Saturday, March 27th starting at 5:30 PM. Read more about it LA Blogs. I’ll be there hanging out with the other bloggers, trying to match faces to URLs, maybe I’ll shoot a few digipix.

I haven’t much to say. I’ve abandoned work on the novel right now. Not in favor of working on anything else, but just because I haven’t the stomach for it right now. It turns out that I can’t just edit it in the same way that just wrote it. It apparently takes a plan and some notion of what the hell the novel is about and attention to continuity. I like revising plays much better, I have a bunch of actors read it out loud and they tell me what needs to be fixed. I wonder if I could lure an actor to read it outloud for me ... as if it were a very, very long monologue.

No matter. The weather is beautiful and things are growing in the back yard and I’ve got my camera back out and I’m takin’ photos.

So, at least once a week (or until I run out of servers space), I’ll grace you with a photo of something I took in my back yard.

Today it’s the lone calla lily. We have one calla lily growing under the Norfolk Island pine. I’m not sure who planted it or if it was part of a bed of lilies at one time, but it was happy to get some rain this spring and graced us with a bloom.

Has anyone else seen this? Was I asleep for a week and missed this one? The Congressional Accountability for Judicial Activism Act seeks to provide a way for Congress to reverse Supreme Court decisions with a 2/3 vote. It was introduced by Ron Lewis (R - KY). He says “This is especially true when the power to interpret the Constitution rests in the hands of activist judges anxious to find the latest ‘right’ hiding between the lines of our founding document.” [emphasis added by me]

So now we have checks and balances and then another check for good measure? As Bill Maher has said before, sometimes the majority is wrong. The courts may be out of step with the prejudices of more vocal members of our great country, but they seem to be going in the direction of what’s right. It’s all a reactionMassachusettset’s courts upholding same-gender marriage.

This fellow has the whole text of the bugger. And you can tell Mr. Lewis how you feel here (or your own Representative). The bill is also known as H.R. 3920.

Well, it seems that scientists are prepared to announce the discovery of the elusive tenth planet. Many have suspected a tenth planetoid on a large eliptical orbit that takes it well into the Kuiper belt.

But what I found surprising was this article. It says, “A 10th heavenly body has been spotted orbiting the Earth.” Now last time I checked (and I haven’t been in school for quite a few years), things that orbit the Earth are moons. Things that orbit the Sun are planets (if they’re big enough). Glad they’ve got the basics down there at The Scotsman. (UPDATE: Hah! That article disappeared and was replaced with a different one with completely different text. No mention of a correction. I’m sure someone pointed it out to them.)

Other articles of course got it right and report that it’s being called Sedna. It was spotted by the Spitzer Space Telescope and confirmed by the Hubble. I think this only demonstrates the usefulness of the Hubble and the fact that we should make every effort to upgrade it and continue to use it.

Here’s a cool article written by an academic about how life is not as stressful as some other academics would have you believe. Complain, Complain by David Lester in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He’s very even-keeled when describing the difference between the hard work that workers do and the hard work that academics do. Let’s face it, it can’t compare.

But my favorite part of it was this: I have not attended a faculty meeting since 1972. I found that I liked my colleagues much better if I did not listen to their silly comments in such meetings.

This is something I’ve suspected for a long time. We’re all much happier in the dark. We’re all much happier not looking at a big picture we have no control over. What’s the point of going to meetings where nothing happens except you are informed of everyone else’s dissatisfaction ... which you have no control over.

Yes, I belong to the Ignorance is Bliss Club. It’s a huge club, but don’t bother coming to the meetings. None of us ever show up.

It’s March and I can already see the way this year is going to go. It’s gonna be a great year for me as a writer but a sucky year for my health.

See, my play was published and I’ve had bronchitis since the week before New Year’s. The length of the disease was determined by the momentousness of the event. Then this week I find out that I’m gonna be published in two anthologies and I’VE GOT A COLD! I’m not sure if I can extend this pattern to previous years ... I did have the whole knee thing going on back in October ‘02, right when I started auditions for my production in Hollywood.

I don’t think I’m strong enough for Broadway or a runaway best-seller.

