Wednesday Check-In, July 3rd

Weight:

Weight is up to an embarrassing 201.6 once again. Those trips to visit my dad really do me in. He buys donuts, which are my kryptonite, and every time I would offer to cook something healthy, he would say, “let’s go out to dinner.” Invariably, we would wind up at some Italian restaurant.

I don’t know what is keeping me from logging my food into MyFitnessPal again, but I am just going to have to start. Partially, I think that it’s been due to being away, and partially probably to all the activity of late. Not only is my younger son spending the summer with his grampa 1200 miles away, but my older son is going away for a total of nearly a month to two different, very intensive trainings. Add my trip to Chicago, with the return happening the first day of school, then top it off with the (exciting, but sad) news of my hubby’s promotion and transfer. The boys and I will stay in Florida for the teen’s final year of school while hubby will be living about halfway up the coast. Hubby’s promotion means that we also have to sell the house that we just bought last year, although we have to time that with me and the younger boy moving north to be with hubby. The house needs major cleaning and clearing out, ‘cause we are some serious pack-rats; but a cluttered house doesn’t show well. So, yeah, busy and stressed, and stress eating.

At any rate, I am back on the exercises. Gotta tell you, forty sit ups after two weeks of none was not easy. But I did them, and that’s what’s important. I also completed most of my usual calisthenics routine. The treadmill is back to one hour every other day. The fight to get back to what one friends calls “one-derland” is on.

Writing:

It’s nice that, sometimes when I screw up in one area, I shine in another. This is one of those times. So far this month, I have written 2592 words; since last week, I have written a total of 3905 words. All of those words have been in Quantum Kiss. One thing that’s helping is that I decided to join Camp NaNoWriMo, in which we are attempting to write a total of 50K words by July 31^st, beginning on July 1^st.

For this week, with the holiday, and the teen heading off to one training on Saturday, and hubby leaving out for a week on Monday, the writing is slow-going—I know, I know, not so slow if I’m churning out in one week what I have been doing in two weeks or a month. Our daily goal in Camp is 1613. The nice thing, and one I didn’t think I’d like, is that they assign you to a “cabin”, where you can check in with others and motivate each other. Our cabin is having a slow start, but that happens.

My goal is to finish Quantum Kiss this month and begin to really focus on Druid, my Western. A friend of mine even made me a sig and avi set, as well as a book “cover” to display on my Camp profile once I’ve finished Q.K.

Prompt: It’s 1776. You are a loyalist married to a rebel. Or vice versa. How do you feel about your mate? Are you worried for them? Hopeful that they’ll be killed?

Vocab: Loyalist: One who remained loyal to the British government during the American Revolution.

Wednesday Check In: A Day Late and 1200 Miles Away...

Weight:

I’ve tried to keep the food intake down this week, but I’ve been very naughty on the carb front. Between that and going out to dinner with hubby to Olive Garden, I wound up with a gain over last week. I’m back to 200.8. Not thrilled. Not that I did anything about it yesterday. Got up and had no time to exercise, as I had to catch a plane to Connecticut with my youngest son. He’s spending the summer with his grampa. We ate a very, very quick McSandwich for breakfast. Lunch/supper was at a very nice restaurant. I was hungry, so I had an appetizer of New England Clam Chowder. Ate a relatively healthy lunch of braised herb salmon and asparagus, with a small bit of smashed potatoes. Dessert was an issue. Lava cake and ice cream, split with my son. Oy vay! Connecticut’s gonna be hard.

On the plus side, despite the rain and chill keeping me from walking around the hilly neighborhood and the lack of exercise equipment at the house, I should be able to get over to the local YMCA. My dad said that they have a two week free trial that I can participate in. Failing that, the local gym has a 10 day free trial. I’m hoping the Y has a pool; although there is a town pool, it’s so far been cold and rainy and the town pool is outside.

The other thing going for me is that my dad is a diabetic. I know that sounds wrong, but what I mean is that there’s not a whole lot of sugary crap food around his house. Now if I can just get him to stop feeding my son and I like we’re starved and having a low-sugar attack, we’ll be fine.

