First Rejection

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Well, today was the big day: my first rejection!

As I said, I didn’t really expect my first submission to be accepted. I’ve already re-submited it to another venue. This is a really hard market to get into because they only publish one story a month, but they are looking for “Near-future, Earth-based science fiction” which describes my story perfectly! It is online publishing only, and of course I would rather have an actual print magazine, but the pay is good.

This story was returned pretty quickly, faster than average. Maybe that’s not a good thing. 🙂 I really thought I was going to finish my next story before this one came back.

So, off we go again.

Squidlies?

/ Shane / 5 Comments

Okay, this is a little odd. Our house is split on this one, I think it is super cool and Sara thinks it is super disgusting.

What you do is stab uncooked spaghetti through hotdog pieces and then boil the whole thing, cooking the hot dogs and spaghetti at the same time. I would certainly be willing to try it and I’m imagining that kids would like it.  There is also some good discussion on that link as to what to call it (Squidlies was one suggestion, my favorite), so does anybody have any other suggestions?

Link via InteractiveReader

How good are you at eyeballing things?

/ Shane / 3 Comments

This isn’t really a game per say, but more like a test to see how good you are at eyeballing things. But it was still a lot of fun and as soon as I got done with it I wanted to try again.  My score was 5.22 but I definitely think I could improve because I had like 2 that were way off for some reason and the messed up my average.

What I’m Doing

/ Shane / 10 Comments

What I’m Reading: (InteractiveReader Edition)

So titled because it covers not one but two YA books! And InteractiveReader is certainly the best (*ahem* only) such blog that I read.

I am just over half way through Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer, and I already have to blog about it. If I remember correctly, this book was actually recommended to me by two people independently: Jackie and Barb (Do you want a link somewhere?) So when the two most qualified book suggesters I know both come up with the same idea for me, I thought I better take them up on it. And they were sooooo right!

I am a sucker for end of the world stories, I don’t really know why exactly. But this was a little bit different. An asteroid hits the moon moving its orbit slightly closer to Earth, affecting the tides, etc. It was interesting how this was sort of a slow decent into chaos over the course of months instead of the instant disaster usually associated with the zombie apocalypse. For example, in this book food is a big issue and it slowly runs out over time (well, slowly for some, faster for others). In the case of a zombie apocalypse, most people die pretty fast leaving a decent amount of food lying around. Since I don’t usually read YA, having a teenage girl as the main character was sometimes annoying. I could do with out the boy talk, day-dreaming about figure skaters, etc., but that being said the choice of narrators did make it interesting. For example, going alone into a lawless town was a big concern, whereas growing up as a boy it’s not something I even really think about.

I would definitely recommend this book. I would listen to the audio book in the car on the way home from work and I would get so absorbed that it would take me a little while to snap out of it when I got home, like I would have to remember that we don’t need to conserve food, or that we could just go to the store and get things if we wanted them. I already have the pseudo-sequel the dead and the gone lined up for when this is done, which is sort of a retelling of the same disaster from a totally different viewpoint (for example, New York city instead of small town PA).

Before Life as We Knew It, I read Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.

I like vampire books. I have spent a lot more time reading about, thinking about, and watching movies about vampires than I ever have about zombies, and yet nobody ever accuses me of being obsessed with them. Maybe that is because everybody knows that vampires aren’t real as opposed to the zombie menace. I don’t know. But either way, I am inclined to look favorably on the subject matter.

So my review of this book is:  Eh. ::shrug:: I know this is a really well known, well selling book with a lot of hype, but I’m not sure why. The characters are likeable, and they better be since the vast majority of the book is setting them up. I have to admit that the book gets interesting once some action kicks in, you know, right at the very end. It ended well enough that I will get the next one in the series.

I don’t know, to be fair I’m not exactly the target audience. I can only take so much high school melodrama and staring into someone’s eyes and thinking about how beautiful they are. If I have to have one more description of someone’s eyes…sheesh. It was worth a read, but I don’t know that I would recommend it to anybody unless maybe they were a teenage girl. But then there aren’t a lot of them asking me for book recommendations.

The strange thing is that reading the book made me more likely to see the movie. They always have to cut a lot of things from books to make them into movies and in this case it would probably help the story. I can certainly think of a few “longing glance” scenes that could go.

What I’m Watching:

Synecdoche, New York. Anybody who tells you this is a good movie is lying to you. Either they want you to waste a lot of time on this horrible movie, or they are lying to themselves. In the second case, they might not realize they are fooling themselves, but even still they are only telling you to watch it so that you know how sophisticated and smart they are, which isn’t very nice. I don’t know why they don’t like you; you’ll have to figure that out on your own. 

