Rachael

I confused you with Scott Simon! I confused his sweet, overeager voice (when dealing with baseball only; at all other times he is professionally calm and undereager) with your fine, controlled live-from-Baghdad one. I don’t know how to explain how I did that except that I was not well-enough caffeinated.

And not only did I confuse you two, but because of the tunnels in the knitters’ underground (this is how we get wool from Canada), YOU FOUND OUT that I mixed up the two of you. And now, forever more, instead of thinking of me as Rachael Herron, writer and avid NPR aficionado, you will think of me as Rachael Herron, that girl who doesn’t know how many minutes are in an inning AND can’t tell voices apart when listening to her factory-installed cassette-tape radio on her way to work.

I hope you will forgive the gaffe.

Don’t tell Scott, huh?

Be careful over there.

Yours very truly,
Rachael.

** edited to add:

Also:

Dear Corey Flintoff, Scott Simon, and Ira Glass (who is not part of this but I adore you, too),

If you would like a pair handknit socks to make up for the confusion, please specify color and size. I am not kidding. Nor am I a stalker. I just like to knit socks.

Yours very truly again,
Rachael.

Lala sent this photo and message to my phone.

I love that he is bothersome.

Hello kids! I’m at work. It’s 7:45, and I’ve been up for three hours already. I hope you’re still sleeping, and that your coffee-pot is pre-programmed.

I have this to say, I am not a baseball fan. I don’t dislike it, I just don’t know anything about it. I am the one who infamously said, at the first of the two baseball events I have attended, "how many minutes are in an inning?" I’m still not totally sure why that was so funny. I swear, people hurt themselves laughing. The rows all around us heard what I said, as it was carried from person to hysterical person.

But Corey Flintoff? On NPR? He who can speak so clearly and calmly and intelligently on just about any subject? When he talks about baseball, it’s like when I talk about yarn. He just loses it, and he is so damn cute. Have you heard that? Do you know what I mean? Usually, when it comes to sports, I’ll flip the radio channel when people start babbling. But him…. oh, just so adorable.

And a local item of interest: A new beginning knitting class is registering over at KnitOneOne. It starts on Tuesday Sept 11th—2 hours for 4 weeks (total of 8 hours).

From Sile’s description:

In Kate’s beginning class, she teaches the basics
(but of course!) and then she gets people
knitting in the round and on DPN’s. And of course
Ms Kate makes the class a lot of fun for everyone!

As we tell the students, after Kate’s class they
can tackle just about any knitting project. (My
coach Kevin is proof positive of that—he is
signing up for Julie’s sweater class and he took
beginning knitting in May!)

Sile’s classes are wonderful — you should do it if you’ve been thinking about learning. This would be the place and the time.

What else? My weekend which starts tomorrow is jam-packed with fun things to do — we’re seeing Big Bad Voodoo Daddy AND Lucinda Williams tomorrow at the Oakland Art and Soul festival, and Monday is the Ladies’ Banjo Society Annual Picnic, and I have Tuesday and Wednesday OFF, which is nice after this rather draining 62-hour work week.

Now you go have fun! Right now!

(Oh, one more bit of miscellaneous stuff: I’ve been meaning to share this with you for some
time. Sil, this is for you. My friends Camilla and Kirk are getting
married soon. And they have THE BEST EVER wedding website. You don’t
have to know them to get the humor. And if you don’t get the humor,
then it’s best you don’t know them. Oh, lordy. Sometimes, on a blue
day, I’ll go to the site, just to cheer myself up. Enjoy, with Camilla’s blessing (but don’t crash the wedding unless you get them a REALLY super-expensive present).)

make me feel good. Thank you for reading, thank you for voting, thank you for encouraging.

But dude, I’m feeling weird about entering that contest now. I’m ready for it to be over, so I can have the manuscript back and start making changes. Edits. Big edits.

It feels like…..

[Here I spend time thinking about an appropriate analogy and this is what I come up with:]

It feels like I wrote a rough draft (a shitty first draft, SFD, as Anne Lamott calls it — just gotta get it on paper) and MAILED IT OUT. And wow. That’s not an analogy. That’s what happened.

I WANT IT BACK.

But I can’t have it.

[Edited to add: Yes, I still have the manuscript, stored in many different ways. But I think even though I want to edit it, and even though I’m freaking out that I sent it, I want at least a month to let it settle a bit.]

So I’m working on the next thing. It feels really, really good to be working. I have so much more energy now those tonsils are outta there! I was under-the-weather for what, four months? That really drags on you, and I feel SO much better. Me and Digit. We’re feisty again.

But you want to see the kittens, right? Or at least one? And a chihuahua? Or the head of a chihuahua?

Someday we will be able to afford to purchase the rest of the dog.

You enjoy your Labor Day weekend, huh? I’m planning to. Drive safely.

So last Tuesday, Michele and Janice M. both pointed me in the direction of a First Romance Novel Competition. A site called Gather.com has teamed up with Simon & Schuster and Borders to hold a kind of American Idol competition for romance writers. (I know, I know.)

Only thing was, they wanted the first two chapters, and the competition closed the next day, Wednesday. I had one day to polish the first two chapters. Sure, I could do that.

Then I read the fine print. You also had to submit THE WHOLE NOVEL in email form. Which is why I spent last Wednesday writing and editing for nine hours. The ending was rushed, yes, but not as rushed as I thought it would be.

So the contest is now live. You can read the first chapter of this silly romance novel of mine (which has knitting! Lots of knitting! Spinning! Pretentious references to things that you, my dear readers, will understand — sadly, not in the first chapter, though) and vote for it. (Working title – Love Spun. Heh.)

