I’ve posted a new sestina under my writing pages (see sidebar). This is the sestina I started last weekend and finished yesterday morning. It is called Captain Seraphina Baleen and I was attempting to achieve a sense of story with the piece.

Around about the fourth or fifth stanza, sestinas get really tricky for me, this one especially so. I could see that I needed to come up with an ending and right quick, but I didn’t know how I wanted it to end. What should happen between Captain Baleen and the mustachioed, limping kleptomaniac? It was a puzzle, which is why it took a week to finish.

Incidentally, when I set my writing goals for the year, along with getting Greenville published and my Woo Woo Teacup Publishing website up, I wanted to write three short stories. That hasn’t happened yet. Not sure that it will, either, because the end of the year is rapidly approaching. I did, however, write three sestinas this year, so I’m counting that in place of the short stories.

My mind is numb with endorphins; my muscles are sore, but not as sore as they are going to be; and my hands are thirsty for lotion. It’s leaf pick-up day in the Warner yard.

We have eight (or is in nine?) oak trees in our yard that are continually shedding something. This year there was a bumper crop of acorns and our weather was so weird that the leaves dropped literally within 24 hours. The sudden leaf-dropping and wet weather have conspired to keep us from mulching the leaves bit-by-bit. We’re now forced to try to deal with the lot of them all at once.

With Hubby’s back no longer able to deal with the twisting motion of raking, he decided we needed a leaf blower. We purchased a light-weight (so I can use it) electric one that kicks out air at 150 miles per hour. We got it home and no sooner did Hubby have it out of the box then our neighbor, who owns a lawn-care business, said that Hubby should use one of his gas powered leaf blowers, which have more power than the one we bought.

The neighbor loaned us two leaf blowers. Hubby used one and Young Son used the other. Young Son thought leaf blowing was the bomb and had a blast doing it.

While the guys were busy blowing leaves into big piles in the backyard, I grabbed the new electric leaf blower and went to work in the front yard.  Having not used a leaf blower before, I didn’t realize there was a bit of a trick to it. First, you have to know where you want the leaves to go, otherwise you’ll end up blowing them all over the place. Second, you have to aim low to the ground and perform a kind of scooping motion, blowing down, across and up in the direction you want the leaves to go.

Once we had the leaves blown into ginormous piles, it was time to load them into the trailer so we can take them to the community compost pile. We knew, looking at the size of the leaf piles, that we were only going to be able to get maybe one pile’s worth into the trailer.

This task fell to me because Young Son was done with yardwork after playing with the leaf blower and Hubby’s back won’t allow him to do the lifting or twisting required. Adopting a technique I learned from a neighbor (not the same neighbor who loaned us the leaf blowers), I used two rakes like a clamshell to pick up leaves and drop them into a large lawn bag. When I had filled this, I would drag it over to the trailer and empty it.

After two hours of this, the trailer was full and most of one pile was gone. Not ALL of the pile, mind you, just most of it. And I was exhausted and numb. There are several large piles left in the yard and I will be enlisting the children to help me with those.

One thing I discovered during our leaf pick-up adventure is that one of our rakes is missing. I had left a rake on our front stoop and it was gone, nowhere to be found in the shed or rest of the yard. I have a feeling someone helped themselves to our rake. If this is indeed what happened, here’s a little clue for the thief. If we leave stuff on the curb with a “free” sign, by all means take what’s there. If, however, we have something on the stoop by our front door, we intend to keep using it, ‘kay?

A quick post for now; it’s a whirlwind day. Sort of. I’ve been slow to get moving, but now that the day feels like it’s half over (is 2:00 half-over?), I have to kick it into high gear. A trip to the grocery store is in order and then I have to go help set up for our writers group’s public reading.  Set up is at 5:00; the reading is at 7:00.

I’m going to be reading a couple of sestinas, leading with an explanation of what a sestina is. Moments ago I finished a sestina I started last weekend, kind of a story-form sestina.  I plan to read it tonight, although I have four others to choose from if I chicken out. (See, Lovin’ Spouseful. I did use the word “chicken” today. Just not in the sestina.)

Wish me luck that I don’t trip all over my words tonight. Gotta run!

“Every metaphor or simile is a little explosion of fiction within the larger fiction of the novel or story.” – James Wood

I found this sparkling sentence – a quotable quote – on page 202 of James Wood’s “How Fiction Works.”

… glasses?

Um, yeah.

Before: Old Glasses

After: New Glasses

When I change my glasses or my hair, I like to keep quiet about it and see how long it takes for people to notice. With both of my coworkers, one yesterday and one today, we were in mid-conversation when they suddenly stopped and said, “Did you get new glasses?” Makes me wonder how long they’d been trying to figure out what was different about me.

When Daughter saw my new specs, she said they made me look artistic or writerly or, at the very least, elven. I can live with that.

Do you ever change your appearance, not tell anyone, and wait for the comments to come?

One morning this past weekend, I was sitting in bed reading or writing or some such when I heard a massive WHOMP! above my head. Something had hit the roof. I suspected it was an oak branch because oak trees can’t ever seem to stop dropping pieces of themselves.

I went to the living room and told Hubby what I’d heard. As he was the dressed one, he went outside to have a look. That WHOMP! was no branch. Instead, a fat squirrel was on the roof, looking like it was trying to figure out how to get down. We figured it had dropped out of the tree and its weight had contributed to its loud WHOMP!

I returned to the bedroom, where I heard the squirrel gallop several times across the roof. Funniest thing ever. Gallop, gallop, gallop, stop for a moment to figure out what to do, then gallop, gallop, gallop back. Eventually the galloping stopped, so our heavy squirrel must have figured out how to get down. Thankfully he didn’t drop through the roof.

