writing life

Pottery Research

After just one pottery class, I already have information that will affect the book I’m working on with a character who’s a potter. Last week, we were doing hand building, working without the wheel. We made bowls using molds and “slab clay,” a sheet of clay sent through a wringer-like device to flatten it out. Then we made vases using coils of clay.

One thing I learned was that this takes a lot of upper-body effort. I was more sore the next day from the pottery work than I was from the eight-mile hike I did later in the day. You’re bending over a work bench, so your back gets stiff if you aren’t careful. You have to “wedge” the clay to work out any air pockets and make sure the moisture is evenly distributed. It’s a lot like kneading bread, but the clay is much stiffer than bread dough, so it takes more force and strength. Then there’s a lot of control while doing the shaping.

I also learned that working with clay really dries out your hands. My hands were so rough and dry after the class. I had to keep slathering my hands with lotion the rest of the weekend. They finally started to get back to normal in the middle of the week. It looks like I’ve got a scene with Elwyn I can add, where she comes up with a balm for the potter to use.

I’m having to adjust the timeline of the book based on something else I’ve learned. It’s important to the plot that my potter makes a certain piece that has to be done before the end of the book, but pottery is a slow process. A piece has to be completely dry before it can go into the kiln, and that can take weeks, especially if the piece is thick. The pieces we make during this class won’t be fired until about 2-3 weeks after we made them. We’re doing the glazing in the last class, so they’ll have gone through a preliminary firing by then. If there’s any moisture in the clay when it goes into the kiln, it will boil and make the piece explode. Today’s kilns have some temperature controls, so they can raise the temperature gradually and reduce the risk of explosion, but I’m dealing with a wood or charcoal-fired kiln in the book, so there’s a lot less control. That means I had to find a way to insert at least a week into the timeline so that the item the character makes early in the book is ready by the time it’s needed.

I did learn from the instructor how clay can be recycled and revived, so my scenario of the person trained as a potter coming across an abandoned workshop and being able to use the clay that’s been dried out is viable (I told her what I was writing and gave her the specific scenario, and she told me how it would work). I have to play with the timeline a bit on that, but I found a way to do what was needed more rapidly.

This week, we’re working on the pottery wheel. I had a toy pottery wheel as a kid that used air-dry clay, and I never managed to make anything viable, so I’m a little anxious about how big of a disaster this can be. I keep telling myself that it’s about the process of learning and getting information and I don’t need to make a pro-level piece my first time. I just don’t want to send any clay flying across the room.

Life

More Weekendy Weekends

I’m trying to be more mindful about how I spend my free time. I especially don’t want my weekends to feel too much like my weekdays, which tends to happen when you work at home. Even if I’m not writing over the weekend, I have a bad habit of spending a lot of time online or otherwise sitting at my computer. So, to encourage myself to spend weekends in a way that feels like a weekend, I came up with three main categories of kinds of Saturday, and I try to plan in advance what I’m going to do, so I don’t get into a round of “What do you want to do? I don’t know, what do you want to do?” with myself.

One category is work. That can include writing if I need to catch up after having other stuff come up during the week. It may also include things like workshops, conferences, conventions, book festivals, etc. It also includes projects around the house or in the yard, like organizing or gardening.

Another category is adventure, which is what I’m calling activities that involve leaving the house. That can include classes, touring and exploring, hiking, museums, and that sort of thing.

And then there’s cozy/creating. This is good for rainy or snowy days and involves things that are good to do on a cozy day at home. I added the “creating” so I’d have to do something other than just read. It may involve baking, cooking (especially trying new recipes), sewing, embroidery, knitting, coloring, music and stuff like jigsaw puzzles.

I pondered a social category, but that usually involves leaving the house, so it could be “adventure,” or else it’s something like a block party that involves work or creating to prep for. A few weeks ago, there was a choir party, so I spent the day baking before the party. Generally, social activities are an add-on to a weekend, and if they’re a focus of a weekend, like the church retreat, then they’re also an adventure.

I imagine I’ll have a lot more cozy/creating Saturdays during the winter, more work in spring and summer when I have yard work and gardening to do, and more adventure in the fall, when there are all the festivals, looking at leaves, hiking trips, and that kind of thing.

I generally try to save Sunday afternoons for rest. I have church and choir in the mornings, and I usually walk there, so that gives me some exercise. In the afternoons I read and maybe cook. Sometimes I have things scheduled that would fit into my other weekend categories. The church does field trips and the pastor leads prayer walks (meditative hikes) once a month.