I like all of his other movies, but world? Charlie Kaufman played a joke on us with this one.

What I’m Listening to:

“Jenny Says” by Cowboy Mouth. Do people know this song? I can’t remember if this was on the radio or if we just listened to it. I also like “How Do You Tell Someone” if you’re looking for another good one.

Nursemaid’s Elbow

/ Shane / 3 Comments

On Saturday the weather was beautiful and Sara got the idea to go to a state park that was not too far away and go hiking. The first part of the day went really well, but around 11 or so we were walking and it was getting a little muddy. Evie wanted to walk, but whenever we came to a muddy part, Sara and I would lift her up by her arms until we were past the muddy part. On this particular one, Evie started to cry a little bit. You can probably see where this is going. She never really cried full out, she was just sort of whining a lot. It was around time for her nap, so we thought maybe she was just tired, although she did seem like she was fussier than usual. She fell asleep on Sara’s shoulder on the way back to the car, but she seemed to be sleeping very lightly and if we tried to shift her she’d wake up and cry. Finally we got back to the car and she slept most of the way home.

When she woke up she complained that her arm hurt and she kept it close to her body, refusing to use it for anything. We talked to our doctor and she told us to take her to the emergency room, making this our 3rd trip in under 6 months. It turns out that she had a dislocated ligament in her elbow, a very common ailment known as Nursemaid’s Elbow. The name apparently comes from having a nursemaid jerk your kid around by their arms, or in this case, swinging your kid up by the arms. The doctor said a lot of kids even do it to themselves. The thing is, this just happened to my boss and his daughter a few weeks ago, so it was the first thing that came to our minds. The bad news is that now that it has happened once, it is that much more likely to happen again. But she will eventually grow out of it.

So, as if hiking a couple of miles in the morning wasn’t enough for one day, we ended up spending a total of about 3 1/2 hours at the emergency room, even though it took literally about 2 seconds to fix. It was amazing, the doctor just rotated her arm a certain way and the pain seemed to go away instantly. In about 5 minutes she was acting like nothing was wrong at all, using the arm like normal. Because we thought we’d be leaving soon I didn’t go put more money in the meter, but a trauma came in to the ER and the resulting ticket means the trip to the emergency room cost $50 more than it should have. (Side note, wow have traffic tickets changed! When I got home I was able to look up pictures online of my car and the expired meter.)

Did I mention that in the middle of all of this, she apparently got two more teeth? And don’t get me started about how she is not even 2 and she seems like she is already giving up on naps. Oh well, another day, another person saying Evie looks like Shilo Pitt.

I don’t know how many times Sara or I said, “What a day!” and that was even before the power went out to our entire block. Luckily we had *just* finished our movie and we were getting ready for bed, so it wasn’t too disruptive. Plus I got to smugly use the flashlight I keep next to the bed. Sara makes fun of me for it and I’ve never had a chance to use it until now.

All’s well that ends well, I guess.

On Sunday we went to the museum. We were getting ready to go and Evie ran out into the main entry hall, with me following behind. There was an old car on display and she must have decided she wanted a closer look because she ran head first into the plexiglass around it, hard enough to knock herself on her butt. She wasn’t too hurt, just a little dazed and confused. I think even after she hit it she didn’t see it and she wasn’t sure what happened. Sara and I felt bad for her, but we just could not stop laughing about it.

She says so many cute things during the day, that I can hardly remember them all, much less put them all here.  Like when she says something like, “Can we have ice cream? Maybe, we’ll see.” Or when you ask her something and she says, “Ack-shoo-all-y…”

Evie was eating some Cheerios when she suddenly indicated one of them and said, “It’s waiting.” “What is it waiting for?” asked Sara. “Evie’s mouth. After this one and this one.”

There has been an ongoing issue with the fact that Evie has blue eyes, but she wants to have brown eyes like her mommy. The other day she said, “Mommy has brown eyes” so I said, “What color eyes does Evie have?” “I forget,” said Evie. “You have blue eyes,” I said, forgetting her displeasure with them. “I forget,” she said again. “I’m reminding you,” I said. “You have blue eyes.” “I forget,” she said menacingly. I said, “It’s okay that you forgot, because I’m telling you you have blue eyes.” “I FORGET!” yelled Evie. I guess we all have things we are trying to forget.