Words:

At least I’ve gotten some words written this week. I got up a couple of mornings and knocked out some writing while waiting for the teen to get ready to leave for school. I also wrote one day in a notebook while I was at an amusement park with my son and his friend. With all of that, and despite getting ready for my trip to Connecticut, I still managed to pop out 1823 words. I was super-proud that all of the words were in my sci-fi romance instead of all over the place. Now, not all of it was in a direct timeline from point A to point B, but still…

These next couple of weeks will be a challenge to find writing time, as I am at my dad’s to help him clean out some of my mom’s stuff. Mom is in a nursing home and neither knows about nor wants (when she does know about) a good percentage of her things. She has resigned herself to being in the home and knows that she has no room for many of her things, most of which she has not even seen, let alone used, for several years.

There are also the numerous dusty items that are found when one has been living in the same home for dozens and dozens of years. I need to help Dad sort through a lot of that stuff while I'm here, and since he'll be working during the day for the next couple of weeks, it's pretty much on me. 

Vocab: Conflagrate: to be on fire.

Story idea: A dragon walks into a pub…

Wednesday Check-in

Hi all!

I know I’ve been absent for the past couple weeks. It has been a struggle for me to get back into the swing of things. The good news is, Mom goes to a home this week, and Dad is nearly done with the spend-down, which will help him qualify for Medicaid. My dad is not a rich man, but the government decrees that he has to spend half of his carefully squirreled away savings & investments or they won’t pay for my mom’s care. Weird, eh? This does relieve a lot of the stress that was giving me fits of writer’s block. While my stress still remains (who among us doesn’t have stress and can we trade lives for a few days?), my mind is beginning to clear of the cobwebs of worry for my parents. I know people who have written through the deaths of their parents and, like those women who can work full-time, cook gourmet meals, keep a clean house, and pursue a doctorate degree while raising happy, healthy children and keeping their mates satisfied, I just don’t get it. I applaud them, but I will never be one of those people. As my teen says, “Mom, you’re a worrier.” Worry leads to stress which leads to a lack of sleep which leads to a foggy brain. And weight gain.

For some reason, the picture is not loading, so I'll just tell you the number and add the picture later if it allows me to. I am up to 199.0 again.

Yup. I gained this week. I haven’t seen that number in a couple of months now. I can only blame the stressful past month so much on this one. In all honesty, I gained because I was not careful in my eating. I went back to old, bad habits, and didn’t track my eating so I could ignore the elephant in the room, no fat jokes against myself intended. I ate pasta like the world was ending tomorrow. I ate candy—stupid peanut butter cup Easter eggs. I ate a third of a loaf of French bread on my own. I ate often. I ate late at night. I ate from boredom in the few spates of time I had where I should have been writing or relaxing. Wrong choices, and lots of them, all contributed to my weight gain. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that I kept exercising, through it all. The other good news is that I can come back from this. I feel no need to throw out the baby with the bath water and toss my diet into the trash can. What I do feel is the need to re-set, to start over again. And this is something we can all easily do when it comes to this sort of thing. The past is the past, the future is not yet written; what I do now is what counts. So, I am going to heave myself back onto the wagon of healthier eating and let’s see if I can’t bring some more weight loss back to this blog next week.

As to writing, I have written a grand total of 25 words this month! Go, me! All right, not so great by any standards. I have re-set myself for the writing, as well, and a brand new Little Bites Challenge is now open for April. Those who wish to participate, the goal for the month is 7500 words, which is the 30 days of April multiplied by the 250 words per day. For me to catch up, I will need to write 725 words today, which is doable if I set my mind to it.

I now have received my (six!) twenty page each entries to judge for my local RWA's writing contest which must be completed by the end of the month (the 27^th to be exact). This definitely adds to my overflowing plate, but I am glad to do it.