The Saturday before last was a cozy/creating day because it was rainy. I baked bread and read. But there was also some work because there was an online seminar.

Last weekend was a mix of all of them. I had a pottery class in the morning, which counted as adventure, creating, and work (since it’s research for a book and I asked the teacher questions that have come up in my writing). Then in the afternoon the hiking group did a city walkabout hike. Between walking downtown and back for the class and the hike, my phone says I walked more than 9 miles that day. It’s a good thing I had a restful Sunday afternoon planned because my legs were tired and my upper body got a workout from the pottery.

This coming weekend I have another pottery class on Saturday, then a committee meeting after church Sunday and then one of my neighbors is having a party Sunday evening, but we’re also expecting a big winter storm, so I don’t know how much of it will end up happening. It’ll be really cold Saturday morning but the snow isn’t supposed to start until later, so the pottery class may happen (I’ll drive instead of walking if it’s that cold), but we could get about 10 inches of snow overnight Saturday, so there’s a chance the Sunday stuff won’t happen. I don’t know if the neighbor will cancel the party or just assume we can fight our way through the snow across the street. After the pottery class, I plan on going full cozy. There will be baking, soup, and cocoa. If it’s going to snow, it would be nice if some of it would happen while I can watch it. I’ve found that it tends to snow overnight here. You wake up and there’s snow on the ground but you don’t get to watch it fall very often, and I only really like snow when it’s falling. I love to watch it fall but could do without it once it hits the ground.

The local weather people started off all “don’t buy the hype” about the storm but are now saying to make preparations, so that means grocery shopping today to beat the rush.

Books

Back to Narnia

On Christmas, when I finished the holiday-themed book I was reading and didn’t have another library book handy, I pulled The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe off the shelf. The movie kept showing up in the “Holiday” collection on Disney+, so I thought it would work as a seasonal book (mostly I think the Christmas association comes down to the brief appearance by Father Christmas). From there, I ended up going through the rest of the series. I hadn’t re-read these in at least 20 years, so it’s been a fun nostalgia trip.

I just finished with The Silver Chair, which was my entry into the series, in a way. I’d actually read The Horse and His Boy a few years before during my horse phase, when I went through the library systematically checking out every book with “horse” in the title or a horse on the cover, but since that’s the one book entirely from the perspective of someone from that world so that there’s no portal travel, it reads like just another talking horse book if you don’t have the context, and I didn’t read any other books in the series then (they didn’t have “horse” in the title and I moved on to the next horse book). But I got a copy of The Silver Chair when I was 11 and became utterly obsessed with Narnia.

Looking at it now, I can see why it particularly got to me in a way that I don’t think would have worked if I’d read the first book first. I like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but I don’t think it would have grabbed me. The Silver Chair is one of those books that feels like it was written just for me in a way the AI bros wish their machines could do for them if they could just come up with the right prompt. And yet, the book was written long before I was born and the author died before I was born.

At that age, I was most interested in books that had a girl I could relate to as the main character, someone similar to me in some way and around the same age. They never actually give Jill’s age, but she seemed to be around 11 to me, not fully a child but not yet a teenager. I found it easy to identify with Jill, who ended up being buddies with a guy (I was the kind of girl who easily made friends with boys without being a tomboy). I was fascinated with the idea of British schools where they wore uniforms because the older sister of my best friend at the time went to boarding school in England (we were living in Germany), and she’d come home on breaks wearing her school blazer (which was pretty pretentious, now that I think about it, but at the time I thought it was cool). I thought it would be great to get to wear uniforms to school. In fact, I signed up for Girl Scouts that year mostly because I liked the idea of wearing a uniform to school at least one day a week. But I also loved the idea of dressing up like a princess, so a book in which a girl around my age started the book in a school uniform and ended up in a princess-like dress while hanging out with a boy was sure to catch my interest.

Then there’s the story. It’s a quest in a way that none of the other Narnia books are. They have a clear story goal and go on a journey to get to it, with adventures along the way. I love a quest/journey story. The fun thing about this one is that it’s a girl who’s sent on a quest to rescue a prince, flipping the usual fairytale dynamics. So, we’ve got a girl from out world who gets to journey to a land right out of a Disney movie and rescue a prince from an evil witch. That’s like all my favorite things thrown together.

