What day is it again?*

I've been saying that a lot lately. Since the last weekend of April, I've been out of town or had obligations of some sort or had a guest every weekend. Me very, very tired.

And we won't talk about the state of my apartment or the fact that I neglected my new pet George for the first month we cohabited. He's a juvenile bearded dragon lizard and should have been handled every day. Alas, now he just scrambles away as fast as his little legs will run and then bristles and hisses his displeasure, when he's not actively trying to bite me.**

I'm not sure what this blog will turn into, but I've been thinking about doing a SciFi/Fantasy book review once a month, since I am a scifi geekstress. Mwahahahahha....

OK, I'm officially too tired to blog coherently, so I'm signing off. With a scifi poem from a couple years ago, written for Robert Lee Brewer's Poetic Asides Wednesday prompt series. I think it's from March 2013.

Let's Fly To The Moon

Let's take a trip among the stars.
Sleep through space and time.
Embrace the death we leave behind on Earth
while we breathe deep the gas
that gives us long life
and dislocated stars.

* This was written last Friday but not posted then because my laptop ran out of juice. 'Cuz I lost my power cord and had to buy a new, and very expensive!, cord from the Mother Ship, aka the nearest Apple store.

** I will eventually post pics of George, once I excise 70 G of photos off my laptop and have HD space available for backing up my phone again.

I have a valid excuse this time...

My Mom had been fighting cancer since 2007.  It metastasized in her lungs last fall.  After two sessions of chemo, she called into the hospital because she felt horrible. And then spent several hours on IVs to get her electrolytes in-balance and re-hydrated, she and her oncologist agreed to stop the chemo.

So she focused on quality of life rather than quantity.  And focused her energy on self publishing a novel and a slightly fictionalized memoir of the 23 years my family spent living in the Alaskan Bush, from the early 1960s to the early 1980s.  I read about 100 pages of it before my life exploded this past summer.  I also haven't read her novel.  Any of them -- published or unpublished.  It's like I am too close to her and them to be objective.  And I feel bad about it.  But I still haven't read them.

So, they are on my "to read" list.  Whenever I stop reading the head-candy crap I've been able to focus on lately.  Wonder why that is?  Dog died.  My Mom's dying.  I can hear her gasping for breath right now as I'm writing this.

I'm waiting on my younger sister to come back here to my Mom's cabin tomorrow.  I left a message on my older sister's answering machine.  Guess I should call my brother-in-law and see if he can get her a message at work.  Since I don't have that particular number.

I'm signing off and going to write my mid-afternoon pages, a la the Artist's Way now.

If I can focus on it, that is.

Travel delays

I swear when I booked my flight, I was supposed to leave Richmond at 11am.  Maybe I'm going quietly mad, but I would've bet money on it. But my itinerary showed me leaving at 2:52 pm Wednesday.

So, I did call in a favor to get to the airport, but not from my BIL.   Asked a friend who has Wednesday's off & she agreed to help me out. And she had enough time to get her hair cut on the way back from the city. ;)

I was early, which meant my flight was delayed. I had distractions, iPhone, books, including an Ethics book I need to read some out of to get CE's to renew my license in 2 states. And we boarded the plane 30 minutes after we were supposed to have taken off, then sat there for another 30-45 minutes while the pilots recalculated the flight plan & asked for more fuel to be loaded onto the plane -- so we wouldn't run out of gas and fall from the sky like a lead paperweight.

We arrived in Cleveland in time for me to receive 5 updates from the airlines telling me I would not be leaving at 5:42pm, but at 10pm. There were flight delays and cancelations all over the boards & disgruntled passengers 10-20 deep at the airline customer service counter the entire time I was at the Cleveland airport.

I ate expensive crap pub food, had another beer (before, I whiled away time in Richmond observing 4 new GI's revel in being off-base), and actually went on-board a mere three hours late. I napped, wrote in my journal & watched the complimentary direct TV for 2 shows. By the time we arrived at San Fancisco, I was over three hours late and I barely made the last BART train out of the airport.

I arrived at the stop where my Aunt picked my up after 1 am, got to her house after 1:30am and she kept trying to feed me as soon as I got into her house. You can take the girl out of the South, but can't take the South out of the girl.

My S.O. has bad restaurant luck. I have bad traveling luck. Give me flight delays over frozen entrees any day!

I leave my Aunt's house a bit later today to make my way to the hotel I'm sharing a suite with two other poets to keep expenses down. But first, I'm swimming in my Aunt's pool.

Balticon 46, Day 3 & me is tiwed now

I over-labeled, I think. 

But I'm running on very little sleep, so this won't be very long, or detailed. 

I'll just say,  I've had a helluva time so far.  And probably will fall asleep with my head on the keyboard in a minute. 

Met some nice authors, scared another with my pirate costume accessories -- enough that said author said "Hi" to me by name every time he saw me* --, scored some free & not so free books, t-shirts, art.  Oh, yeah, still have that auction to pay for, frell! 

And wore two costumes, if you count the Chinese long tunic I wore today, and the mask I bought 'cuz it matched the tunic.

I just had to leave a panel about the probe we (NASA / US government) is building to go the closest one ever has to the sun.  Even though scientists have wanted to do this for 50+ years, only now is technology at the point where we can build what we need in order to protect the instruments from the high radiation of the sun.  I was starting to head nod despite my interest.  So I left rather than start snoring during her lecture.

And I have not had enough coffee to see me through any more panels, despite wanting to hit the science of Wedenesque universe panel in less than 13 minutes.  And the firking, song fest thingie. 

Next time...so, I'm signing off from Balticon 46.  And need to phone home now.


* OK, scared is an (over-)exaggeration.  I did get a "Holy sh!t, better treat this like it's loaded," when he felt the weight hit his hand.  & a "remind me not to piss you off, AC." 

Not sure I wanna do this...

but Robert Lee Brewer challenged me, so I'd better step up to the, er, internet.

I'm an introvert.  I am the wallflower with her face stuck in the book at parties.  Or looking for reasons to just not go in the first place.  Or hiding behind the camera because I hate to have my picture taken.  Often photographers like to hide this way.

I prefer to communicate with written, not spoken, words. Or images, if I'm carting the camera around.  I guess blogging should feel comfortable.  But it sure is scary doing this first post.  Which, truth be told, I should have done a few days ago.  But I think I was trying to get out of town for Easter and, well, I procrastinated.

I think I'm up to 5/7 of RLB's Platform challenge*.  The challenge is to get a number of us who write to his Poem-A-Day Challenges** in April (National Poetry Month) and November (poem/chapbook version of NaNoWriMo***) out into the real world.  Those of us who are scared silly sharing our work with others.  Or at least, the general public.

I'm trying to write not one, but two poems a day (what can I say, I'm a masochist! and I have more than one project going at a time).  During the same 30 days, I'm also attempting to set up an internet presence without having internet at my house.  (I don't have cable either.)

Ah, yes, I am aware that this is insane.

On that note, I'm signing off .  Maybe I'll catch up tomorrow.

I'm still blaming Robert.

*You can find the platform challenge at the blog My Name Is Not Bob.
**The Poem-A-Day challenge can be found at Poetic Asides with Robert Lee Brewer.
***National Write a Novel in a Month