In other news, I’ll soon be blogging for blogging.la. Look for entries there from me on such topics as the greatness of craigslist.org, local cafes that welcome laptop writers, insects I find and photograph in the back yard and walking to work.

Okay, maybe triumph is a little bit big.

I just got an email from my publisher (Playscripts, inc.) and they submitted two of my monologues and one scene from The Redeemer to be included in Best Stage Scenes 2004 and Best Men’s Stage Monlogues published by Smith and Kraus. (Okay, okay, they don’t have the sexiest site.) They only picked one of the monologues, but I’d rather that than both monologues and not the scene because now I’m in TWO books! I’ll keep everyone posted on the release date.

The pay is practically non-existent, but I consider it good exposure for my work. A little billboard out there directing folks back to my plays.

My marketing plan goes something like this: an actor uses one of my monologues or scenes for audition. Maybe he gets the part, maybe not. But he stands up there and says, I’ll be doing Stewart’s monlogue from The Redeemer by Cybele May (hopefully he’ll pronounce my name correctly). The director and casting director talk, maybe a little about the play and the actor’s interpretations or maybe not. But the fact that my name has entered the consciousness of the director is good. Maybe another year goes by and he might see another monologue (I have others up on the web for actors to use) and there’s that name again. One day he’s looking through a catalogue or browsing the web and he comes across my name and he’s heard of me. Suddenly I’m validated. He’s more inclined to read my more, perhaps even like it.

Anyway, that’s what I hope.

The next thing I should do is actually write some more!

I’m not adept enough to create poetry from my spam subject lines. But I had to share this little doozy I got today:

Subject: Dip Your Toes in Lettering!
From: “Roland Husman” .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

I didn’t actually read the text of the email. I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with press-apply toenails with little sayings on them (maybe they look like those little valentine’s candy hearts).

This is just an attempt to get my ping to weblogs.com take effect. I don’t know why I care. I really don’t get much traffic, but it’d be nice if some of them just came by curiousity and perhaps stayed for the quality.

So, this is just a blatant attempt to try to get myself to show up on lablogs.com.

Yes, it’s March and if you haven’t checked the calendar, it’s National Novel Editing Month.

Of course, I can’t do anything normally. I’m not planning on editing, because that implies that I have a “draft” of my novel that’s worthy of polish. I don’t have something rough, I have something that’s raw.

I’m planning a chapter-by-chapter rewrite. I’m just sitting down with print out and retyping it. My laziness will be a guide - if I don’t feel like typing it, it’s probably not good enough to be in the novel. If I can reword it to be more concise, you can be damn sure I will.

The Exchange, for those of you who joined recently, is the story of a teen girl who was raised by her mother and grandmother. When she’s in a car accident, her mother tries to track down her biological father. She’s not able to find him, but seeks help from a postmaster in the man’s tiny rural hometown. The postmaster takes pity on the little girl in the hospital and sends her flowers, signing her father’s name. Of course the girl writes a thank you note when she recovers and they begin corresponding. For years. Finally she comes to town in search of her father and finds this postmast, who is only a few years older than her and they strike up a friendship as the postmaster seeks to thwart her efforts to actually meet her father.

It needs work and what I had originally envisioned was that the bulk of the novel would simply be the exchange of letters between the two people as the girl grew up. She would start at 13 or 14 and eventually come looking for her father about five years later. I think the pretense of letters has got to go. I don’t think there’s any compelling reason that I can draft that they wouldn’t email each other, if not from the beginning, eventually the communication would become more immediate.

So it’s a lot to do. And of course it’s the second of the month and I haven’t started yet. The rules for NaNoEdMo are much more strict (well, for me) since they require 50 hours of work. And I don’t usually take that long to write it.

I read all these things (as you’ve seen) and it gets me to wondering. They always say we’re overdue for this or that.

Take a look at Parkfield. They’re supposed to be on a 22 year cycle for major earthquakes. And here we are, 16 years after the last expected quake and we’re still waiting. Of course a watched pot never boils. The more resources we throw at studying this exceptionally regular event, the less likely it will happen. Maybe that’s the cure ...

