Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 93

Thank God, it’s a cockroach

On Tuesday, we went to the closest Mayan ruins. They weren’t particularly big or impressive ruins: I’m told that across the border in Guatemala, Tikal is simply astounding, worth spending a couple of days exploring. These ruins–Nim Li Punit and Lubaantun–were pretty low-key, really. Lots of rocks tumbled about, with reconstructed piles showing how it might have once been. But both ruins had local Mayan women selling crafts. In Nim Li Punit, they had tables, but at Lubaantun, the women had spread blankets on the ground on the path up to the ruins, almost like a Californian tag sale, the kind people have in San Francisco. (Garages are rare there, but tag sales are not.)

On the way up, I spotted a wooden crocodile. It wasn’t anything impressive. Belize had lots of wood carvings for sale that looked almost machine-made in their precision. This was more like a piece of curved wood in which a not-very-experienced artist had seen a crocodile. The lines depicting the croc were rough and jagged, a little wobbly. But he had personality.

I ignored him. What do I need with a wooden crocodile? But on the way back, I couldn’t resist. I stopped. I picked him up. He was smooth and solid in my hand. He felt real, in a weird way. Warm from the sun and heavy. And he had such personality. Little black beads marked his eyes and his crooked teeth were smiling. I liked him. I paid $15 for him, thinking maybe I’d give him to my nephew as a souvenir.

In the car, on the way home, I decided he needed a name. Suzanne suggested Shane and I rejected it immediately. I could tell he wasn’t a Shane. I thought maybe Ramsey, after the captain of our boat. That night, falling asleep, I felt something solid and startled awake. It was Ramsey. I’d left him on the bed. I went to sleep with my hand over him, smiling at the memory of another magical day.

Alas, in the morning, he was gone. I looked everywhere. I shook out the sheets, lifted up the pillow, looked under the bed, searched along the window ledge. No Ramsey. I tried all the same places again. No Ramsey. I looked through my pile of clothes, not so neatly stacked on the floor. No Ramsey.

I got determined. After all, I went to sleep with the crocodile in my hand. Ergo, he had to be in the bedroom. I dumped out my bag on the bed. Re-folded and sorted through all my clothes. No Ramsey. Re-packed everything. No Ramsey. Made the bed, shifted all the objects around it to look under and behind them. (We were staying with Dale, a friend of Suzanne’s husband, Greg, so it was a house, not a hotel–there were crates stored under the bed and extra blankets.) Still no Ramsey.

R had a bed on the floor in the same room. I saw no way that Ramsey could have wound up on R’s side of the room — I don’t generally throw wooden objects in my sleep and Ramsey was heavy enough that I’m pretty sure I would have woken up at least a couple people if I had — but he must have gone somewhere. So I started sorting through R’s clothes, picking each item up and dumping it on top of his backpack.

No Ramsey.

The weather had gotten cooler. We hadn’t run the fan the previous night. But R hadn’t used the blanket Dale had set out for him, so I picked it up. No Ramsey. But what was that?

I think I was almost calm as I said, “There’s a scorpion here.” Then I added, less calmly, “I’m going to jump on the bed and say ‘eek!’ until someone comes and deals with it.” I jumped on the bed. I said, “Eeeeeeek!!!!!”

I’ve actually seen scorpions before. My parents had them once or twice. This scorpion was not like those. As soon as S sends me the pictures I’ll post one, but I’m not sure the picture will do it justice if there’s nothing in it to show the scale. This scorpion was BIG. Big and black and terrifying looking. It wasn’t a bug-sized scorpion. It was the size of my hand. It was to my parent’s scorpions what a jaguar is to a house cat. Standing on the bed and squealing was absolutely the only sensible reaction.

Dale and Suzanne came running. Suzanne to take pictures, Dale to kill the scorpion with a broom. Mild chaos ensued. My contribution was to stand on the bed but Dale and Greg collaborated to kill it and then sweep it out of the house.

Lots of adrenaline, lots of laughter, lots of relief. Wow, it could have been bad. If R had put that blanket on during the night, he would have been stung for sure. It would have been miserable midnight madness.

In the midst of the laughter, R reaches down to pick up his plastic bag of toiletries, now lying in the middle of the floor. And then he paused. In an absolutely calm, absolutely deadpan voice, he said, “There are babies.”

