The big 3-0

/ Shane / 7 Comments

Today is the big day. I’m turning 30.

To be quite honest, it doesn’t really bother me. I kept waiting to have this big, “Holy crap, I’m old!” moment, but it never really happened. Maybe it’s because I’m doing pretty well with myself. I would probably feel worse if I felt like there were things I should have done before I turned 30; like my life was lagging behind my expectations. If anything, it’s exactly the opposite: I am married with a beautiful daughter and another kid on the way, I have a job that I like, a Master’s degree, I own my home (by which I mean I owe a whole lot of money to the bank, but hey, they don’t call those payments rent!), and I have some dough in both my savings and retirement accounts. What more could a 30-year-old ask for?

I’m not saying there’s nothing that could be improved in my life. I need to lose some weight (but isn’t that supposed to be what I say when I turn 30 anyway?), my hair is hiding who-knows-where, the house could be cleaner, etc., etc. But all in all, when I look around at my life, I think I’ve got a pretty good thing going.

Is this normal? Will it hit me at some point? Am I missing a good excuse to make a big deal and get a lot of attention? Do I need to turn the histrionics up a bit? (I mean aside from posting this early in the morning so I can get compliments all day, instead of posting it at the usual time) Anybody have any good getting old stories / discussion? Feel free to post in the comments.

Irrelevant Details

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I think one of the best ways to improve on your own writing, is by reading really good books. Even little things, like how dialog is formated. Unfortunately, I almost always forget to pay attention to those kinds of details when I’m reading, especially if it is a really good book. I get too sucked in. And on one hand, I’m not sure I want to change that. I kind of feel like once I start noticing all the little technical details of writing, I will never be able to go back to just being a fan and getting sucked in.

However, I have been trying to remember to keep an eye open for some of these details, and one really struck me the other day. Something that I almost always forget to do in my stories: include irrelevant details.

It’s little things, like how a character thinks how that particular shade of blue reminds him of his mother’s eyes, or little myth or religion things, like how a the sounding of a bell will remind someone how he was raised to believe that the sound of a golden bell will drive away evil spirits. The thing is, those don’t add to the story directly, so I don’t think of them. However, they do add a lot to the story indirectly, by making the setting richer. They make it seem like there is a lot more to the world than we are seeing, that the characters have thoughts and memories and histories that we don’t know about.

And really, that’s how a real person thinks. These little stray thoughts that don’t mean anything are always shooting across our consciousness for no reason. If I were a character in a novel and someone was seeing what I was thinking, these little out-of-context thoughts would be all over the place. So not only does it make the world have more depth, it also makes the viewpoint character more believable.

Finally, this technique can be useful in a more direct way. It’s a good way to introduce things that are important down the road. If a character thinks, “I haven’t had this much fun since Martha died”, then the reader can reason that his wife is deceased, which may become motivation for some decision later in the story.

So perhaps I should say “seemingly irrelevant details”, since we don’t want truly irrelevant details cluttering up our story. We want the story to be as tight as possible, with no wasted words. But every once in a while, a couple of these details sprinkled throughout the story can really add a lot.

So, in the future, remember to keep the irrelevant details in mind!

Bacon in 2020

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Now tell me, where do they come up from this stuff? From a list entitled, “Here Today, Horrible Tomorrow: Which Fads Won’t Survive The Next 10 Years?”

Bacon: You know how everyone makes fun of old recipes from the 50s and 60s, pointing out the nastiness of gelatin salads and such? Or how everyone rolls their eyes when the fat free fad of the 90s is brought up? That will be the 2020 reaction to bacon: “Ugh, remember when everyone put bacon on everything?” Believe it.

WRONG!

Unless there is some sort of taste calamity in the next 10 years, wherein the taste buds of all of the citizens of the world are destroyed, this is a ridiculous statement. Bacon can’t go out of style. That’s like saying breathing will go out of style, or watching Fresh Prince reruns. Bacon tastes good, always has tasted good, always will taste good. FACT.

Speaking of bacon, over vacation I got to try some real bacon and pork sausage, straight from the hog. My uncle raised some pigs and my mom bought some of the pork. We’re talking some authentic stuff here, I met those pigs before I ate them.

It was awesome. The sausage was hands down the best sausage I have ever had. I don’t know how it was seasoned, etc. and I know that has a lot to do with it, but all I can tell you is that it was amazing. The bacon was very good, but very unexpected. It doesn’t taste like bacon that you buy from the store. The up-front taste was much milder, but the flavor was back-loaded. I thought it was really good, but I could see some people not liking it quite as much.

So, in summary, to claim bacon is going out of style is ludicrous, but you might as well use it as an excuse to eat bacon as if it were going out of style.