My brother sent me a movie called “Under Our Skin“. It’s about chronic Lyme disease, its dramatic effects and how most of the medical community doesn’t recognize it as a disease. You can blame our capitalistic health care system and conflicts of interest for that.

The movie points out that the Lyme disease agent is a bacterium known as Borrelia (there are 3 strains), which is shaped like a spiral, allowing it to bore into human tissue. Another spirochetal (spiral-shaped) bacterium that causes disease in humans is Treponema pallidum. This causes syphilis. What I find hard to believe is that the chronic Lyme naysayers claim that the Lyme bacteria cannot affect the brain, yet syphilis’s effects on the brain are well-known. (When you watch the movie, you’ll see that Lyme does indeed affect the brain, even though many physicians will tell those with chronic Lyme that “it’s all in their heads” as a way to dismiss their disease. Ironically, they are right, but they’re not actually helping.)

The movie hinted that, like syphilis, Lyme disease may be sexually transmitted, although I’m not sure enough is known about this.

The best time to treat Lyme is at the very beginning, once you are bitten by a tick. My brother also suggests asking for the more expensive, but more accurate, test for Lyme right at the get-go. The test that’s usually done has an extremely high false-negative result and if an insurance company sees a false-negative, it won’t pay for treatment.

If you know someone with Lyme disease or you live in an area with a high concentration of ticks that carry Lyme, this movie is a must-see.

When I hear about an interesting resource online, I won’t always check it out right away. Too much to do, too little time tends to be the issue in my procrastination.

I read about WNYC’s Radiolab, a National Public Radio program about science, on Seth Godin’s blog, thought it sounded like something I’d enjoy, and then promptly ignored my curiosity.

This past weekend, Hubby and I got together with friends and while hanging out, one of them mentioned Radiolab, specifically the episode on parasites, and how podcasts of the show could be downloaded free from iTunes.

When I hear about something repeatedly, it’s time to get in gear and investigate. I had to charge my iPod yesterday, so went to iTunes, searched for Radiolab, and downloaded six episodes: Choice, Race, Parasites, New Normal?, Stochasity, and Shorts: Helicopter Boy.

This morning I listened to Choice. The program has the same high quality I’ve come to expect from all public radio programming. The hosts are approachable and they achieve right balance of humor and fascinating data.

If this is the first time you’ve heard of Radiolab, feel free to ignore my advice to check it out. But if it’s the second or third time you’ve heard about it, take it from me, the Universe is trying to tell you something.  Download a podcast or two and have a listen. Really.

I was listening to the Dave Matthews Band’s new album “Big Whiskey and the Groo Grux King” recently and noticed that one of the songs is called “Spaceman.” Hey, that’s the title of a song on The Killers’ “Day & Age,” I thought.

As these sorts of things are wont to do, pretty soon this observation led to the idea of imagining a space-themed album. I started jotting down the space-themed songs I was aware of, coming up with seven.

I talked to my brother a few minutes ago. He hosts a radio show on a college radio station and tends to like to theme his shows. I asked him if he knew any space-themed songs and got him hooked on finding songs for me. He rattled off a bunch, including many I hadn’t heard of, and one that should have been totally obvious to me.

He suggested I do some research on allmusic.com, which I did, plus I googled “songs about space.” Turns out there’s been quite a bit of work done on listing space-themed songs. An especially good list is at HobbySpace.com.

Here’s my list for an album I’d call “Out of This World”:

1. “Space Oddity” by David Bowie

2. “Major Tom (Coming Home)” by Peter Schilling

3. “Spaceman” by The Killers

4. “Spaceman” by Dave Matthews Band (the Spaceman only gets a mention)

5. “Satellite” by Dave Matthews Band

6. “Astronaut Dreams” by Peter Mayer

7. “Camping by the Sun” by Peter Mayer

8. “One More Circle” by Peter Mayer

9. “Planet Earth” by Duran Duran (This is the song that should have been obvious to me ’cause I was a Duranie in my youth.)

10. “Rocket Man” by Elton John

11. “Interplanet Janet” by Lynn Ahrens (Schoolhouse Rock rocks!)

12. “Rapture” by Blondie

Got any favorite space-themed songs you’d add to this album? (It could be a multiple disc set, you know.)

My grandpa, Jens Rasmussen, was an inveterate letter writer. I was the recipient of a good share of his letters, but I was not the only one. As long as you were willing to write to him, he’d quickly respond with a letter of his own.

All of his letters were written in pencil on unlined paper. I think he chose pencil because he was an artist and, indeed, his writing with the soft lead almost seems artsy. He typically wrote on one side of the page and would cram each page, up to four or five per letter, with words.

He talked of life in Siren, Wisconsin, where he lived for most of his 95 years. He also discussed his health, often mentioning that he felt “punk” or that he was sure he wouldn’t wake the next morning and was surprised when he did.

Portion of a letter by Jens Rasmussen

Handwritten letters of any kind these days are precious, but Grandpa Jens’ letters are especially precious to me. Working in a museum, I often have people come in who are sorting through their relative’s personal items, trying to decide what to do with various artifacts, pictures and documents. They don’t want to throw these things away, so they offer them to museums. If a museum can’t take them, out they go. (It’s a rare museum that won’t take handwritten letters that relate to its mission. If a specific museum can’t accept them, ask if there is another museum that might.)

All of this explanation is leading up to a request.

If you find any letters from Jens Rasmussen of Siren, Wisconsin, as you are going through your relative’s personal effects and you don’t know what to do with them, I’d like you to consider sending them to me to add to my collection. There have to be hundreds of them out there, tucked away in shoe boxes and trunks. Jens was as prolific a letter writer as he was a painter.

Contact me via email or by leaving a comment if you’d like to pass along any of his letters. Thanks!