From there I went on to read the rest of the series, and that was when I realized I’d actually read The Horse and His Boy, only this time I understood the significance of those visiting kings and queens in that book. The Silver Chair is still my favorite, though. I wish they’d gotten around to making that movie when they made the others. The budding romantic in me had always imagined that Jill and Eustace would end up together, and since the actor who played Eustace would have been a teen by the time they made the movie at the rate they were going, they could have played with some subtle subtext there. He was so good in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, so I really wanted to see how he’d do in The Silver Chair. I guess we’ll have to see how the Netflix version goes, though I’d have to get Netflix to see it. The BBC version wasn’t too bad. The special effects were absolutely awful, but Tom Baker as Puddleglum was brilliant.

In a case of what might have been, not long after the horse phase came the witch phase, in which I read all the books with “witch” in the title (all the girls in my neighborhood were obsessed with reruns of the series Bewitched), but I got sidetracked when I hit the Nancy Drew book The Witch Tree Symbol (which turned out to be about the Pennsylvania Dutch and not about witches at all) and went on a mystery kick, abandoning the witches. That would have been about one library shelf before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Would I have fallen into Narnia then, or would I have been disappointed because it was the wrong kind of witch?

I’ve also been rewatching the movies as I’ve gone through the books. Tonight I’m up for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Life

Relative Cold

Winter is probably my biggest adjustment in my move from Texas to the mountains of Virginia. Summers are humid, but much cooler than in Texas, and spring and fall last longer and are glorious. But winter is colder — sort of. There’s something weird in the way the temperatures feel. We do get truly cold days, where it’s below freezing all day, and we get more snow here, but then on the days when it’s above freezing it doesn’t feel as cold as I expect from the thermometer. As a result, I’m usually overdressed when I go out, or else I resist going out because it’s cold, only to find that it isn’t that bad. Last winter, I shoveled snow while wearing a sweatshirt and leggings, and I wasn’t that cold (I did have on gloves and a hat). I’d gone out bundled up but had to shed layers while working in the sun.

I actually enjoy cooler weather, and I’d rather it be cold than hot, but I generally enjoy cold weather by being inside, wearing a sweater, with fuzzy socks on, wrapped up in a blanket, and with a cup of hot tea. I’ve been slacking off on exercise because I’ll look at the temperature and think it looks too cold to go out, but I completely lost that excuse last weekend. It was a sunny, cold day, but still above freezing, so I walked to church. It’s a little more than half a mile, and it’s not much faster to drive because I can walk right to the churchyard gate, but if I drive I have to go past the church, then go through a couple of stoplights and make left turns to get to the city parking garage behind the church, then walk from the parking garage. It is uphill both ways from my house to downtown, since the road goes up and down hills, but it’s definitely easier heading to church than heading home because I live far uphill from downtown. The main hill is big, but it’s a fairly gradual slope. When I’m driving to downtown, once I get to the crest of that hill, I just coast the rest of the way. Walking home up that hill is a bit of a trudge.

There was a brunch after church on Sunday, and when I left, it was sunny and quite pleasant. No wind, and the sun made it feel warmer. Kids were playing on the church playground. I was enjoying the walk home, thinking about how nice it is walking through a historic district and looking at all the Victorian houses along the way.

Then I got to the crest of the hill, and it looked like I was walking into a dark tunnel. Next thing I knew, I was in the middle of a blizzard. There were dark clouds, the wind was whipping around, and snow was blowing. I’m not sure how far the visibility went because I kept my head down so the snow wouldn’t blow straight into my face. I kept my eyes on the sidewalk, putting one foot in front of the other. The front of my coat was crusted with snow. I was glad I hadn’t driven because the streets in this general part of town are pretty hairy in good conditions. There are all the hills, and the streets were laid out before cars existed, so they’re pretty narrow. On that street between my home and downtown, there’s one particular part that’s treacherous, where there’s a sharp curve on a hill at a point where the road narrows. I suspect they cut into the lawns of the houses to widen the street so there are two lanes (one in each direction) plus room for parking on one side. But at this one spot, there are churches built right against the sidewalk, and they’re historic (one is on the National Register of Historic Places), so there’s no tearing them down, and the road can’t be widened there. There’s no parking in that stretch, but people do the “I’m just running in for a second” thing and park anyway. It’s supposed to be a 15 mph speed limit there, but most people ignore that. I can’t imagine trying to navigate that area with no visibility.

I only had to walk through the blizzard for a few blocks before I turned off to head to my street, and there I was sheltered from the worst of it. Then on my street I was heading away from it, so there was snow falling, but it wasn’t blowing into my face. At my house, if I looked out my front windows it was snowing, but if I looked out the back windows it was sunny. By the time I changed clothes, the sun was out all over and there was no sign that it had ever snowed. I couldn’t even see any dark clouds. It was above freezing, so the snow didn’t stick.

