"Be kind. Make art. Read good books. Take no shit." -Word PornAt work, we’re in the run-up to a phase II kick-off on one of our projects, so my week was a series of much longer days than normal. While I caught some news coverage about Congress introducing a bill to abolish the EPA, a heartbreaking Tweet-storm about the reality of being a refugee, and facts about minimum wage, I mostly came home too tired to do much more than eat and sleep. Today I found an interesting aggregation site that caught me up on more of the week’s disastrous headlines. Minus the even worse headlines about Fukushima, where radiation from the 2011 disaster has apparently already had health impacts on babies born on the western coast of the US.

All of which adds up to the fact that we’re living the epitome of the curse: “May you live in interesting times.”

And reminds me that in my life, I can really only control my own actions. So when the image I’m including in this week’s post scrolled by, it resonated. I do my best to be kind and supportive, even when I’m frazzled. And especially when I know how much is going on in my friends’ lives. The first one to face surgery is now recovering nicely, though they still face the standard course of chemo. The second friend’s surgery comes this Friday, and we had them over for some preparatory acupuncture in hopes that we’re setting the stage for success there, too.

As for making art, I managed 1,742 words this week. There’s no way I’ll make Friday’s deadline, but I’ll keep chipping away at my story. If I can manage even just 500 words a day, I’m only a month away from finishing. But… we still have to finish our phase II kick-off prep, and then travel to Florida to participate in the meetings for that, so the days required to make up that month seem likely to stretch out longer than that. Unfortunately. Especially since I recently realized that April 21 will be the five-year anniversary of the release of the first in the Red Slaves series. I hate it when I have to wait forever for an author to finish writing a series I love, so now I’m vicariously hating myself for making my readers wait that long to finish mine.

😛

Naturally, that means I took a night off and read another Hotel Paranormal book. The Fox’s Wager is by Tawdra Kandle and features a kitsune and psi-gifted human as its protagonists. It was a lot of fun and a perfect snack of fiction when my brain was too tired to focus on my own world-building. Oddly, this means I have somehow gotten ahead of myself on this year’s Goodreads Reading Challenge. It’s something I came to late last year for the first time, and I’m still on the fence about whether it’s a good thing to encourage my inner competitor about something that makes it so easy for me to lose days and days when I’m on a real book binge.

Another night off was to keep up with the date night promise to hubs. There wasn’t anything to laugh about in the season opener of The Expanse, but it’s such a compelling show we’ve been talking about it ever since.

We’ve also managed to keep pace with our .75-mile-a-day walks. Tashie had a follow-up visit with the vet specialist this week, and it seems there are multiple reasons for her limp. On top of the Lyme, she also has a partially torn MCL, and it’s likely she ruptured a disc in her mid-back about a year ago. She’s such a trooper to have dealt with the pain that long without showing any signs that I’m doing everything I can to make sure it doesn’t go on any longer than necessary. She’s so happy to be out on family walks, though, it’s hard to hold her back from what she really wants to be doing. At least now we have analgesics for her and she’s happy to be able to hop up on the futon in my office (i.e. closer to our bedroom) to sleep at night.

I’m not sure how much progress I’ll make with my writing, but I’ll keep trying, inching closer to done as work and life obligations allow, while taking the breathers necessary to re-acclimate to something like a normal life. We have our 19th wedding anniversary to celebrate this week, too. In the meantime, I’m keeping up with my ROW80 buddies, and encourage you to do so, too. We’ll see whether I manage a post next week from the road, but I will always return to my blog eventually.

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6 thoughts on “Being Kind

  1. How do you do it all? How do you do it? I’m impressed. Me? I’m stingy with my energy. I parcel it out little by little. Maybe that’s a result of having survived Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I learned to baby myself, conserve my energy, respect my body’s signals. Most of the time.

    Twitter has been a long monologue of political rants. I inserted positive messages, but everyone was so red-eyed and frothing at the mouth, my attempt at light didn’t get through. I think I’ll steer clear a bit more often.

    1. I’m stingy with the things I devote my attention to. 😉
      I curate which entertainment I consume and don’t get invested in games–online or otherwise. And having my furbabies helps keep me active as well as gets me out of my head. I’m also truly blessed with hubs, who has nutritional tricks to keep us both healthy and energized. 😀

  2. I hear you about authors who write series… It’s part of why I am trying to not publish until I have the frameworks of all the main books done first. But I won’t hate you for your delay… I totally sympathize with your need to deal with loved ones and family first.

    And… of course, times are all too interesting of late. Though that Yahoo link about the Fukashima intrigued me because of a discussion I’ve had with some professors of meteorology recently who actually dispute the claims. This isn’t to say there hasn’t been harm done, but that this article is… debatable. At the very least, the Euronews link in it is. The ghosttown streetview shots of the region are as much because there are no new images since 2014 from the area. Most images on Google Earth are from 2013. I have no doubt the area is still nasty, but each study needs to be weighed against all the others out there relating to the situation (especially since all sides have an agenda).

    Another article… not really better than the last, but adds to the confusion:
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-10/here-s-what-life-is-like-in-fukushima-now

    It does make for good story fodder though.

    Here’s one that is kind of heartening as well:
    http://www.boredpanda.com/fukushima-radioactive-disaster-abandoned-animal-guardian-naoto-matsumura/

    1. I’ve heard of other authors waiting to publish until they have most of the series written… I guess I’m just not wired that way. 😀

  3. Good job on getting some writing done this week. I’m very much a book binger, which isn’t always a good thing. Especially when I should be doing something else, like my own writing, but don’t want to put the book down.

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