Major chaos ensues.

At the end of it, I realize that I am sitting on something hard. I’ve collapsed on the bed, and my pillow is digging into me. Somehow Ramsey the crocodile–who has been invisible, even though I’ve moved my pillow approximately eight times–was in my pillow case all along.

If I hadn’t been searching for him, I wouldn’t have moved R’s blanket. R might have found a mama scorpion, with babies, the hard way that night when he pulled the blanket over him. I am very, very, very grateful to my new lucky talisman. He is definitely not going to my nephew. He’s going to be sitting on my desk, watching me write, from now until forever.

That night, we return to the house after a day that included a pleasant wander around Placencia, a ride on a purple school bus, a delicious lasagna dinner and early evening bird-watching, some fun stories from a couple of former hippies including one with the punchline “But you have to wear a mask!” that would be way too complicated to explain in the midst of this novella but that made R and me laugh and laugh and laugh again on the plane on the way home when we were remembering the trip. A truly nice day, as in fact, all of them were in Belize. And I’m in the bathroom when R gasps and my heart leaps into my throat until I hear him say, great relief in his voice, “Thank God, it’s a cockroach.”

I bet that’s a sentence you’ve never heard before.

Maya Beach morning

The view from the window at the place we’re staying in Maya Beach.

Suzanne is taking photos so when we get home, I’ll have some better images, but we saw a crocodile in that water yesterday and a huge iguana in one of the trees. The iguana’s head looked just like a T-Rex, continuing the Jurassic Park theme.

We took a sailboat from Caye Caulker to Placencia, camping two nights along the way, and arriving Sunday night. The sailboat was a “fun, but…” experience for me. Twenty-four people on a small boat is sort of a lot, and sitting on hard fiberglass for hours of sailing got old. It was incredibly windy our first night of camping and I didn’t get a lot of sleep. The second night of camping was on Tobacco Caye, a lovely little island with lots of small, colorful houses clustered together on white sand, with scattered palms and mangroves. Also a bar. Right next to where we were camping. During spring break. The people bellowing out ‘Don’t Stop Believing’   were having a great time, and I did think about going out and joining them — resistance feeling futile — but instead I just sweated in the hot tent and wished for the night to be over.

That said, sailing was beautiful. The snorkeling means lots of opportunities to see amazing creatures — lion fish, moray eel for R, spotted eagle ray for S, conchs and sea urchins, and of course, colorful fish of all shapes and sizes. I love the moments of discovery with snorkeling, when you are simply floating and suddenly you realize that an entire school of fish is busily chewing on the seaweed below you. The boat would stop, sometimes in what seemed like the middle of the ocean and the captain would say, “okay, go ahead” and there would be entire worlds under the blank expanse of blue.

The captain and his crew were incredible, too. I live in a major tourist capital, so I know how good people can be at smiling for the tourists but also how hard that can be for anyone to maintain hour after hour. These guys were still smiling, cheerfully answering questions, jumping to help out, singing and laughing and making jokes three days in. And Captain Ramsey was a fantastic cook. Turns out I do like conch, at least in his conch ceviche and another conch dish he made, and that conch doesn’t actually have to taste like shoe leather. His food was easily as good or better than that at the restaurants we’d eaten at and with more options. He did a coconut curry fish that was delicious, and at the same meal, shrimp sautéed in butter and jerk spices with a little parsley and cilantro and then rum that I am going to try to make at home because it was so very, very tasty.

There is so much more that I want to write about but I am ever so tired of fighting with this Internet connection and iPad keyboard and everyone else is now up. Time to start the day. I think we’re going to start with a hunt for milk for our coffee. The local supermarkets are an adventure in themselves.

Early morning

View from our window at Caye Reef

I suspect that all my pictures are going to be of early morning, because so far it appears that I left the battery charger for the camera plugged into my wall at home. I’m grateful for the iPad, but I do not intend to carry it around with me all day long so that I can take bad pictures with it. For morning, though, it’s nice.