Take a look at Gorda and Juan de Fuca subduction zone. They are supposed to get a quake (part Native American lore and part geological evidence) every 300 to 600 years. It’s been more than 600 since it last ripped from the Mendocino coast to Vancouver - a huge quake that caused the coastal wetlands near the bays and inlets to either be pushed up or sink as much as three feet. This of course caused huge deadly tsunamis that were recorded in Japan at that time about 600 years ago. 

Then Russ shows a link to a story about the new rumblings under Yellowstone. We like to think of Yellowstone as geysers and mudpots, but it’s really an ancient and dormant volcano. Turns out that supervolcano is 40,000 years overdue for an eruption. And when it goes Ö that’s gonna be a huge one. We’re talking something that’ll take out most of the park and spew debris and ash into the atmosphere that may cause the equivalent of a nuclear winter for the Eastern US. And some other reports of a worst case scenario say it would destroy every living thing in a 600 mile radius.

My personal favorite story is of Cumbre Vieja in the Canary Islands. It’s a large volcano that has a large portion of its western mount that is particularly unstable and could break away and collapse into the ocean. Why should we care? Well, it’s a mountian, and the displacement of water in such a short period of time would create a super tsunami that would race across the Atlantic Ocean and swamp all coastal cities with a wave as high as 100 feet. A 100 foot wave would swamp the entire state of Florida, which doesn’t have much above sea level. Okay, maybe we’re not overdue for it, because I don’t think this particular thing has ever happened before, but it’s a huge thing anyway. If you’re really interested in sub-oceanic landslides and the accompanying landslides, here’s some good reading for those days when you’re not fatalistic enough.

I’m not sure why I bring these up. I suppose there are plenty of times we’re told that something will happen and it does. I suppose there are lots of other times when we’re told that they’ll happen and they don’t. Of course you can never say never because there’s always more future out there.

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it here before or not, but I’ve kind of been obsessed by these wild parrots I’ve been seeing in Los Angeles for the past ten years or so. It got worse when I started working in Hollywood, because there seems to be a large colony of them over in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

The story goes that these were birds imported to the US and they were in quarantine down in Long Beach. Then there was a big storm in 1992 destroyed the aviary and all the birds escaped. The resourceful little conures (parakeets) set up sucessful breeding colonies all over Los Angeles, including Hollywood, Santa Monica, Temple City and Pasadena. They’re entirely unexpected, in a way, when you’re walking down the street and you’ll look up into a palm tree and hear their cackles and see something the same color as the fronds flitting about. I’m not having much luck finding info out on the ‘net about them, except for this lovely but slightly outdated site called Parrot Project.

But this morning, not only did I get to see them much closer up than usual, I also snapped a few photos.

There were two out there today, though I only caught one of them with the camera. As far as I can tell, it’s a blue crowned conure. It’s not a bad picture of the cedar waxwing either ...

I don’t know how it slipped my mind, dear readers three. But there it is. I am published now. You can buy it online. Or come by the house and take one of my complimentary copies the publisher sent me.

Of course sales have been going like gangbusters. I can track who has ordered copies and I’ve been quite suprised to find that 90% (9 sales) of those ordering the play don’t even know me (not that I know of, anyway). I’m very big in ... hmm, well, there’s really no rhyme or reason to it, no pattern I can detect. Leavenworth, Kansas; Idaho Falls, Idaho; Caspar, Wyoming ... Wheeling, IL.

I brought this up for another reason though. It’s about titles. See, the title is The Redeemer. Now when you go to the front page of the site and you can search by playwright (well, I can’t really change my name easily) or title. Well, take a lookee at my title and you’ll see that it falls in the last half of the alphabet. I’m thinking this is a bad idea. I have a similar issue with the short film I did a few years ago, entropy. Sure, E is pretty close to the beginning of the alphabet, but ya hafta go to page two to see it.

I’m not saying I want to be at the top of all lists, I just wanna be somehwere on the list where someone will see it before they get bored. I don’t have name recognition to get me started. I wonder if anyone else has thought about this.

So I’m thinking in the future, I’m gonna start all my titles with an A. I have no idea how I’m going to find appropriate titles that begin with A, but I think this might be the key to my success.

