A Sign?

For what was probably the first time in a couple of months, we had a weekend day with absolutely nothing planned. No family obligations, no rugby, no school nonsense, no work stuff, no date night, no play dates, no friends coming to town, no nothing. It was a relief to be able loll around in the bed this morning with our most pressing concern being whether to make French toast & bacon or shoot down to Sidamo for breakfast sandwiches and coffee.

After breakfast (I went to Sidamo and brought it home) we took the paper downstairs to the backyard to sit around the table and chill. We made some paper airplanes out of the mass of circulars until I finally got moving on cleaning out the back of the car so I could finally get the bikes & bike trailer out of storage.

Once I got everything home and made sure it was in working order (pumped up the tires and swapped out an uncomfortable seat), we went for a little ride around the Hill. We stopped at Lincoln Park to let BabyRat run off some of the energy she had accumulated during her nap and ended up at Matchbox for a fairly early dinner.

$.88 soft serve cones at Dunkin' Donuts proved to be too much to resist following our meal and by some unplanned miracle, we end up at home exactly at bath time. Of course, none of this was enough to get that recalcitrant child of ours to just take her little ass to sleep in a timely fashion but you can't have everything.

By the time I finished watching the Tivo'd Super League Championship game I was starting to feel pretty worn out. I still forced myself to go grocery shopping at Whole Paycheck lest we end spending another week doing a la minute dinner planning which often takes the form of going out to eat.

On the way home from the grocery store I got a wild hair up my ass and decided to stop by Jimmy Valentine's. Not surprisingly, I ended up having a pretty informative conversation there before I came home to put away groceries and finally take a shower after living like a dirty frat boy all weekend.

Now it's 2am and I'm having trouble sleeping, so naturally I decided to get up a do a blog post and I notice that it's June 1. A perfect time for me to re-commit to this blog and see if I can bang out another month of non-stop blog posts.

It seems like a good time to do it; I have so much to write about and my first day's post is already done. Who's with me?

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Posting Everyday

This posting every day is no joke. Originally my goal was to post every weekday, but NylonThread put me onto to this NaBloPoMo thing and I felt like it was a good way to push myself and my writing.

Since I took my first creative writing class in college I have felt a desire to write more. But because of my freakishly bad relationship with school, I allowed myself to be caught up in the ridiculous notion that if I wasn’t writing for class credit then I was wasting my time.

Years later when I started working as a trainer and tech writer had to start creating classes and presentations, I started thinking about writing creatively again. But I had no idea how to get started and I talked myself out of giving it any serious consideration. It wasn’t that I never wrote anything that amused me or that I never enjoyed writing, commenting on blogs and e-mailing gave me plenty of that, but somehow I didn’t feel like I was writing.

Now that I’ve started this blogging thing I’m allowing myself to reconsider creative (specifically TV or movie scripts) writing as a career again. I feel like I have ideas out the wazoo and I’m getting closer to being able to assemble them in a coherent way. My experience as a gov’t contractor is going to be to my advantage, not just as grist for the comedy mill but also, in analyzing what it is that I need to do to sell an idea. Who to present an idea to, how to create a demand for what I’m producing; all the things you have to do to keep yourself employed as a gov’t contractor.

I was gonna put some humble pie bullshit in here about how I know I’m going to strike out a few times, but I don’t actually believe that. Either I’m going to put together some ideas that I can sell to a production company or who-the-fuck-ever (maybe have a more known writer pimp my ideas) or I’m not. It’s that simple, maybe the first buyer won’t bite but someone else will.

I don’t know where this well spring of confidence comes from, but I feel it.

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T Diamond Ranch

So after the call was made for Obama last night at 10pm our (central) time, we hit the road for Montana. I caught an hour of sleep before we left the in-law's place and slept the first two hours we were on the road before I took over behind the wheel at about midnight. We drove across western North Dakota and Eastern Montana until about 5:30am when I had to pull over to rest. I caught another two hours of sleep in the car and then not too long after we resumed our trip our route took us off the interstate.

Once the sun was up I could see that Montana is beautiful, it reminded me of the phrase "magnificent desolation". We stopped for breakfast in the thriving metropolis of Roundup, MT before coming into the home stretch of our trip. About 20 minutes outside of Lewistown it started snowing; I'm not sure of the geography of the area, but apparently we entered some mountain range. There was much rejoicing when we finally pulled into the driveway of the T Diamond Ranch.

After greeting everyone and a lot of hugging and excitement, BabyRat and my nephew/Godson (n/g) demanded to go out and play in the snow. We made a snowman and burned off some of the energy that BabyRat had built up sitting in a car for 12 hours before we had lunch. I won't bore you with the rest of the day, but it was pretty standard fare.

After we get the kids to bed and the adults are hanging out I realized that it's 10pm and I haven't done my blog post for the day. So I'm trying to excuse myself to bang out my 500 words for the day, but I'm not really sure what to tell people. I don't really want to tell them, "I'm a blogger" for two reasons. The first being I would feel like an unmitigated tool referring to myself as a blogger and the second is then they may want to read my blog. It would be fine for my sister & brother-in-law, but somehow I'm not comfortable with the idea of my brother-in-law's parents reading my piece of shit blog.

I realize this hesitance to tell people I have a blog is a weird bit of cognitive dissonance when you consider that anyone in the world can google "hill rat" and this blog is the second hit. I want people to read this blog, but I guess I just don't want certain people to read it lest I feel like I have to censor myself even further. Does this makes me a phony because I don't want some people to see behind the carefully constructed facade I present to the world?

Do any other bloggers feel the same way? It's kind of like I have a desire to keep my online life and identity separate from the rest of my life even though my life in meatspace is pretty much all I ever talk about.

PS - Special to my NaBloPoMo peeps. I pushed the send button on this post at 11:20pm Mountain time on 11/5/2008. Fuck that time stamp.

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