Dwarf Planet in Purple

So, we've had a weekend with Halloween, the end of Daylight Saving Time (which will start again in about 137 days...), and a blue moon. Seems appropriately scary, given what this country is about to go through.

I finished writing the article a bit late and have not heard back from my editor since. I guess he is keeping me waiting the way I kept him waiting. I just cannot pull all-nighters like I used to.

Then I wrote a short article and got that in on time.

Now it's time to focus on being an election judge. I voted Wednesday afternoon at the University of Maryland Xfinity Center (corporate name for sports complex). Tomorrow afternoon I have to show up at the polling place (the local high school this time around) and help set up equipment. I've been figuring out what to wear, trying on pants I haven't worn since last winter, setting aside snacks and PPE. The boy toy unearthed a small Thermos bottle I had when I was a kid -- gotta bring my own little coffee stash. (This time around, I'm not going to bring a coffee maker and won't count on the availability of one.)

Since the boy toy is going to visit his parents in San Antonio one week after Election Day (November 10-17), we were thinking that we might need a little apart time in case one of us picks up any virus, not just the pandemic kind. So yesterday we set up my Pennsic bed in the spare room. I can crash there after I get home from the polls (and sleep in as late as I want the next morning). And then he can sleep there for a couple of nights after he gets back from Texas. His parents are cautious about health too; the boy toy is more worried about the airport and plane (although Southwest isn't filling their middle seats until *next* month).

Finally, I'm wondering what else to do with my month. Nablopomo (NaBloPoMo?) doesn't seem to be a thing anymore (although I could just do it on my own). NaNoWriMo is still very much a thing, and every year I want to do it, but whenever I do try it, I fall flat on my face. Maybe I should continue the novel I started a long, long time ago. I know that technically you're not supposed to do that, but every time I start fresh, I lose interest in the story and the characters. So maybe I should try working on something that I have cared about at various times during my adult life. What the heck. I'm not going to live forever, after all.

But I will have to start later. Sleep calls.....

Thanks to a bit of recent reorganizing, I now have a plastic bag filled with plastic bags from stores that no longer exist: Borders Books & Music, People's Drug, Bradlees, Rich's Discount Department Stores, Fashion Bug. All trips down Memory Lane.

The reorganizing came about because we were digging the Christmas boxes out of the spare bedroom, which has been pretty much just a storage room for some years now. Plus, the boy toy replaced the second of the two window blinds in that room with the blinds that were left over from his parents' house when they moved from Maryland to Texas. The old blinds had been disintegrating; I'm a bit surprised that the condo board's aesthetics "police" never called me on that, although maybe the large holly tree in front of one of the windows had something to do with that.

I would like to arrange my spare bedroom so that I could use it as a "crafts room." I could put the sewing machine on my uncle's old desk, the one that I used to use for my desktop computer back in the pre-wireless days when I had to plug the machine into a phone jack. I could also have a folding table for temporary use.

But first I have to winnow down the stuff that's already in that room. I can't spend too many hours at a time going through boxes and bags of old papers, books, and whatnot, because I get overwhelmed. I can take those chores only a little at a time. Intellectually I know that I shouldn't hold my current life hostage to my past. OTOH, since my "old life" is virtually all gone now, save for a few Facebook friends, no wonder I hate to chuck all of it out.

Nope, I didn't post over the weekend because I was having too much fun at Philcon. Despite the sardine-like conditions for three adults crammed into the back seat of a Prius, my friends made the car rides pleasant. H. made me a necklace and a bracelet out of beautiful cobalt blue beads. I certainly wasn't expecting a nice gift!

F. spent a lot of time at the con in the gaming areas. I think Spider was very attracted to the art show and art-related panels, including a roundtable discussion on how to price your art. Now she's talking about exhibiting some of her artwork at Lunacon next spring. Hm, maybe this is the spark that will give her some purpose....

H. and F. also got a chance to talk with some folks from New England whom they had not seen in, literally, more than a quarter-century. Since before Spider was born. So, yeah, another good thing.