The TV meteorologist calls that a “flizzard.” It’s blizzard conditions but with the scope and duration of a flurry. This one was so small that it didn’t even show up on the radar unless you zoomed in. It covered that one little spot, a few blocks long and barely wider than the street, and it moved past quickly.

But Monday when I was looking at the temperature, around 42, and thinking it was so cold, I remembered that I’d walked to church when it was 33 and walked home through a blizzard, so I had no excuse. That was a pleasant walk, though I may need to find better walking shoes for cold weather. I have Skechers, and they’re ventilated. That’s great in the summer, but you don’t want a cold wind blowing through your shoes in the winter. I was wearing fleece-lined boots on Sunday, and that was perfect, but those aren’t really walk-for-exercise shoes.

This coming Sunday, it’s supposed to be in the 20s for a high and may be in the teens in the morning, so I’m going to plan to drive. By any standard, that’s a bit cold for a comfortable walk. Getting from the parking garage to the church will be bad enough.

writing life

New Photo, New Me?

My big excitement for the week was getting a new author photo taken. I got the notice that I’d been selected for a library book festival in an adjacent town (I’d applied a couple of months earlier, after battling the warring impulses of “Why would they want a has-been like me?” imposter syndrome and “Do they know who I am? They’d be lucky to have me” ego trip), and they asked for an author photo as part of the things I needed to send in to participate.

That was when it struck me that the photo I’ve been using is more than twenty years old. I had it done soon after Enchanted, Inc. came out and my agent told me I needed a professional photo (I’d been using one I took with the timer on my camera). I’d just had my hair done, since I had some booksignings coming up, so I found a photographer and scheduled an appointment. Based on suggestions from some writer friends, I looked for a photographer who did headshots for actors.

Then I got to the appointment and found that the studio was in an … interesting … location, and the actor headshot thing was his sideline. His main line of work was taking what we can call “professional” photos for the sort of women who advertised on the back pages of weekly newspapers, if you know what I mean. He kept trying to make me look sexy, and most of my expressions were mean and scary. Maybe that’s why I’m still single. When I try to look sexy, I look like I’m plotting murder. We finally found one shot in which I didn’t look like I was about to shoot lasers out of my eyes.

To tell you how long ago this was, after the photo session, I went to see Revenge of the Sith a second time since I was on the side of town that had the theater with digital projection (at that time, there was just that one theater in the area, adjacent to the Texas Instruments campus where they developed that equipment).

I kept using that same photo because I didn’t think I was changing that much. I still had the same hairstyle and my skin was pretty good. I even still wear the same dress. I wasn’t doing as many booksignings after I stopped doing traditional publishing and my books weren’t in stores, and then I backed off doing a lot of other public events. I wasn’t putting my photo in my books, since that adds to the delivery fee of e-books. The photo just lived on my website, so it didn’t seem worthwhile to go to the effort of getting a new one.

Also, I’m not crazy about getting my photo taken, which is funny because I was a notorious camera hog as a small child. There’s a family story about toddler me sitting on my grandparents’ front porch, and when there was some cloud-to-cloud lightning in the distance, I posed and asked, “Is someone taking my picture?” But as an adult, I’m better at staying out of pictures. I especially don’t like posed pictures, and my irritation with the photographer is what comes through in the picture. That made finding a photographer something to dread.

But I figured that with this book festival in a new place, I should probably update the photo. I knew I’d be needing a new photo eventually, so when someone posted to the local Facebook group looking for a photographer, I’d follow the links in recommendations and was bookmarking people I liked. That meant I knew who I wanted to contact, and I was able to get an appointment.

The studio was in a nearby town (where the book festival will be), just off the courthouse square downtown. It’s a family business that’s been around since the early 1900s, and the storefront and sign were like something out of an old movie. The photographer was a lot less sketchy than the last one. She understood my reluctance to get my picture taken and did good poses that kept me at ease, and she didn’t even try to make me look sexy.

It’s interesting to see how I’ve changed. Some of the differences come from having a photo taken in January vs. June. My hair’s darker without having any highlights from the sun and my skin is lighter (though some of that is a makeup difference and difference in lighting/backdrop). My hair is more or less the same, since it styles itself and I don’t have a lot of choice there. My skin is still pretty good and I don’t have a lot of wrinkles. But the flesh seems to have melted off my face. When I was younger, my body was thinner but my face was still a bit round and chubby. Now I actually weigh more and my body’s a little thicker, but my face is so much more hollow. I can see why people get fillers in their face. I have to admit that I look different enough to make it worthwhile getting a new photo.

