Latest article

Hey everyone!

My latest Defense AT&L article is online now. It's titled The Courage Imperative, and you definitely don't need a technical degree to understand it. :)

Writing Update

Holy cow I'm having fun with this new book project.

As I previously mentioned, it's a very different kind of thing from The Boomer Sisters books. It's still an adventure, with a bit of mystery, but it's all takes place in a fantasy world, full of strange creatures and much danger.

I find that I can fill about four notebook pages in an hour, before running out of words. I'm going to go do that now.

Magnetic Poetry

A while back, I came into possession of a little box of words on magnets - a magnetic poetry kit. On campus, I found a bathroom stall with metal dividing walls and covered the back of the door with words. It was fun to periodically stop by and see what kind of poetry people created.

Then someone took the magnets away. I assume they were thrown in the trash.

So I put up another set. A few days later, they were gone too. But I still had plenty left.

Now that I'm in a new position, I covered the fridge at my new office, and people have so far not thrown them away. In fact, there's some pretty fun stuff there:

MPG vs GPW

These days, most of my commute is by bus. I only drive about a mile or two to the bus stop, and it's at a relatively low speed, with plenty of stop & go.

So, my gas mileage isn't as good as it is on a highway. It's actually taken a bit of a dive. But, while my MPG is getting worse, my Gallons Per Week is fantastic. I hardly ever have to go to the gas station. And that's the real point, isn't it?

I (don't) Got The Power!

Every move, something goes missing. This is one of the factors contributing to the truism of military life that says "three moves is equivalent to a fire."

This time, we seem to have lost the charging station and spare battery for my cordless drill... along with the charger cord for our cordless weed eater. I spent quite a while looking for them both, but no luck (yet). So far, both devices have a bit of juice left, but it won't be long before they're stone cold dead.

The one hopeful aspect of this absence is that both chargers were in roughly the same place in our Ohio house (the garage). So maybe they're still tucked away in a secret box somewhere. The weedeater charger is small enough that it could conceivably have been accidentally thrown away, but my goodness, the battery and charging station for the drill is pretty much impossible to overlook. So, I'm cautiously optimistic that they're still around here, somewhere.

I'm just running out of places to look, and like I said, the charges are running down...

This Morning...

There are times when a brutally hot and humid day, followed by an epic midnight thunderstorm, will conspire to create a graceful morning that is exquisitely crisp, as if the weather is apologizing for its previous rudeness.

This is not one of those times.

Yesterday was indeed brutal, and last night's thunderstorm epic, but this morning was no apology.

At 5:45, I stepped outside to go for a run across the surface of Venus. The morning air was trying to be cool, like a balding, fat, 53 year old man in a Member's Only jacket, driving across campus in a t-top Camaro and blasting Barry Manilow's 1978 disco hit, Copacabana, while winking at the girls going past. OK, it wasn't quite as cool as that.

Tiny invisible fairies stretched their coarsest woolen gossamer across my path, lovingly wrapping me in a warm, damp embrace and helpfully thickening the air I'd hoped to breath. It was quite an interesting run.

My new goal for the day: stop sweating at some point before bed.

"Mowing"

This weekend, I spent about 30 minutes "mowing" the grass, using my uber-green eco-nerd reel mower.

Note, that's "reel" mower, not "real" mower. If it was a real mower, it would probably clip the long grasses, rather than just press them down a bit.

Fortunately, my "lawn" (which consists largely of a strange, low-growing green plant that is not grass) doesn't really do much of what you'd call "growing." Get this: the last time I mowed was July 6th. I mowed this weekend more out of a sense of duty rather than because the grass (such as it is) was actually getting long.

That's really good, because the end result of my mowing didn't look all that different from what it looked like before I began.

So, my earlier post about figuring out time does get balanced out a bit by the fact that I'm not spending 90 minutes every Saturday mowing the lawn. I kinda dig that.

Time

I got really spoiled during my last assignment. Sure, being a full-time student had its own time pressures, with assignments due and lectures to attend... but I was still able to get to the gym on a regular basis, get some writing done, and spend time with the fam.

These days I'm struggling to figure out how to get to the gym - partly because there isn't a gym to get to. I could pay money for a membership at the Pentagon gym, but that's a 15-min shuttlebus ride each way (plus time waiting for the bus to show up), and I'm just not sure how often I'd be able to carve out 90+ minutes during the day for a workout.

My best bet is probably to get up and run in the morning, before work, but I'm already leaving the house at 6:30 am as it is. I don't know how much less sleep I can manage. Working out after work isn't a very attractive option either - mostly 'cause it means getting home later, and partly 'cause I'm usually kinda tired by the end of the day. Sigh. I'll figure it out, but at the moment I'm a bit stumped.

Also, early morning has always been my writing time. Saturday mornings like today are the best. I got up for a run and still had an hour or so to write before everyone else was awake. But now that I'm working on my new book, time for working out gets rarer and rarer.

We'll see how it goes...

It's started...

Well, I've started writing my book for this year: The Helper In The Sun.

I'm probably not going to do much posting on this blog for a while, preferring instead to put updates on Facebook and focusing most of my writing on the book.

But I really like how it's coming together so far. It's going to be quite a different thing than the Boomer Sisters books. More grown-up. A bit more serious, and definitely more challenging. I can't wait to see how it comes out.

While I've aimed to do the previous books in 30 days, I'm giving myself a bit more time on this one. I still plan to have it done by Christmas, and I still plan to write at a frantic pace, but I know I won't be done by Sept 1st.

I'll keep you all posted...