Caye Caulker is a tiny, mellow, colorful island. Most of what there is to do seems to be to go elsewhere, on sailboat tours, snorkeling, manatee watches, dive trips. You can rent bikes or get a ride on a golf cart, but there are no cars and the roads are sand. The front street is lined with vendors and shops and rustic, open air bars and restaurants. Yesterday day, Suzanne and I theorized that this was a night time town, quiet in the day. Then we went out to dinner and wandered home in the dark and revised our theory to it being a peaceful town. It’s probably not the most crowded time of year, but it’s really gorgeous. Writing on the iPad is quite the pain, though — it just tried to convince me that although I had typed ‘gorgeous’ what I really meant was ‘ogre dust’, because that comes up in conversation so often.

Last night, I tried conch for the first time at Rose’s Grill. The grill is set up outside a bar and you pick from platters of raw fish, shish kebabs and crab claws. I always want to try the thing I’ve never had before so conch it was. Conch tastes like leather. Well, no, it tastes like nothing, but chews like leather. Good to know! The fish creole at the Lazy Lizard the night before was fantastic, though, and I’m looking forward to today’s food adventures.

Rooftop pterodactyls

The rooftop deck at CayeReef on Caye Caulker. I sat up there this morning, waiting for the sun to rise and drinking a truly horrible cup of coffee. (The horrible is what happens when you try to make coffee in the dark, in a strange kitchen, while trying not to wake up the sleeping kid three feet away, no reflection on the island or hotel.)

My camera ran out of battery charge almost immediately, but it has a couple pictures of the undersides of birds on it. I went up there before dawn and sat in the dark as it shifted to half light, thinking I’d see a lovely sunrise. Instead I saw these incredibly spooky silhouettes of pterodactyls overhead. Suzanne tells me they were frigate birds, but I was pretty sure I’d entered Jurassic Park. I cowardly retreated back to my room.

Motivations

The dog is watching me pack. Every time I stop moving, she tries to climb into my lap. She has an opinion about what is happening, and it is very low. Her worried look would be charming if it wasn’t so very worried.

In un-related frustration, writing about a character who knows the future in the same book as a character who has various angelic abilities is somewhat maddening. I’m halfway through and continually stumped by the “well, wouldn’t she know that?” and the “couldn’t she handle that?” type questions. But I’m bringing my iPad keyboard with me because even at my current rate of eking out a few sentences at a time, I really love Nat and I don’t want to leave her behind for ten whole days.

Akira is cautious. Sylvie is a planner. But Natalya is orderly. And having her order messed up is stressing her out. In the sense that all the characters I write are really just parts of me, I’m pretty clearly working out my anxiety issues on paper. (Um, pixels.) But that said, there’s something about what’s happening with Natalya right now — in my head, anyway, if not quite in the pixels yet — that is just plain fun. A long time ago, I had a bumper sticker on my car, selected by R, that read “Not another learning experience!” Nat is having learning experiences and she doesn’t like it. But they’re good for her and she’ll wind up better off in the long run, so it’s okay, and meanwhile, I get to feel both sympathetic and amused.

I’ve already planned out Grace’s story (more or less) so I know it’s not going to have anything to do with anxiety. Grace is not the anxious-type. But eventually I’m going to give an HEA to a character who has full-fledged panic attacks. Maybe I’ll write…oh, no, I won’t. I was going to say that I’d write the first agoraphobic romance, but I’ve actually seen one before. It’s erotica, and I haven’t read it, but for fellow agoraphobes, Escorted, by Claire Kent features an agoraphobic hero. (I think, anyway.)

Moving on, back to the packing. Or maybe back to eking out another sentence or two. It would be convenient for me to be able to post my latest chapter to fictionpress tonight, so that it’s easily accessible from my iPad tomorrow. Hmm, good motivation.

Awkward conversations

R and I had the most awkward conversation imaginable, at the end of which he said to me, in his typical low-key, calm sort of way, “I am both offended and annoyed that you felt like you needed to say that.”

I completely sympathized. Completely. And I told him so. But, you know, some parents in Steubensville, Ohio, felt as if they never needed to have that conversation with their sons. And they were wrong.

Way, way, way back when, I wanted to have a daughter, for a lot of reasons but among them was the idea that I’d be able to understand her experience better. I don’t know what it’s like to be a teenage boy. I truly just don’t.