 

Old photo
New photo

And while I was there, I got a new passport photo taken, since my passport expires soon and I need to renew it. Due to the photo requirements there, all my inner murder demon tendencies come out in that photo, but it’s probably accurate to how I’d look after an overnight flight.

Life

Holiday Catch-up

I’m back from the holidays and diving into the new year. To update what’s been going on since my last post:

I finally got my new desk delivered. Once I had it set up, I ordered a new bookcase for the office and got it just before Christmas, so rearranging my office was my big project for the week between Christmas and the New Year. It also involved rearranging my spare room because I moved the old office bookcase in there. I still need to set up the basement with the shelves from the spare room, but that’s a project for later in the month. I also have some fine-tuning to do in the office as I decide exactly where everything needs to go, but it’s at a point where I can comfortably work in it. I took my old desk chair to the Habitat ReStore, which cleared a lot of space. The spare room now has enough floor space that I can do yoga in there again.

While I was ordering stuff, I bought a small chest freezer. I got tired of wrestling a frozen pizza out of the way every time I opened the freezer part of my refrigerator. It’s the drawer kind on the bottom of the fridge, and it doesn’t handle large things well. When I cook, I like to freeze portions of leftovers and stock up, and I’ve never really had enough room for that, and I also run into the situation where you only get good deals on meat when you buy the family pack, so I freeze the meat in portions. The little chest freezer is clearing space so I can actually find things in the fridge freezer, and I’ve got room to shop sales. Now I can bake a casserole and have room to freeze the leftovers. It paid off for me yesterday when I found that Aldi had the frozen German hard rolls on clearance. They were in large bags that I wouldn’t have been able to fit in the refrigerator freezer, but I was able to buy a bag and just drop it in the chest freezer. I also picked up some frozen entrees that were on sale for those days when I’m too busy writing to bother with cooking dinner.

The other thing I bought that has improved my life in surprising ways is a little milk frother, as I’ve gotten into making tea lattes. I’ve had chai lattes at coffee shops but usually drink my chai plain at home. Then I ran across a recipe for a London Fog latte, which is a latte made with Earl Grey tea. The recipe called for a lavender simple syrup, but I have some Earl Grey tea with lavender in it, so I thought I’d give it a try, using my immersion blender to froth the milk. I’m not normally a huge fan of Earl Grey tea, but this was really good. I then tried making a chai latte and enjoyed that. So, when I saw that milk frothers were pretty cheap at TJ Maxx, I got one. I got one that has an eggbeater attachment, as well, and that makes scrambled eggs a lot easier without having to get out the mixer. I don’t necessarily make a tea latte every day, but it’s a fun way to make a little afternoon treat, especially when I want to reward myself for getting a lot of work done. (I know that lattes are supposedly a breakfast thing in Italy, but in the morning I want the tea full-strength, with just a splash of milk, and I don’t have time or brainpower to mess with heating and frothing milk.)

After we had snow for the first half of the month, we had a fairly warm Christmas week. I went on a hike on Christmas Eve, and it wasn’t too cold for the late-night church service. Then I was able to walk to church for the Christmas morning service. I served drinks for the community Christmas lunch open to all who need it (mostly homeless and seniors) and then ate some of the leftovers afterward with the other volunteers. I then came home and collapsed and put my feet up for a nice afternoon of reading.

During the holidays, I got to work in earnest on developing the fifth Rydding Village book, and now I’m about to start writing it. One of the main characters is a potter, and while I was developing her, I saw a notice that a pottery center near me is offering a four-week intro to clay class on Saturday mornings. You get to try several techniques, like hand-sculpting and working with the pottery wheel, and you end up with some finished pieces. So, I signed up. I figure it’ll be fun, I’ll learn stuff, and I’ll meet people, and it counts as work because I’ll be getting details to use in the book. I’ll be able to describe how the clay feels and smells and have a sense of the process. And since I’ll be getting to know the teacher, I’ll have someone I can talk to if I have any specific questions. The class starts a week from Saturday. I’ll also be getting exercise because I can walk to the class.

Meanwhile, I’ve found myself re-reading the Narnia books. I’m not sure what got that started. I finished the library book I had on Christmas, and I guess I saw The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe on the “holiday” list on Disney+, probably because of the snow and the Father Christmas scene, so I pulled it off the shelf to reread, and from there I was sucked back in like I was when I discovered them as a kid. I’ve been on a portal fantasy kick lately, looking for stories about people traveling from our world to a magical land.

Now I’m trying to be good about being focused on work but also finding fun things to do when I’m not working. That’s going to be my priority this year. We’ll see how long it lasts.