I had fun reading this article in The New Yorker today called Select All by Christopher Caldwell. It’s about how having choices, making decisions and feeling comfortable with those decisions may have a lot to do with our feelings of well-being.

And I think it’s true to a large degree. I think it’s one of the reasons I like shopping at Trader Joe’s. Let’s face it, when you go to the standard grocery store, you’re presented with 60 different choices for one thing - different sizes, squeezable bottles, brands, off-brands, names (catsup, ketchup, etc.). We try to eliminate choices. “I’m not buying an off-brand” or “I want organic”. This all makes it more manageable. Well, Trader Joe’s offers little of that. The most overwhelming part of the store is the cheese section, and not because it offers so much of the same thing, there are few different brands of the same cheese, just lots of different kinds of cheese.

I think a great deal of middle class depression can be eliminated by not shopping. I think if I didn’t go shopping as often, I’d probably be happier. Of course not having enough choice makes us feel trapped. Thank goodness I’m not the one who does the grocery shopping.

I’ve been thinking about my writing lately. Which is good, because there are large spans of time where I don’t think about it and I worry that makes me a bad writer, or worse, not a writer at all.

Anyway, the point is that I was thinking about my first novel (heehee), The Exchange. I’ve decided to amp up the drama in it and maybe bring it into the 21st century. For those of you who have joined this blog more recently than two years ago, the story centers on a teen girl who reconnects with her father through a series of letters. Of course that doesn’t make sense now, it would be email. So I’ll fix that.

And I think I’ll kill off the grandmother while I’m at it. That way she’ll have a huge hole in her life and it will propel her on her trip to meet him. Grandma won’t die in the car accident. I think it’ll just be a stroke or something rather quick.

So, it looks like I’m in for NaNoEdMo. And the best part is that much of my editing will also be writing, which as we all know is the only fun part about editing.

I’ve been sadly lax lately blogging. I can’t think of much to blog about that would be of interest. Though I’m not sure that stops many bloggers.

Sean Bonner says that you have to update your blog lots. I fail that test.

I loved his posting called Al-gebra. Very funny.

Does this count as a post?

I’ve noticed that I never talk about what I read on my blog.

I’m not really into fiction. Yeah, I know, I’ve been doing the novel-in-a-month thing, but I think that’s more of an exercise than anything else.

My taste, first off. I’m a science aficionado. Not science fiction, which is great for movies and TV shows and books and all, but I like pure science. I think it goes back to trying to understand this mixed-up world of ours. I read a lot of consumerist science stuff (‘cuz I’m not well-versed enough for the real journals). I’ve been reading Scientific American for many years, Discover, because it’s great for really short bursts of reading, kind of like the Entertainment Weekly of science journals. I like Tuesdays because that’s the day that the New York Times has their expanded Science section. I like physics and the ideas behind quantum physics and the search for the superstring theory. I don’t understand it all and I’m trying to read Brian Greene’s book right now, The Elegant Universe.

I like the life sciences and I’m fascinated by the beasts that are only recently gone from our world, like the Steller’s Sea Cow (like a manatee only twice as big and lived up off the coast of the Alaska). I like stuff about animal behavior and organization. I like to watch bees and ants and I’m interested in animal culture as it relates to understanding our own brains. I like it when we discover that crows are smart, because I hope it makes us more humble.

When I was a teen I read books like Carl Sagan’s Dragon’s of Eden and everything of Lewis Thomas I could get my hands on. I struggled to get through Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which I never did and it still sits on my shelf as a testament to my failure to learn more about the mathematics of music.

I like geology and plate tectonics. Mostly because I lived in Humboldt County, which is pretty much on top of the Gorda Plate as it’s being subducted under the North American plate and from the geology class I had at college, someday that fault is going to rip starting at the Mendocino Triple Junction and head all the way up the coast to the Juan de Fuca plate and past Seattle to Vancouver. It’ll be a big earthquake - that’s the Big One - not the San Andreas that’ll hit North America. For some reason I check the recent quakes every day. Like that’s going to warn me.