But I was really pretty sure that my boy would be as completely disgusted by the behavior of those boys in Ohio as I was. I had the conversation anyway, and I was so glad to be right. But I’m also glad that I bit the bullet and had the conversation. Yeah, it was incredibly awkward and uncomfortable and he’s annoyed with me right now, but I’m still glad to know that it’s been said.

Justified

OMG, Justified.

OMG, more Justified.

OMG, still more Justified.

I want to write Boyd fanfic. I want to give him a happy ending. I have no idea how an evil white supremacist who clearly can’t stay away from the dark side winds up happy, but I want to try nonetheless.

I want to write Ava fanfic. What the hell is the fanfic community doing? 200 stories and she’s practically ignored? Are you guys insane? She’s beautiful and hot and fundamentally so tragic, and having seen three shows into the first season and about 5 into the second, I want her to have happy. I want her to have babies and fried chicken and contentment and joy. Come on, fanfic community. Give me her happy-ever-after stories.

And Raylan. OMG, Raylan. We hate Winona. Ick. Just ick, ick, ick. We’ve gotten stuck on the robbery because honestly, watching Raylan risk himself to save that selfish creep is just not fun. But Raylan himself? Wow, I just melt.

Um, so yeah. If you’re not watching Justified, you should give it a try. It is television at its best. The language, the poetry, the imagery, the…well, let’s be real, the hormones. Raylan would be fun. Raylan plus Boyd is an estrogen overdose that reminds me of why it’s good to be female. Way, way too much fun.

PS: Anyone out there have a WordPress blog? Do you know how to turn the little traffic counter off? To the best of my knowledge, my blogspot blog had no readers, except for me and Carol and Judy, but this WordPress blog has a creepy little traffic monitor icon and it’s ,,, well, yeah, creepy. Not that I’m not happy to welcome readers (hi, Andrew! hi, Suzanne!) but I don’t want to have to think about it. Someone tell me how to turn that monitor off, please, or at least not have it show up in my toolbar.

Yes, I was serious

New blog address: sarahwynde.com

I suspect the design will be a work in progress for a while. Learning how to use WordPress is going to take some time.

Ironically, I wrote a lengthy post over there and when I went to post it, it disappeared. Turns out that it was a Google Chrome problem. Considering that it was all about how angry I am at Google, I thought the software was probably reading my mind. I've now switched to Firefox and I know it's silly, but I miss the curvy tabs. Firefox just isn't as pretty as Chrome. But pretty is as pretty does, and since Google hates me, I hate it, too.

Anyway, please, come join me over at my new site. I promise I'll be making it prettier as soon as I can -- plus, very exciting, once I learn how, I think I can set it up so that I can post stories and stuff directly on my site, which would be very cool, IMO. Not that I'm opposed to people paying me for stories, but I'm trying to cut back on my coffee consumption anyway. Also, it looks like I might be able to set it up so that my entire RSS feed can show up in a page on my site, so you could see all the random stuff I read. I'm not totally sure that will work yet, so don't consider that a promise, it's just an idea. But it would be kind of cool if it works -- like having a continually updating blogroll.

Google Reader and Maps

Woke up to today to discover that Google is killing Reader. I'm shocked, dismayed, horrified -- and a little bit furious. 
Google Reader, if you don't know, is an RSS reader. I use it to follow (as of today) 137 blogs. My bookmarks toolbar has a Subscribe button, which is a javascript. Every time I stumble across a blog that looks interesting, I click the Subscribe button. When I want to read blogs, I use the Next button, also in my bookmarks toolbar, and it takes me to the next item in my feed. My internet experience isn't that I check out a few news sites in the morning and randomly look up a few bookmarked sites. Instead I look at information that is exactly tailored to my interests, blogs on writing and cooking, self-publishing and book reviews, some games and fan sites, mommy blogs and people that I just think are interesting. 
I used to use iGoogle for that purpose. I had a home page that was exactly what I wanted. And then Google decided to kill iGoogle. It took me months to get my web experience back to a place where it was comfortable. Losing iGoogle was like losing television -- or even more, like losing access to a telephone. I'd turn to a thing I needed, a basic tool that I took for granted, and it wasn't there anymore. Finally, finally, after months, I got settled into this new system with Reader. And now Google is killing Reader? 
Well, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times? Not going to happen. As far as I'm concerned, Google is now officially untrustworthy. 
Google's killing Reader?  Fine, I'm going to kill Google -- at least from my computer. 
That means saying goodbye to Google Chrome. Okay, I can use Firefox. Saying goodbye to Google Drive. No problem, I'll go back to Microsoft. Moving my blog -- that's okay, lots of people say that WordPress is better than blogger anyway. Giving up gmail means changing my email address in lots of places, but that's okay, too. Maybe I'll get my own domain with an email address or two included. I'm fine with giving up Google shopping: I usually wind up on Amazon in the end anyway, so no regrets there. I use Google Talk, but I've used other chat options, I can live without it. I've never liked Google + at all, so giving that up is not a problem.
Google, of course, has an assortment of other tools, but I can live without them, too. Google is not essential for anything, even search, except .... Google Maps. 
Which brings me back to the point of this post. I will be purging Google from my life in April. It's going to be a big project and I won't have time to tackle it until then. But when I do, how do I replace Google Maps? It's the one Google tool for which I can think of no substitute. Any ideas? 