Life

Off for the Holidays

For an update to Wednesday’s post, I still don’t have my package. I got to the end of the delivery window on Wednesday without it coming, they said it would come by end of day, and then they gave me a Thursday delivery window. The same thing happened again. They then gave me a delivery window for this afternoon, so we’ll see what happens. I’ve noticed that they haven’t given me the name of a driver and said he’s on his way, so I wonder if it’s actually left the distribution center. They may have loaded it onto a truck or set it aside to load onto a truck, but it may not have gone anywhere. If it is actually on a truck, you’d think their logistics system would have to give the driver a route based on the packages in the truck, and that would give them an idea of what could be delivered in a day. They might be a little outside the delivery window, but not miss delivering entirely. They keep saying they’re not delivering because of “dangerous weather,” but the last dangerous weather was nearly two weeks ago. Today’s the day when Wayfair said to contact them if I haven’t received my order yet. We’re nearly at the start of the delivery window and it’s not shown as being on a truck yet, so I’m not optimistic about today being the day.

I was hoping to finish setting up my office before Christmas so I can start the new year ready to go, but that may not happen. I bought a hospital tray-type table to go alongside the desk I have so I’ll have more working space. The desk and table are on wheels, so I can reconfigure to meet my needs. I’m not sure which I’ll use as the computer desk until I see how it works/feels. I want to replace one of my office bookcases, but I need to know how the desks are going to lay out before I order anything. Then the old office bookcase will go in the spare room and I’ll move the metal bookcase from the spare room to the basement. I need to get the basement organized to finish putting away the stuff I brought from where I was storing it at my parents’ house. So this delivery is the domino that needs to fall so I can get my life in order.

I’m taking the next couple of weeks off posting for the holiday, though it’s possible I’ll do a year in review post on New Year’s Eve or the following Friday. Right now, my Christmas Eve and Christmas will be busy. The church where I sing in the choir does a big Christmas Eve service, and fortunately this year they moved it an hour early so I should be done by 11 rather than having to stay up until midnight. Then there’s a service on Christmas morning, and then there’s a community lunch for anyone who needs a Christmas lunch. I volunteered for that last year and am doing so again. It seems to be mostly homeless and seniors. They have drivers go pick up older people who are alone for the holiday, and it’s a big, festive occasion. I’ve been invited to join someone from choir for Christmas dinner, but I think the lunch will overlap and it’s possible that I will be peopled out and exhausted by that time, so I’ll just want to come home, put on my snowflake pajamas, and watch Christmas movies while eating cheese and crackers (what I did last year — they sent me home with a plate of leftovers from the lunch, and that was my Christmas dinner).

There’s supposedly a neighborhood New Year’s Eve party at my next-door neighbor’s house, but I haven’t heard any details yet.

I’ve been weirdly lax in preparing for the holidays. I did all my shopping in October and early November and not much since then. My tree is up, but I haven’t put decorations on it other than lights. Fortunately, my new neighborhood isn’t big on decorating outside, so my wreath on the door is enough (besides, I’m near the end of a dead-end street, so no one will see it). I put a lighted garland on the stair rail this week so there’s something festive downstairs. Maybe I’ll finish decorating the tree tonight. I think I’ve gone full Episcopalian and am doing Advent, with Christmas starting on the 25th and going through until January 6. That’s when all the parties I’ve been invited to are.

Anyway, happy holidays and a joyous new year, and I’ll see you in 2026.

Life

The Great FedEx Meltdown

Santa may be struggling around here this year. I present to you the saga of the local FedEx meltdown, in which there is apparently a mountain of undelivered packages, with more arriving every day, so they can’t keep up with it. This crisis has taken over the town Facebook group, as people are bonding over sharing stories of failed deliveries. I’ve met so many people through this. We should organize a potluck.

It all started the Friday before last, when we got snow that made the roads difficult (school was cancelled), but it cleared up quickly. But then there was another round of snow on Monday, and roads didn’t get cleared until mid-day Tuesday. This apparently threw FedEx off because packages didn’t get delivered Friday and Monday, but more packages kept coming in, faster than they could deliver, until it got out of control.

I was supposed to have a package delivered last Tuesday. They gave me a delivery window. I went out to shovel my porch and front walk so they could deliver. Then the delivery window passed and the status changed to delivery by end of day. When it started getting dark, I turned on my porch light. At about 6:30, the status changed to delivery by end of the next day. The same thing happened again on Wednesday, with a delivery window that passed, delivery by end of day, then delivery by end of next day.