My favorite TV show is Nova - it has been since I was a kid. I remember the first show I watched on Nova was about dreams and the subconscious. I think that was in 1977, back when we still had a little 14” black and white TV. I watch the Discovery Channel and National Geographic channel but I think that they sensationalize stuff a lot or gloss over the reality of our breadth of knowledge. They also only like to do shows on stuff they can get film of - so you can count on lots of animals and not a lot of hard science.

Don’t get me wrong, I like other brain candy type TV shows - I’m embarrassed to list them, but it goes something like this (in really no order), Star Trek (Enterprise at the moment), Angel, Stargate, ER, Law & Order. I’ll watch silly sitcoms or reruns of old shows on Nick at Nite (Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched), but that’s all it is, brain candy. As empty as a bowl of starlight mints.

I think my interest in non-fiction is actually pretty helpful as a writer. I know that there are plenty of other playwrights that try to merge the technical with the dramatic (Stoppard, David Auburn, Michael Frayn).

I got the car back from the shop and it looks pretty damn good. They detailed it as well ... I should have timed the accident when it really needed a good wash and wax, but I’ll take what I can get. They even shampooed the mats.

Now, about me. I’ve had this bronchitis thing going on for a while. I first went to the doctor on New Year’s Eve and he gave me a round of Biaxin XL and sent me on my way. Two weeks later I was still wheezing, so I went back and he put me on Advair and some Allegra to keep things from irritating me (yeah, like Allegra works on all irritants!).

Well, another couple of weeks and I get this horrible pain in my chest. At first it’s just behind my shoulder blades and I chalk it up to sleeping in the wrong position. But then it moves over to my left side and gets bigger and pretty much makes breathing rather painful. So, back to the doctor. He does chest X-rays to rule out pneumonia and pleurisy and they come out clear. So he says that I’ve probably just trashed those muscles from all the coughing and I should stop that. He puts me on another round of antibiotics (Zithromax) and this time I have to accept a cough suppressant - Phenergan. Now, I’m not one for taking narcotics. He offered me codeine, and I know most folks jump at the chance to get some codeine, but not me, it makes me nervous and anxious. So he gives me Phenergan, which as far as I can tell, is an anti-vomiting and general knockout drug.

That’s good, because I’m under doctors orders to get more sleep. He said nine or ten hours a night. Well, a spoonful of this stuff at nine each night and I’m out by ten and could go until ten the next morning. I haven’t been at the office much, mostly because I’m taking this stuff and I shouldn’t drive, and even when I’m there I’m either complaining about how much it hurts when I breath or totally zonked off my ass with the hangover this creates.

We’ll see how the next few days go. The worst news about all this is that I can’t see myself being ready to train again until March at the earliest, which means the LA Marathon is out of the realm of possibility. Oh well. There’s always a marathon somewhere. There’s no reason I can’t train for the one in Santa Clarita or maybe Big Bear.

I left my car at Moden Auto Body on Monday. I’m riding around in a Dodge Stratus ... which I wouldn’t really consider an approximate replacement for the Prius, but hey, the insurance is covering it.

See it as it happens.

So, I’m cruising around the ‘net looking at other blogs. I’m trying to figure out what other bloggers have that I don’t. You know, they post all the time, they say clever things and have multiple entries on one day. They look like they have interesting observations and they’re not afraid of sharing them. But I’ve also noticed that a lot of it is filler. There are the people that put a picture of the book they’re reading… is it a picture book? won’t the title do? They put little pictures of everything up, the CD in their player, a little pixie that is supposed to tell us what the weather is like where the blogger is. They take a lot of quizzes, and post the results. They answer a lot of questions ... Friday Five, Thursday Threesome.

I’m just not able to do those things on a regular basis and I wonder if that makes me a bad blogger. Sometimes I don’t think I’m a blogger at all. I have a blog. I keep a blog. Just like I write novels, that doesn’t make me a novelists. I write plays, good plays, and that makes me a playwright.

What’s the difference, and why do I care?

So, the new car is great. I love it. I love just about everything about it.

It’s attractive.

It’s so damn attractive it compelled a couch to come off of some car ahead of me on the 5 north just past the 170 merge. There I was, second lane from the left and it was tumbling towards me. I couldn’t change lanes, as it was taking up part of the #3 and some other car was in #1. So I took it on the chin. Well, Dyna (what I named the car) took it on the passenger side fender. It’s not a serious blow, but will require more work that a bottle of rubbing compound.