At the moment, I am exhausted (it’s quarter past 10 in the morning and I’ve already been awake for longer than I slept last night), so I’m going to leave you with your prompt and vocab word and meander off for a 15 minute or so nap.

Prompt: Cinderella in Space. Re-tell the classic fairy tale in a sci-fi setting.

Vocab: Vacuum: A lack of air. (While not a very unusual word, it is often misspelled and is appropriate to the prompt.)

See you all soon!

Wednesday Check In

Last Wednesday, by the time I went to bed, I had the flu, good and solid. For the next three days, I had no energy outside of that required to do the most basic things—running the few errands that could not be put off, washing dishes, that sort of thing. My brain could not even begin to build any fantasy worlds or scenes; in fact, I spent the whole time watching Battlestar Galactica and playing cards on the laptop when I wasn’t sleeping. Most foods tasted awful to me, so I wound up snacking and eating a lot of bread and pasta (the only things that didn’t make me want to hurl) rather than really eating properly. With that in mind, here are my reports for the week:

Words:

My muse has been coming to me in the middle of the night lately, bearing a notebook, a pen, and a flashlight.  Despite that, between Sunday and Monday nights and a bit of this morning, I was able to get in a total of 1088 for the week, which is just 662 shy of the weekly 1750 that is my 250/day fiction writing goal. All of those words were in Quantum Kiss, which is now up to a total of 15,489 words. I was able to add to the notes for that world, as well as getting started on character profiles; those numbers are not included in my word count.

I have discovered that I will need to have some sort of organization if I’m to write a novel, as opposed to my seat-of-the-pants writing with fan fiction, where everyone knows what most of the characters look like and how they act, and all I have is one or two original characters to put in. The character worksheets provided to members on Savvy Authors (see “My Hang-outs”) are a great way to do that. I can keep an online copy, saved to my Sky Drive, as well as a hard copy. The nice thing about the worksheets is that I am forced to think beyond the physical attributes to their quirks and what makes them tick.

As I mentioned last week, I’m going to stop putting in a weather section unless something totally newsworthy, like a hurricane or snow (which would be totally newsworthy in Orlando!) happens. Instead, I know some of you really liked having a writing prompt, so I’m going to include one writing prompt and one new word (new to me) each week. Sometimes, I may just put in a word or words that I am familiar with but that are not used anymore like they were in the olden days when I was growing up and dinosaurs still roamed the earth.  

Writing prompt: A woman wakes up in Heaven’s waiting room, but St. Peter is not who she thought he would be.

Now, what word should I start off with? So many to choose from! Back in the days when bookstores were aplenty and books were made of paper and not binary code, I used to enjoy vocabulary books. I know, I know—GEEK! Yup, and proud of it. The University of Chicago used to come out with these little pamphlets where you could test your knowledge of vocabulary, much as the Reader’s Digest does (did?).

Since I am a random person (which drives the orderly Virgo in me absolutely bonkers), I am going to choose one of my favorite words—gloaming. I love that word; it just sounds so mysterious. Gloaming. Know what it means? Go to the head of the class, you get ten extra minutes of recess. The gloaming is the time between full day and darkness, also known as twilight or dusk. Gloaming can be used to describe that time between dark and full light in the morning, but is more commonly used for the evening hours. The gloaming has often been associated with magic, as it is a transitional time of day, a time that is neither day nor night, a time when the veil between the worlds is at its weakest.

Challenge: Use the word “gloaming” in the writer’s prompt. Write at least 500 words.

Weight:

Well, boys and girls, as I mentioned above, I was down with the flu for three full days, not counting last Wednesday, when I was just “feeling blah”. I was also unable to exercise for five days in a row (didn’t want to push it on Sunday morning & on Monday, the air conditioning man had to stop by—yes, again, and yes, to fix something on our six month old air conditioning unit). Despite those challenges, and despite eating all those carbs this week, I managed to lose another full pound! I am now a nearly-svelte (shoulda used that word!) 204.8. The “skinny shorts” that were painful to even try to put on a month ago (couldn’t even get them over my hips) are currently residing comfortably on my body. I can move and I can breathe, and I don’t feel like I’m cheating on my husband by wearing them (think about it for a minute—oh, you got it! TMI? ). My goal, assuming there are no new bouts of the flu, is to be back into the 100s, even if it’s 199.8, by Valentine’s Day at the latest.