This is how it works: The first round is the first chapter. People vote, casting a number from 1-10, 10 being the best. The fifteen chapters with the most number of 10s will proceed to the second round Votes of numbers 1-9 don’t even count, so if you DO like it at all, if you want me to proceed, 10 is the number to keep in mind. If you think I deserve it, that is. After that round, the five people with the most 10s cast for their second chapter will move on to the last round – The Gather.com, Borders, and Simon & Schuster people will decide on the winner, who will be published and featured prominently in all Borders stores.

Now, they’re tracking votes by IP and username, so you can’t vote more than once, or the chapter might be disqualified. Because I know you, dear reader, and you might pull something sweet like that.

You have to register for the site to vote, which is one of those "social" sites. They won’t sell/share your email address, and you can opt out of receiving any emails from them.

You wanna read it? Really?

My chapter (with an egregious typo or two – "Now way" should be "no way" and it makes me want to cry when I think about it) is HERE.  And all the rest, if you’d like to vote on them as well, are here. Woot!

* And yes, this is the same book that I wrote for Nanowrimo last year, then facetiously titled Bleating Hearts —
you might already have read the excerpt here (turn the flash page at the bottom right to read it, but
don’t do that till you read the first chapter and vote! Hooray!).

** at noon, looks like their site is bogged down. Don’t give up…. Try again later? Please? xox

It’s a day off — finished my work week well and feeling strong, if tired. But because I get up at 4:30am on work days, it’s hard for me to sleep past 9am on days off, and that’s if I really, really try. So Lala’s still sleeping the sleep of the justified rocker, and I’ve been tidying and puttering, backing up the computer, things like that. Don’t you feel good when you back stuff up? You do if you’re like me, and only do it every six months or so….. (Of course, everything I write is stored online in two or three different (secure) places.)

Boy, that’s boring talk. Let’s have fun talk! Digit talk! (If you’re new, saga begins here.)

Th cat of my heart, continues to do well. VERY well. He’s still gaining weight — when I pet him I can still feel his backbone, but every day the padding gets a little thicker. He bitches and moans, all the time, which is just what he loves to do.

The front sun-porch, a spot that we use for some storage but where I also set up a nice writing spot, is now his space when he needs to be alone. He eats out there, he has a litter box, and the nicest thing is that we can leave the inner door open and just keep the iron security door closed, so he can sit by it and feel like he’s outside. The room is all windows, and he has many high perches from which he can view not only the street, but look into the living room to see how the kittens are behaving.

More and more, though, after he eats, he howls to be let into the house, even though the kittens plague him to death. They simply don’t understand that passing tails, especially THAT twitching, angry tail, are not to be played with. So Digit WHAPS them, and they skitter (skitten?) off, but they have memories shorter than mine, and minutes later they’re all like TAIL! MUST GET THAT TAIL! However, he tolerates them. He’ll sit next to them. He’ll ignore them. I never expected them to do this well. He won’t ever, ever speak to them unless it’s a growl, but he can share a lap with them. If they’re not near his tail.

Speaking of that tail, I really think he has much less feeling in it now (which would make sense, seeing as how much of his back end was seriously damaged…). That would explain his balance, how he appears a little off balance all the time, and how Waylon managed to hold it down that one time without him noticing and how, the other night while I was having a bath, HE DRAPED IT IN THE TUB and didn’t seem to care.

A little in.

and even more tail in the drink. (Why, yes, I WAS worried about dropping my cell phone in the tub, thank you.)

That tail, however, is still a good indicator of geological happenings. Last week I woke up to Digit growling furiously and whipping his tail back and forth across my face. Lala, still not in bed, could hear him from another room. Ten seconds later, a small earthquake, centered in Oakland, rippled through the room. It was a 3.2, and for those of you not familiar, a low 3 like that just feels like a big dog jumped up on your bed. A low 4 feels like more like an earthquake, but a 3-point-something just makes you go, huh? And Digit apparently HATES the sound of them coming.

And just look at that tail’s magnificence:

And when all is said and done, my sweet chickens, it looks like we will have about a THOUSAND DOLLARS to donate to Milo Foundation and Best Friends. I’m not sending it quite yet — I’m taking your excellent advice to wait until he’s all better, well and truly, but is that amazing or what? I’m still not over it, and I never will be. I love you all every day, and I pet his head and tell Digit so.

Sunday mornings make me sappy.

So I will close on this note. See that box up there? Behind Digit? I’ve been meaning to tell you about that. (This is the point, dear reader, when you should click away if you don’t have a cat and are offended by litter talk. We cat lovers LURVE our litter box talk.)

I read about this idea here, Ikea hacks for cat boxes. And it was seriously SO easy. See, we have a small (read: big) problem with Clara and cat poop. She sees nothing wrong with diving for the good stuff. I want to die every time she does it. We have to keep the big litter box in the kitchen — no room in the bathroom, and I hated seeing it there, and Clara LOVED having it there. So I had to do something.

This is a box from Ikea called Hol — there are two, this is the bigger one. You put it together and then you saw a small hole, just big enough for your cats to jump through. I used a tile-cutting saw just big enough to fit through the small holes (it was easy, I swear — I’m not a saw kind of gal). It’s big enough to place a large litter box into and still have room for litter/scooper/bag storage. And while Clara’s head fits in the hole, her shoulders don’t, and she can’t reach! Hahahaha!

Yes, that’s a gigantor Rubbermaid, not a litter box. Digit has issues and pees standing up. No litter box on the market is high enough for him — I use this, and when I started using this ikea box, I just cut a little away on the side so they can jump in. And yes, that’s Trader Joe’s pine litter. Wouldn’t use anything else.

So there you go!