I think I’m taking it well. After all, I’ve had the car only a scant month and I’ve already messed it up. But I’m grateful that I didn’t hit anyone else and that Brett (in the car with me) and I are fine. And the car was driveable.

But I have yet to go to the body shop and get the real news.

I’ve decided that the repairs will take an inordinate amount of time and I will have to live with the dent so I’m going to name it. Dyna, meet Dent, Arthur Dent.

Because I’m not clever enough to have a page about me, this is just an entry about me. Unlike all the other entries on this blog that only pretend to be about me.

I am: happily married
I drive: a 2004 Prius
I am: liberal
I live: in Los Angeles
I react to: bee stings
I use: a PC
I type: 70 wpm
I am: the middle child
I have: one dog
I have: two blue eyes
I play: Scrabble online
I have: no tattoos
I have: two piercings - one in each earlobe
I like: chocolate, licorice, coffee (the dark flavors)
I earned: a BA
I earned: an MFA
I eat: candy, often to the exclusion of meals
I have: lived in three states (Pennsylvania, Ohio and California)
I lettered: in swimming in high school
I deny: that I know how to use PowerPoint
I read: non-fiction
I drink: at times
I prefer: gin
I love: mangoes
I vote
I walk
I sleep
I can’t sleep
I write: plays, first drafts of novels, emails, blog entries, photo captions, synopses, biographies, loglines, drafts, notes, about me.

Yes, when everything’s new, you feel like there are so many more possiblities.

New kitchen means that I can be organized and change my lifestyle into one of productivity and hospitality.

New car means I can drive with less guilt. But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to drive more.

This of course rubs off on other parts of my life. Once again I am starting on The Artist’s Way program for myself. This means a bit of whiny journaling (called morning pages) and some other exercises. The goal is to dislodge those things that keep me from my writing life. Let’s face it, I’ve got the time to get things done, we all know that I can write really, really fast, so there’s no reason that I can’t conservatively churn out a play a year. But I don’t and I need to work through why that is and change it.

I used to think my lack of productivity was okay. There was still plenty of time. But there really isn’t. And even if there is, and half the stuff I write is crap, shouldn’t there be more of my stuff, so more would be good stuff?

Remember back in October I mentioned how upset I was about getting rid of the dishwasher?

Here’s a little update. First, the new dishwasher kicks the old dishwasher’s ass! It’s so quiet that twice on Thanksgiving people opened it while it was running because they didn’t know it was running. And it actually cleans the dishes! What a concept. I’m having trouble getting used to the part where you don’t actually wash the dishes before you put them into the dishwasher. You’re just supposed to scrape them and put them in all crusty with food and sauce and stuff. It’s supposed to be more efficient (saves water and energy over hand washing). And it works.

Yes, getting rid of things that no longer suit your needs is good.

Anyway, from my previous post you can glean that I’m selling my car. Well, I sold my car. To a nice fellow named Howard who is a grad student from UCLA. I showed the car only a three times and was stood up for appointments twice as many times. Howard is very excited about the car, the only person who saw it that was. And because he seemed so excited before he even came to see the car, I did something special for him. Knowing my affinity for spreadsheets, you won’t be surprised to hear that I made a log of all the major maintenance on the car. All I did was take what I had on the work orders from the dealer and synopsize them, but I guess it gave him the impression that if I was meticulous enough to make a spreadsheet, I probably took good care of the car. Which I did.

See, that’s what upset me about the process of selling the car. Everyone was quoting Kelly Blue Book or Edmunds to me. First they weren’t running the numbers right so they’d tell me that the car was only worth $2,200 or something, when they were inputting that it was only in fair condition and didn’t have AT, AC, ABS and all that rot. And what’s wrong with charging what it’s worth, anyway? That’s what the book tells you, what the car is worth. If I had a pound of gold to sell and you went and looked up that gold is selling today at $409.50 per ounce, you don’t go in asking for 10% off - because you know that’s the value of it. Period. (Okay, maybe that’s not a good example, because gold is a commodity and appreciates for the most part, where a car is useful and depreciates for the most part.) The value of my car was at least what the blue book said, if not more. There were intangibles that I thought added value: The car was in great shape; No accidents; It had been kept under cover during the day for the past four years and carported for the past six at night; Absolutely nothing wrong with it mechanically. Yes, it will need new tires in about 5,000 miles. But to me that’s another year, so why would I replace the tires now? That’s normal wear. Someone tells me they’ll need to be replaced in two or three months, I ask them where they hell they’re driving! Across the country a back?