My calorie count was rather high yesterday and I did snack late last night (I was having late night chocolate cravings), so I spent an extra 20 minutes (on low speed—2.6) on the treadmill this morning; I was only able to do that because my older boy had to be to school early for inspection for his military class, but it was nice to be able to do. I have decided also to incorporate at least one “high calorie” day each week, where I am eating closer to the number of calories I need to for very slow weight loss. Hubby figured that out to be around 1573 calories, which is 70% of what I need to maintain my weight. Most days, I try to keep the calories to 1200-1299. See you all next week (come on, 203.anything)!

Wednesday Check In

Words:

I did three writing sprints this week, one of which was interrupted by the teen and his date coming home to await her father, who was picking her up. I worked on a Christmas story for fan fiction, featuring Major Lorne of Stargate: Atlantis (Surprise! Not.) and my OFC (original female character). I am polishing it today and tomorrow for posting by the week-end. I also wrote Monday’s blog about some of the non-fiscal properties of gold.

Not including today’s blog, my word count for the week is 2671, which is an average of 381 per day. Not what I was aiming for, but not too bad considering this is my busy season with work (I work out of my home in direct sales and also train new sales representatives for the company). It’s also when I go, “Oh, crap! Taxes!” and run around getting all my papers together so I’m not freaking out on April 15.

This week, I plan on trying to get next week’s entries done ahead of time and then work on the NaNo fic. I would really like to finish it by the end of January and then start the editing process.

Let’s see how big this entry turns out to be and maybe I’ll include it, just for fun. All right, so including this entry, which is 847 words, my total word count for the week is 3518, which is an average of 502 per day. That’s more like it!

Weight:

Current weight is 211.6. Yay, me! That’s down 1.6 pounds from last week. If I am able to keep up a rate of 1.4 pounds lost per week, I should be at my goal weight of 160 in time for Chicon (August 16-18). I am going to have to really step up my game and quit the yo-yo-ing.

Working out of my house makes it both harder and easier. It is harder because there’s all this yummy, naughty food at my finger-tips. If I feel like being lazy, I can pull up a couch and veg in front of the TV for a couple of hours. It is easier because I also have all this yummy, healthy food at my finger-tips. If I feel like getting in an extra work-out, I can change clothes, get my exercise, shower and be back on track in a couple hours.

Now, I have been watching what I eat, as well as when I eat heavier stuff. I’ve been drinking more water and eating less/no snacks at night. Hubby has jumped on the band wagon, deciding that he should also start eating a bit healthier. He cooked a nice meal last night of lightly breaded flounder and carrots, with salad and crescent rolls (my younger boy, J, made the crescent rolls). I had a nice snack of sugar-free jell-o and light whipped topping.

I made homemade chicken pot pie for the family on Sunday and just put the recipe into the calorie counting site that I’m using. I will not make pot pie again for many, many, many pounds. It was just shy of 500 calories PER SERVING! Mainly from the crust, but still…

This week, I added to my exercise routine. I now do five extra stretches, as well as five more sit ups (for a total of 25 and I’m flying right through them) and five extra flutter kicks (two sets of ten, with a ten-count rest between each, then one set of five). I am up to 25 “easy” push-ups from 20, and can do eight regular push-ups now, as well—not military reg, as I don’t go down far enough, but I keep my back straight and that’s the important part. I do the five push-ups, the 25 easy ones, then three more regular ones. I finish off with alternating between child and cobra pose five times, then do ten curls and ten side raises with two pound weights to try to sculpt my arms a bit. When I finish with that, it’s on the treadmill for 25 minutes of medium-paced walking while I watch Netflix to keep me from getting bored.

