Logic need not apply

DH is still running the show here for a few more days. Tonight at dinner time...

Boop: What are we having for dinner?
Daddy: Jambalaya
Boop: I had that once in Japanese and I didn't like it, so could I have a peanut butter sandwich?

See you soon!

I'm going to be offline for a week or two - I'm getting some health issues that I alluded to fixed, and I didn't want you all to think I'd just disappeared.

I will leave you with a few conversations had around the House of Mystery:

Boop: I tried to keep the sun from going down the other day. Most people don't know that the sun follows you - or you follow the sun - so I went out to the backyard when it was very late and looked at where the sun was going down, then ran all the way to the other side of the yard to keep it up!
Red: Um... I don't think that really happened.


At prayer time, DH talked about Jesus being God, and also being born by Mary.
Boop: So did Jesus just look at Mary, snap his fingers and say 'that's my girl?'
DH: Something like that...


Me: Well, I made it to 39,050 words - my goal was 40K before I went in on Tuesday, but I'm close.
DH: So, if you just wrote 950 more you'd make it?

I made it. ;) Yay for 40,000 words! And I'm bringing my book on the history of dirigibles with me to the hospital. :)

Halfway, baby!


I'm halfway through the first draft of Steam. Wahoo! That means I'm tracking to my goal which is the first time I've ever done that with a novel. My little "about" box always said when I was planning to finish the book, then people would ask me about it, and I'd have to change it. I think once I just let it ride from one Christmas to the next. ;) Outlining is a wonderful thing.

So is Page Four. If any PC users out there feel like their head is gonna explode trying to write a novel in Word, I suggest Page Four. You'll love it. I can jump around between chapters now, and merge them when I need to, and search for overused phrases and do a word count of all the chapters even when they're in separate docs - no more word count math! Plus, always good to keep the brain firmly in place inside the skull.

Right now, I'm on my deep sea creature scene, so I've been watching Deep Blue Sea with the kids (they love it!) and looking through books about the deep sea trench. I'll leave you with this picture of a cuttlefish from my new favorite blog, Aqua Marine Discovery. Cuttlefish are cephalopods, like octopus and squid, but kinda cute, intelligent enough that you can train them to do tricks in their cages, and they do fun things like communicate by changing the color of their bodies. There are days that sounds like a fabulous idea. Green for 'sure kids, have another piece of candy' and red for 'if I hear you ask me for that one more time...'

Oops.

So, yesterday I crunched my toe against some stairs. It's purple. I'm wearing my crocs in the house to create some barrier between the ill-fated appendage and my 2 year old son who thinks I'm a jungle gym. This, unfortunately, causes a buildup of static electricity. So every time I touch something, I shock it. And me. What's really cool, is grabbing a pinch of salt from the salt cellar and watching it turn into a snow globe.

The morale is, if you see me coming... don't shake my hand.

It's Friday...

I’ve got pork in my crock pot for Easter brunch which is fairly optimistic, considering the sick little boy I have tucked into my bed upstairs. There’s been a lot of sick around here lately. The kids have been passing some bug back and forth, and I’ve been battling some ever present health issues. Which makes it sound like I’ve got my feet firmly planted, a shining weapon in my hand, and a Clint Eastwood-esque grin on my face. I’d love that. In reality health issues are more of a long, wartime march through hostile landscapes with paltry rations and shoes that don’t quite fit. More Frodo, less Dirty Harry. But my march is starting to wrap up, I think. And as I laid next to my feverish little guy tonight, I thought of the phrase “it’s always darkest just before the dawn.”

That feels like a way to stay hopeful in the middle of the biggest battle, or longest march - like if it’s this bad, it must be getting better soon. But it’s kind of an empty promise, because how do you really know this is as dark as it’s gonna get? When you feel like you can’t convince a kid to take one more spoonful of medicine, you can’t write one more word, you can’t haul yourself out of bed one more time, you can’t tell your daughter to stop putting her hands in your other kids pockets and falling on the ground so her sister will drag her around like a zombie... or maybe that last one’s just me... you assume dawn’s coming.

Tomorrow Christendom celebrates the brightest dawn we’ve ever known. But the way we say it is, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming.” And it helps me to remember the guys who just saw their best friend and brightest hope torn to shreds and mocked and killed ein front of everyone that mattered. It helps to remember that they must have felt absolute grief, mixed with fear, mixed with despair. And despite being told, they didn’t get that Sunday was coming. And when it did, it was spectacular.

He is Risen.