Anyway, Howard saw the virtues of my little car and appreciated how much I appreciated her. She really does run great, quiet and I had always gotten better mileage than the EPA suggestions on the sticker (chalk that up to clean livin’ baby). Let’s face it, a car only three months shy of 10 years with only 65,000 miles, well equipped and from the original owner is quite a find these days.

My point though here, and obviously I have more than a few of them, is that there is nothing wrong with the car. I just feel like getting a new one. Or so I like to rationalize. The Impreza was a compromise car from the start. It’s small and doesn’t have a lot of features like cruise control or a nice stereo or the space to schlep stuff. It was good to get me to work and back and to run errands and to take the dog to the vet. I want a car that pollutes less (and let’s face it, the Prius pollutes soooooooo much less). I ran a few numbers at the Enviromental Defense Fund’s Tailpipe Tally - now they don’t have the ‘04 Prius up there so I ran the old one against my little Subaru. At 6,000 miles a year (okay, that’s really more than I drive, but it’s a nice figure):

CAR…...............Fuel/Cost…....CO2 ......CO1 ....Nitrogen oxides….Hydro-carbons
2003 TOYOTA PRIUS….124 gal/$191….2396 lb…38.4 lb….0.4 lb…........0.4 lb
(48.6 mpg, SULEV)

1994 SUBARU IMPREZA..231 gal/$356….4477 lb..165.3 lb…15.2 lb….......10.7 lb
(26.0 mpg, Tier 1)

You see that? My car puts out 10.7 pounds of hydro-carbons a year and the Prius puts out 0.4? My car puts out more than 25 times as much?

So that helps me to rationalize my impact on the planet and all that rot. Because that is really what I’m trying to do. Hone my life, decide where things are important. And if I can afford a better, more efficient car after reducing my driving, yeah, it’s my responsibility to do that. And I kept my last car in great shape and it will perform better for the environment than some other clunker that it’s getting off the road. It’s my responsiblity to be an early adopter of techonolgy and lifestyle choices I think can make a difference. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

I know, it’s a little off-topic. But I finally got the call that my car is coming in! I’m getting a 2004 Toyota Prius.

So, if you want a good deal on a sweet little, low-miles car ... I’ve got just the thing for you. My 1994 Subaru Impreza with only 65,000 miles on it!

So I prepped my “manuscript” for posting on the NaNoEdMo Yahoo!Group for reading. I wanted to at least fix a few of the glaring errors (I called one of my characters by the wrong name for several chapters) and then I decided to break up the chapters properly. I kind of abandoned the chapters when I wrote the fairy tale part. I just started writing the fairy tale from beginning to end, instead of sprinkling it in every other chapter or so. So I went through and chopped it up and inserted it where I thought it might belong. Who knows if it does. The book is about 1/3 fairy tale, 2/3 saint’s history.

So, I re-pdf’d it. I’ve uploaded it now. I also corrected some security measures I’d placed on it. It wasn’t letting anyone print it. The security is just supposed to keep someone from copying and pasting the text. I have this bizarre fear that some student somewhere is going to turn it in as a writing assignment. That’s the only thing I can figure it’s good for. No one is certainly going to steal it and put their name on it and send it to a publisher.

Yes, it’s true, I write like a woman. But I blog like a man! I threw some entries from this blog through the Gender Genie (which is brilliant, I tell ya!) and it said that my entries were male. It’s supposed to be 80% accurate.

For giggles I also ran some of my novel through it. I definitely write fiction like a woman. I even ran the “fairy tale” sections through separately.

Now I feel like running other things through it. Bicycle assembly instructions. Software help text. Letters. Emails. Essays from the web.