The View from the Hermitage, Day 196

We aren't far from 200 days. The husband and I have finished one of the two bottles of champagne I was given on Friday. I told him we should open the other on the 200th day of this pandemic recounting. I don't know why I initially thought the pandemic would be over quickly. I certainly never foresaw it lasting the 28 weeks it already has. The joke is on me, I guess.

Older son took down some more boxes from the mountain of boxes in younger son's room. Several contained books on knitting, crocheting, or felting. I'm putting them on lower shelves below where I will be putting my yarn stash. I need to put something, anything, on lower shelves to deny the family cat access to my wool. One of the boxes had some notebooks I sort of remembered but hadn't looked at in two or even three decades. One was the journal I kept in Spanish for a bus tour of Southern Spain we took the summer I studied in Madrid with a group from another university. I glanced at that long enough to know that it would take me a while to read it since I would have to use context to translate a lot of it. 

Another journal I found was one I kept from August 1989 to July 1990, the year we spent in the Netherlands where I gave birth to younger son. I worked from this journal to craft weekly letters that got printed, copied, and mailed to family members and close friends back here. I kept a copy of each of those as well. Talk about a cascade of memories. It appears I was quite honest in those letters about the feelings of isolation, only having the husband for adult conversation and older son for not-so-adult conversation. He had been in day care when I was working, so that year was the first time I'd been with him 24-7. I had forgotten just how interesting he was at the age of two. It was especially interesting to read the last entry/letter, a summation of the year. Among other things, I noted the number of nights we had at least one guest in the house and, being a data nerd, the number of guest-nights reflecting that we had, at least once, three visitors staying with us the same night.

It was interesting to read my writing as something of an impartial reader. I have been told, typically in business settings, that I write well, and I usually just dismiss those compliments. They make me uncomfortable, especially while writing the next thing I write. Expectations can weigh heavily on one's shoulders. Reading that last journal entry and some of the others, I can see why people have told me that. I would tell the person whose writing I was reading that she writes well.  

Continuing in the forgotten writing vein, I also found a notebook that contained assorted poems I wrote in the 1970s as well as various essays I wrote for freshman English in the fall of 1973. I did not read the essays, but I did read the poems. I was surprised that I wrote some of them. They sounded, well, not too bad. Needless to say, many had been inspired by people or events in my late high school and early college years. Another rush of memories. I will have to spend some quality time reading more of all this found writing and get reacquainted with my younger self. 

The park was foggy this morning and seemed to get foggier as our walk there lengthened. Here's a shot on the arrival side of the visit, at the start of what turned out to be a three-mile walk.

And here's one on the other side, on the way back to the car.

Driving home post-walk, it suddenly cleared. By the time we got home, the sun was out. Mother Nature likes to keep us guessing.

And so I have successfully avoided discussion of the broader world. It was a good day, and not watching the nightly news might keep it that way. We shall see.

It's Been Too Long

I really should try to update this blog more often. An entire year between one post and the next does not make me happy. As I go through the day, a thought here or there is followed by another thought that I should write something about the first thought. You can see how often I've gone through with that. It's mostly because somewhere, possibly folded in the emotional baggage some of us carry, is the thought that keeping a blog or journal is a waste of time. I need to work on changing that. I like to write and therefore should write even if it is just for myself.

My six-months-from-New-Year's-Day birthday means it's another new year, this time a new year of my life. According to the horoscope in today's Washington Post, here's how that year might go:

This year, optimism becomes a given in your life. You will see concrete results from this attitude change. If you are single, you have a strong personality, so you probably will need someone a little less intense for a partner. You will have several potential sweeties around you. If you are attached, this year offers many romantic moments. Aquarius teaches you how to express your feelings.

Do I have to be single to be strong? Does that mean I am not strong having been married for a third of a century? I'm also not sure how being married relates to the "several potential sweeties" angle. If I skip those thoughts and go to the next line, not passing "Go" on the way, "many romantic moments" doesn't really seem like much for a whole year. How about some excitement on a front other than the romantic one?