Blogging Challenge – 1 year down

/ Shane / 12 Comments

In years past, my blogging as been spotty at best. Most years my posts were few and far between. I even took an entire year off from August 2004 – August 2005. Here are my totals through the years:

  • 2004 – 74 posts
  • 2005 – 57 posts
  • 2006 – 83 posts
  • 2007 – 91 posts
  • 2008 – 173 posts

So after averaging just over 75 posts a year, I jumped up quite a bit in 2008. At the beginning of 2009, I started blogging a lot. I thought to myself, “Self, do you think you could blog every day?” Honestly, I thought the answer was no. After a few minor adjustments (Sara convinced me to keep it to only week days), I gave it a shot. I was a little worried that I would run out of topics to talk about, and that I would end up making posts for the sake of posts, which would draw down the quality of the blog as a whole. Surely no one can come up with 5 good posts per week (I’ve at least proven that, if nothing else)!

So I started doing it just to do it and to see how long I could keep it going. I didn’t know how long it would last. Just when I was about to make up my mind on if I would really commit to doing it every day or not, here we are! A full year complete. I can’t believe how fast it went.

So 2009 ended with 309 blog posts, more than all the posts I made from 2004 – 2007 combined. There have been times when I just really had nothing else to say, and something occurred to me right at the last minute. Other times I have 10 posts half-written on the back burner, waiting to be polished up and put out. I even pre-scheduled posts over holidays (excepting the Christmas hiatus I just took).

So what sayest thou? Should I keep going at the same schedule? Any thing you’d like changed around here? More / less regular features? More / less posts? More delicious bacon ideas and zombie escape plans and less darling quotes from my daughter? (Just kidding on that last one, I’ve already heard aaaaall about it, believe me)

Answers go in the comments, and feel free to lavish me with extensive praise. I think it’s the least you can do for me, I like the attention (why else would I write 309 publicly viewable blog posts last year?)

Bigirl Bed

/ Shane / 7 Comments

So Christmas came and went, and Evie got piles and piles of wonderful presents to play with. But the marquee present, the gift to end all gifts, was the big girl bed. If you asked her what she wanted for Christmas, or what she asked Santa for, there was only one answer (pronounced as one word in Evie-speak: “bigirl bed”).

We were away from the house for Christmas Eve, but Santa left a note saying there was “something big” waiting at the house in Chicago. Sure enough, when we got home, there was the brand new “office bedroom”, resplendent with a new bed, dresser and book shelves. “Everything turned brown!” she exclaimed, since her old furniture was white. It was everything Evie had hoped for and more. We took a video of it, but if you don’t spend a lot of time around her, you would probably think she wasn’t very excited about it. She’s a pretty low-key girl, so you have to know her to really see the things she’s doing that show she is excited. So you’ll have to take my word on it when I tell you that it was that quintessential childhood moment when you get everything you’ve always wanted.

Now, for our part, there were two big concerns going into this: 1) would we lose our hard won gains with sleeping, and 2) would it be okay with her on a different floor of the house.

It turns out, there was no need to worry at all!

From the very first night, she slept perfectly and peacefully, waiting to get out of bed in the morning until we come down and get her out. She doesn’t set a toe outside of her bed until morning. In retrospect, this kind of makes some sense, since she already had the ability to climb out of her crib, but she doesn’t. Also, she doesn’t like to go downstairs by herself due to “scary monsters”, but she has no qualms whatsoever once she is actually in her room. What a relief (especially after hearing some other parents’ horror stories)!

Because we were worried about her downstairs by herself, and in particular worried that we wouldn’t hear her, we finally broke down and bought a baby monitor. It’s kind of funny to buy one at this point, since she’s quite old. We didn’t tell her about it, and she hasn’t noticed it, so we’d like to keep it that way to avoid the dreaded “toddler-monitor-summons”.

Now, I thought I mentioned this on the blog, but I couldn’t find it. When we went to Seattle, we were sleeping in the same room as her. Since we couldn’t really go anywhere while she was sleeping, and we couldn’t have any lights on in the room or anything, we mostly just ended up going to bed when she did. This is where we learned that for the first 20 minutes or so, when we always thought she went right to sleep, she really whispers to her stuffed-animal friends. I don’t know what she tells them, but she’s sure telling them something. The monitor confirms that she seems to do this pretty much every night. I still can’t hear more than the occasional word, but it sounds very interesting!

One last thing, on a lighter note. Evie got some lotion for Christmas, (“Just like mommy and daddy!”) but she wasn’t sure what to make of it at first. Sara asked her what she thought it was.

Evie took a long look at the package and exclaimed, “It keeps away bees!” If that’s what she thought it was, she sure was excited about receiving bee repellent.