Five Things for April 12
Total eclipse of the…stomach bug
- As alluded to above, I did not, in spite of a great amount of planning ahead (booking a hotel room in January, buying a whole set of glasses, taking time off work), get to see the eclipse. A stomach bug began going around our building two or three weeks ago; Liesl fell victim to it on Friday evening and by early Sunday morning I was the one puking. Huge, huge bummer. The rest of the family went up without me and Theodora spent all of Sunday night throwing up, yay.
- I recently re-read two of my all-time favorite books — Goodnight Mister Tom, which I wrote a little bit about in this Five Things from a couple weeks ago (aaaand that I forgot to publish, oopsie woopsie!) and Dogs Don’t Tell Jokes. Both of them held up incredibly well. I was having some trouble with Dogs Don’t Tell Jokes because Gary is SO obnoxious with all his joke-telling, but when his parents challenge him to not tell any more jokes until the talent show is when things really get poignant. Really, almost downright sad. Gary realizes how much of an outcast he truly is, and how much he shields himself from the hurt with all his jokes. The last line of the book is just sad. After he ends up winning the talent show, he starts crying when he sees the state of the curtains, and he’s still crying when his parents pick him up several minutes later. I mean, what does it even mean? He’s just got this deep sadness inside of him that’s never really resolved. I suppose it kind of is — he makes a friend and a possible new girlfriend (although, excuse me Gary, what about Angelina?? I never picked up on that when I was a kid) but what about all the kids who bully him? Will anything change for him?
- Okay, the remainder of this post will be me talking about things I’ve been influenced into buying, probably. Starting with this Boba Tea Protein powder, which I’m actually super excited to try. (It hasn’t arrived yet, wah). I ordered the Vietnamese Coffee flavor, but got a subscription both for the 10% discount and for the ability to switch between flavors each month. I mean, I doubt I’ll be needing a new pack each month but we’ll see. I go between wanting to drink a protein shake each day and not wanting to drink protein at all because it seems to bloat me. I’m super sick of the vanilla flavor we have though, so it will be nice for a change.
- Next influenced item was The Way Home shorts, from Free People. To be fair, these have been on my to-buy list for at least a year; I finally decided to pull the trigger on the purchase because I’m nearing the end of Epic Heat, so it will be a lil reward for me. I actually bought a top and a bra to go with it…I probably shouldn’t buy a new set after *every* Caroline Girvan program I complete, but I am actually overdue for a refresh on exercise clothes. Again — they haven’t arrived yet, but I’ll share a review when I do get them.
- Don’t wanna get too spoilery here, but I’ve finally begun making some great progress on my scene outline of A Marriage of Convenience. My process is currently a glorious mess, and boy oh boy do I love it. I started by attempting to go scene by scene chronologically but got stuck thinking, “what comes next?” So I started writing down later scenes I wanted to build to. That whole thing got me a total of 9 scenes in, and then I was stuck again. (Yeah I know, I’m really writing a riveting book here.) So this weekend I finally said, “You know what? I’ve got random bits of dialog floating around in my head. I’ll write them down and that will count for something.” That exploded my 9 all the way to 16. So…maybe it’s not going so incredibly great, but the way I’m doing it — pondering all my options, looking at the story all at once, and just sort of getting everything down — is wildly different than anything I’ve done before, and just so freeing and chaotic. I might even write a separate blog post about this later if it turns out to do me/the process of getting this story down good in the long run.
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