About those "concrete results" from being more optimistic, well, there might be something to needing to be more optimistic. My 62nd year had more than a few rough spots. Several people I know got medical diagnoses of a less-than-positive nature. The results for most have, however, been positive. While I do have pretty much the dream job (part-time, from home), I'm still adjusting to the retirement of my boss of several decades (and the only reason I went back to work when asked to). Even after more than a year, there are new things to get used to with a new boss. Even though it was the right time, saying good-bye to our canine companion Biscuit still hurts much more than a little.

And my own physical condition leaves a lot to be desired. While I feel so much better after April's knee replacement, to get there I had to give up several things I loved doing and that kept me in great physical condition. And let's not talk about the more than 15 pounds I've gained as a result. I went from being in the best physical shape I'd ever been in to being in worse shape than at any time since childhood. Would being more optimistic help here? Probably, but it's not necessarily easy. I am working steadily at getting my strength back while also dealing with knowing that more of my weight gain may have come from emotional eating rather than lack of exercise. Having lost 30-plus pounds at one other time in my life tells me that I can do it. It also tells me that it won't be easy. Note to self: Try to feel more optimistic about succeeding.

Should I offer resolutions for this new new year of my life? Would "be more optimistic" count? Would "blogging more than once a year"? Spending less time on social media and more time in creative pursuits? Keeping the house and environs neater and more organized? All the resolutions that come to mind are based on improvements, suggesting there is a lot that needs fixing. Which I know, when it come right down to it, there is.

So let's start small, with putting up another blog post before 2019. And add a photo or two next time.

NaNoWriMo? NoMo!

I’ve attempted and won National Novel Writing Month for the past three years, but I’m afraid the streak has come to an end with 2007. As it happens, I will be writing—probably a lot—in November 2008, but it will be on a statistics book rather than a new zombie novel.

About a year and a half ago I got a cryptic e-mail from Ralph, who supervised my doctoral dissertation in 1981-1982. As a bit of background, my degree is nominally in social psychology, but my dissertation research was in statistics, on “The Finite-Sample Properties of Analysis of Covariance Tests under the Multiple Design Multivariate Linear Model.” I was planning to do some re-training and start a career in stat when I met a nuclear physicist in the laundromat. Wedding bells, maternity clothes, fast forward 23 years and, well, any notion of statistics had fallen by the wayside. My business card does say “data analysis,” but what I get hired to do around here is pretty pedestrian, descriptive stuff. I sometimes feel as if I’ve forgotten more than I once knew about real, inferential statistics.

Anyway, Ralph’s e-mail simply said “Call me” and provided a cell phone number. I called him, and he asked me if I wanted to write a book with him on an area of statistics that didn’t really exist in significant form when I was in school. He said that he’d had a publisher after him for about five years to do the book, but that he simply didn’t have the time to write it. Would I write it with him? He’d handle the statistics part; I’d handle the verbiage. I agreed to think about it, and we’ve been going back and forth on various things since then, including formulating an outline (table of contents, really) and working up the first two chapters.

Last week, we sat down with the third author (whom I’d never met but with whom Ralph has collaborated in the past) and had a rollicking good discussion of the project. We also met with publishing reps who gave us various forms to complete but who also told us they’d like to have the first five chapters by July in order to get some teaser stuff ready for a meeting in August. They also discussed when they’d like to see the book come out, which will pretty much mean a chapter a month for the next year and a half.

There’s no signed contract, but this somewhat nebulous “yeah, I might be writing a stat book” project seems to have become very real very fast. I shall miss National Novel Writing Month, but see no way this side of hades or heaven to think I could work a 50,000 word novel in while writing something of this magnitude. I shall endeavor, however, to work a zombie into an example somewhere in homage to the fourth zombie novel I otherwise would have written come November 2008.