Thursday, with the delivery window I got the name of the driver who was on his way, and the scan record showed that it had been put on a truck (which suggests that those previous days it never even made it onto a truck and was never actually out for delivery). After the delivery window passed, the name of the driver changed and it said by end of day. Then I got a bright orange flag on the delivery, saying it would have to be rescheduled because of dangerous weather and they would notify me when they were able to schedule the delivery. Mind you, this was a day when even I, the weather weenie who won’t drive if it’s raining, was out driving. The package was scanned back into the FedEx facility.

The next update came Sunday morning, when it was scanned on a truck and out for delivery. They gave me the name of a driver. And it was stuck there until this morning, with the only update being that it went from delivery by end of day Sunday to “we’re actively trying to find a delivery time for you.” It wasn’t scanned back in, and it still said that my driver was on his way. We had a really bad cold snap, and I worried that this poor guy had frozen by the side of the road, since he was still on his way days later.

Now the package was supposedly scanned onto a truck this morning, for delivery this afternoon. I’m not holding my breath since it doesn’t say anything about a driver being on the way. This is just something for my office so it isn’t crucial. I just get frustrated with the constant changes. If they’d simply said that they were backed up and they would deliver next week, I’d have been fine with that. I get annoyed when it’s day after day of being told it will come and then they don’t show up. But there are other people in town who have perishable items like food or medication that was shipped in dry ice or in cold packs, and it’s now been out too long to be safe. There are people waiting on Christmas gifts that they ordered in plenty of time and that got to town more than two weeks before Christmas but that may not be delivered in time. Businesses haven’t been able to receive items they need for their businesses, and they apparently aren’t making scheduled pickups for businesses trying to send things. One of the pharmacies in town isn’t getting shipments of medicines. There are people expecting packages that require a signature who have taken off work to wait for the delivery, only to have it not show up.

People who work for FedEx say they’re completely buried after getting backed up. When people offered to go to the facility to pick up their packages so they wouldn’t have to deliver them, they said that wouldn’t work because they couldn’t find the packages in the pile of backlog. The only way they’re able to chip away at it is to just load packages on trucks as they can go. I’m picturing something like that episode of I Love Lucy where she’s working on the chocolate conveyor belt and it all starts piling up, but with packages piled everywhere and still coming in.

There are other things I want to order to finish setting up my office and kitchen, but I may wait until after Christmas to see if they get settled down rather than adding to the pile-up.

This might make a fun Christmas movie plot, with the delivery service overwhelmed with packages and a bunch of people from the community dress up as Santa to come help them deliver so that Little Timmy in the cancer ward can get his present on time. I doubt FedEx would allow that, but in Christmas Movie World you could make it work.

movies

Transformation Stories

First, if you’re looking for cozy fantasy to curl up with on cold winter days (and nights), today (Dec. 12) is the Cozy Up With Fantasy sale, with a whole bunch of cozy fantasy reads on sale for .99. Tea and Empathy is included in this sale, and this is probably the last time I’m going to discount it until late next year, so if you haven’t tried my cozy fantasy series, this is your chance. You can find the list of participating books, with descriptions and keywords, here.

Meanwhile, we still have snow on the ground and it’s going to be a chilly weekend, so I want to start watching Christmas movies, but I never seem to actually get started watching one because I’m torn between rewatching old favorites and trying something new. My problem is that I’m very picky about these. I love the ones I love, but most of them end up making me feel just a little depressed. But I never know when watching a new one if it will be one I love that gets added to the rewatch lineup or one that will make me feel like I wasted an evening.

I’ve come to the conclusion that what I really like are the hot mess/stagnant person gets their life together (with maybe a bit of romance along the way) stories a lot more than I like the more straightforward romances, especially the career woman goes to a small town and saves the Christmas festival sort.

Looking at some of my favorites, there’s one of the earliest of these Christmas rom-coms meant for adults (vs. kid-oriented Christmas movies), The Christmas List, in which a woman whose life is stuck in neutral impulsively makes a Christmas wish list and then starts getting everything on it after her friend grabs it and sticks it in the mailbox of the Santa display in the store where they work. There is a romance, but it’s mostly about her realizing that she has the power to grant a lot of her own wishes. She just needs to put herself out there and try. I found a copy of this on YouTube last year, but I don’t know if it’s still there. I found that it still holds up pretty well (though Marla Maples as the villain is an interesting bit of pop culture from that era).