Three times in my life I have been ridiculously sick. Not...

Three times in my life I have been ridiculously sick. Not sick like major illness, scary life-threatening disease sick. Sick like ridiculous.

The first time was twenty years ago. I got sick over Thanksgiving and I stayed sick until February. It was the first Christmas after my grandfather died. We spent it in Florida, and I can remember being absolutely miserable, trying to be a good tourist, visiting Disneyworld, shopping at flea markets and so on, but with the energy of a sloth. I went to the doctor when I got back home with a fever of 103. She told me I had the flu. I said, "but you don't understand, I've been sick for six weeks." She said, "you've probably caught every flu going around." Gee, that's helpful.

The second time was the summer of 2000. We lived in a second-floor apartment. The laundry room was down the stairs, across the parking lot, and down another flight of stairs. I sat on the steps and tried not to cry between loads because I was so tired that the walk felt like a marathon. At one point during that summer, I called to make a doctor's appointment. I wound up spending an hour on the phone with the nurse, because she was very committed to the idea that I should go to the emergency room right away, and I was very committed to the idea that I was much, much, much too sick to go to an emergency room. After about two months of being miserable, I was watching television and saw a commercial for my allergy medication that said "side effects can  include flu-like symptoms." I promptly stopped taking it. I promptly got better.

The last time was in Santa Cruz, right before we moved to Florida. I got sick in March. I went away on a business trip. I got better. I came home, I got sick again. After about a month, I went to the doctor, was diagnosed with a sinus infection, started antibiotics, went on another business trip, got better. Came home. Got sick again. More antibiotics. Went on vacation, got better. Came home. Got sick again. Then got seriously sick with shingles.

Some people apparently have mild cases of shingles. I was not one of them. The pain from shingles felt like bolts of electricity zapping my side. It was ... well, I did natural childbirth. I've got a pretty good pain tolerance. One time, I twisted my ankle and four days later a friend -- a former professional biker who'd quit because he'd injured himself so badly -- told me it was the worst-looking sprained ankle he'd ever seen and he couldn't believe I hadn't gone to the doctor. (I did after that; it was just a sprain.) I'm not really tough -- I hate pain, I do my best to avoid it. But I'm reasonably stoic while experiencing it. Not with shingles. Shingles was hell.

After that, I put two and two together and figured out that my house was making me sick. We had a mold problem, I have allergies, it was a bad combo. We moved out, and I got better.

All of this leads us to now. R and I have both been sick -- with ups and downs, but more lows than highs -- since he came home on New Year's Day with a cold. I am very, very tired of it. I'll be better for three days, start to feel like life is in my control again, and then, pow, back down. I'll have a day or two where I think, eh, I'm just a little allergic and then I try to get something done and have to take a nap halfway through. But it's most frustrating not to know for sure what the problem is. Is it 1) flu leading to colds leading to flu and back again, the viruses simply winning or 2) a reaction to my current allergy pills or 3) allergies or 4) something else entirely?

We are both on antibiotics now. I have a horrible history with antibiotics, absolutely horrible. Emergency room visits and side effects that lingered for months. And yet I'm desperate enough to take the chance because in nine days, we are getting on an airplane and going to Belize. And damn it, I am not going to be sick.