Weather:

Well, last week-end, we had to cut on the air. Monday and yesterday, I cut it off when I got up in the morning and put it on again in the evening, so that it’s cool enough to sleep. Good thing, as we’ve been getting some rain on and off (you’ll see why this annoys hubby no end on Photo Friday this week). Last night, it stormed so hard, complete with thunder and lightning, that it woke me up around 3:00 and I didn’t get back to sleep until after 4:00.

I wound up having to go out and unplug the lights—I know they’re outdoor lights, but I didn’t want to take any chances with the weather being so wild. The forecast is calling for cooler temps (for Florida—it’ll be in the 70s, Fahrenheit) and thunder storms all day. Hubby will not be on his motorcycle. He will not be impressed.

See you all Friday!

The Triple Double-U

Words:

Well, of course I haven’t kept to a word count of 500-1,000 words per day. I have, however, finished editing and transferring my Stargate Atlantis fan fiction, In the Blood, over from fanfiction.net to Archive Of Our Own, aka AO3 (AO3 is the newly edited version). I also got the last chapter posted on both sites. There was not any heavy editing, but I did need to fix a word here and there, or add a sentence or two. It did force me to re-read the story, something I have not done in ages; I highly recommend it.

I discovered, on reading my fan fiction story, that I really do love language—I love the ebb and flow of the words, the rhythm of that “just so” sentence, the way the perfect simile or metaphor can convey so very much in so little space. I love writing the words, and then delving deeper, to break a scene down into its tiniest molecules.

At first, the idea of finishing my NaNo story and then editing it seemed like a chore; I know some jaded published authors out there who would claim that it is (and when you’re meeting a deadline, I imagine that it truly is a bit of a chore), but right now, in this moment, I look forward to finishing, to polishing, to fine-tuning the story so that it is not just a recounting, but is rather a story-telling that plays like a movie in the reader’s head.  

Weight:

Things are not going as fast as I would like, but then, they never do, as I’m a bit short on patience in most things. I have been keeping up my exercises, but I have not changed my eating habits much. I am down to 213.2 as of this morning, which is a loss, but only a loss of 2/10 of a pound. I think it’s time to do something a bit more drastic and keep a very, very close eye on those carbs. Being from Connecticut, where there are tons of Italians and good food is everywhere, I tend to love pasta and pizza, so this will be the difficult part for me. I must do it, though, if I’m to not look like I’m engulfing Kavan Smith at Chicon.

Weather:

Well, nice and cool here in central Florida again today. I’ve had my air conditioner off for a week now and am enjoying the fresh air. It’s been chilly enough in the mornings and overnights that, despite the warmer afternoons, my house stays cool all day. After the massive light bills of summer (which runs roughly from February to October/mid-November here usually), it’s nice to be able to open the windows and cut the light bill in half or more.

And rain—we had a wee, tiny, teeny, weensy bit of rain this evening! We haven’t seen rain in a dog’s age. All the retention ponds are shrinking and we are on rationing (just the usual winter “only water your lawn once a week” sort of thing). I’d love to have a nice rainy day one day here soon. How’s it in your section of the world? 

Word Wednesday: Intro

I have always loved words—the way a simple synonym can subtly change a meaning, the way they flow together to create new worlds. And yes, I was one of those weird kids in school that loved diagramming sentences. 

Word Wednesday is all about words--their uses, their misuses, their oddities and their simplicities. This week, since we’re just starting out, let’s define some of the words we’ll be using pretty regularly. Bear in mind that I’m not here to argue semantics (ooh! I’ll add that to my definitions) and any nitpicking will be subsequently ignored as I am a busy person looking for less stress, not more. My former middle school Earth Science teacher introduced me to the concept of K.I.S.S., an idea I have become more and more in love with each and every year since.

Semantics: The interpretation of the meaning of a word.

Etymology: The derivation of a word. A word’s “lineage”.

Root:  The base word from which other words can be formed. Ex: the root of “singing” is “sing”.

Next week, we'll talk about -ixes. You'll have to read to find out what I mean. :)