Another one I love is The 12 Dates of Christmas. There are apparently multiple movies with this title, but the one I like was on the ABC Family Channel and is a Groundhog Day type story in which the heroine relives Christmas Eve 12 times, themed on the song. This is another stagnant character who’s so stuck pining over her ex and scheming to get him back that she misses out on all the other things she could be having in life. As she relives the same day, she begins noticing and interacting with the people around her to build a community.

Although I dream of the holiday in the Cameron Diaz side of The Holiday, the story I love is the Kate Winslet side, where she learns to have gumption and be the main character in her own life from an elderly screenwriter, so she’s finally able to stand up to the guy who’s been using her.

I seem to be in the minority, but I loved Last Christmas, which is about a hot mess who learns to get over herself and see the other people around her, thanks to the intervention of someone who has a stake in her life. I think a lot of people were mad because they were expecting a romance and there really isn’t one, but I liked that it was more a vibe than a real romance since that chick was nowhere near ready for a relationship.

I love most retellings of A Christmas Carol because it’s all about the redemption arc. However, I have one big plea: Stop trying to make the Scrooge character a romantic lead. A hopeful ending in which the Scrooge is reunited with the past love and starts to make amends/show the change is fine. You could even do an epilogue showing the following Christmas after they’ve had a chance to rebuild their relationship and we can see that the transformation sticks. But it ruins the story when the Scrooge has been a jerk to the former love right up to the end, then does one grand gesture and then it ends with the Scrooge and the ex-love kissing and the implication that they’re back together for good. I’m looking at you, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. It’s a cute movie, but the guy is such a jerk, ruins everything, then has a last-second change of heart and pulls off the grand gesture, and the ex-love whose heart he broke years ago who has been having to run damage control on his latest antics ditching the hot, kind doctor to dance in the snow with the jerk who has been reformed for maybe five minutes (and who has shown in the past that he can fake “good” long enough to get what he wants) is so outrageous that I end the movie yelling at the screen.

When I tried to write a Christmas movie screenplay and then turned it into a novella, I went with the stagnant woman storyline, where the heroine has been stuck between two “lives” in trying to play it safe and trying to have what she really wants — and then the being stuck between two lives becomes literal. It’s sort of like Sliding Doors, except she’s living each day twice, once in each potential life, and she’s aware of both lives. (Twice Upon a Christmas) This is the kind of Christmas movie/story I want to see more of. Any recommendations for one I’ve missed?

Life

Snowmageddon

Supposedly, last winter was unusually snowy for around here. Everyone kept telling me how unusual it was that we got a big snowstorm in early January, reinforced by another one a little later, and then it didn’t get much above freezing all month so the snow never went away.

And now we’ve already had two big snows this season. We got the first one on Friday, with the snow tapering off later in the afternoon after dropping about three inches of very fluffy snow. Then the weekend got into the 40s and was sunny, so the roads were clear and most of the snow was gone. Then it started snowing very early Monday morning and snowed all day, into the evening. The forecast here was for a trace to an inch, and we ended up with close to five inches. It’s dry, fluffy snow, so apparently it has the same amount of water as what they forecast, but it was colder than they expected, so it was fluffier. Everything’s been shut down. I was supposed to get a delivery today, so I went out to shovel the walk and the front porch, but then they changed the delivery date late in the day. Of course, that meant I got little done because I was so distracted by waiting for the delivery and checking to see if it was here. Then it got changed to today.

It’s warming up, now above freezing, so the snow is gradually going away, but we’re supposed to get another round Friday. Depending on which forecast you look at, we’ll get either a trace or a foot. Since the last trace ended up being five inches, I’d probably better prepare for a foot.

A thick layer of snow covers the top of a patio table, patio furniture, and deck railing.
The “trace to an inch” of snow we got on Monday.

I put up my Christmas tree on Friday, but I haven’t decorated it other than the lights. It’s a tabletop tree that came with pine cones and red berries on it (I suspect whoever made it doesn’t know how pine trees work. They don’t have red berries) so it looks festive even without ornaments, but I may do the real decorating during Friday’s snow and call that my “office party.”

All the snow does help me feel festive. Unfortunately, it kills my productivity. Maybe someday I’ll be used to it, but I can’t seem to do anything when it’s snowing but look out the window and watch the snow. On Monday, I spent the whole day looking out the glass doors in my den. In addition to the falling snow, there were swirls of snow when wind picked up the dry, fluffy snow and blew it around. It was utterly mesmerizing.

I did get some quality thinking done, though. I’ve started developing the next Rydding Village book, and now I have a pretty good idea of the main characters. I guess that counts as productivity, since book brainstorming is what I planned to do right now. I can do that while watching the snow fall.