I also finished Rebecca over the weekend. Now, I'm not going to put these comments under a cut, because the book was published in 1938. But my first reaction to the "big reveal" about Rebecca was: Eewww, how can the narrator still love her husband once she knows he KILLED HIS OWN FIRST WIFE??? And got away with it? Second reaction: Why wasn't Mr. de Winter at least a member of the House of Lords, if not some higher peerage? Third reaction: Maybe the whole thing was some kind of assisted suicide?

What, only one guess? (That was on Dreamwidth, not LJ.)

Anyhow ... I am going to Philcon. To try to help out the next generation.

There's this couple, F. and H., whom I've known since they were newlyweds in the late 1980s. They moved from Massachusetts to the San Diego area for eight or nine years and then ended up in northern Virginia. By then I myself had moved to Maryland. R. knows them too. "Salt of the Earth," he calls them.

F. and H. have two kids, an older daughter and a younger son. Both were always whip-smart with outstanding vocabularies even in elementary school. The young man's in college now and his sister graduated a few years ago from one of the Seven Sisters colleges that is still all-female.

I last saw F. in September for the big NASA Goddard open house (H. had gone to visit their son in college that weekend). F. was telling R. and me that he's worried about his daughter, whom I'll call Spider.

Since graduating from college (she majored in classics, with a minor in studio art, I think), Spider has basically lived at home without doing any of the usual get-your-career-started type of stuff. She doesn't even have a driver's license -- I know that learning how to drive is less common for millennials than for previous generations, but still, there are some places worth visiting that are not on public transportation. She doesn't work, except for occasional cat-sitting at neighbors' houses. She had been taking some art classes since she graduated from college, but she hasn't lately. She doesn't even really go out to museums and such without her mother.

Her father, F., really started to think about her behavior when she turned 26 in September, because, yeah, there's that whole Affordable Care Act thing about no longer staying on her parents' health insurance. F. was wondering whether Spider's depressed, whether she should be seeing a therapist, or whether he and her mother should just start applying some good old parental pressure to get out the door and get a job. F. says that H. is not so worried about Spider's lack of direction. Now, H. has been a SAHM all along -- I think she even quit working before Spider was born -- but then again, she has been married to an environmental engineer pulling down a halfway decent salary. If Spider never goes out and socializes with folks, she's not going to get married to anybody -- and her parents won't be around forever. (H. has already had a double mastectomy for breast cancer.)

My take? I can't tell if Spider is depressed -- I haven't seen her in person since last December, IIRC. As she has grown up she has seemed to become more shy and soft-spoken, at least to my eyes, but I don't see her that often, either. I know she's really smart, wrote some surprisingly good fantasy stories when she was a teenager, and can draw well. R. thinks that going to a small (that is, not overwhelmingly large like a Comic-Con), fan-run SF convention could draw Spider out of her shell and put her in touch with her creative peers. I agree with him to an extent, but I also suspect that a little adult pressure (from her parents or others) might nudge her toward at least getting a driver's license and some sort of job outside the house. Even if she *did* graduate from a prestigious college, at some point people are going to start judging her on what she's done post-college, and "nothing of substance" is going to start to look pretty bad.

So the five of us (F., H., Spider, R., and yours truly) will carpool together to Philcon on Friday. Obviously I want to have fun, but I'll also be keeping an eye on Spider to see whether she is truly having interactive fun with other people or whether she is just sitting by herself, sketching in a corner.

Today, when I submitted my invoice for my most recent feature article, I officially passed the total amount of money I earned through freelance writing in 2014. That may not sound bad considering that we still have more than six weeks left in the year. However, it's not saying much. I'm still pretty low-income, although by the cramped U.S. poverty standards that have not been adjusted for inflation in many years, I'm positively rolling in the dough.

I have a Typepad blog for ranting about income inequality, the "gig economy," and similar topics, but I hardly ever post to it. Just annotating the articles I come across in the Internet puts me in a depressed mood. And when I'm depressed, it becomes even harder for me to do the good stuff, like applying for jobs or seeking out new freelance clients. At least I save the articles on those topics to my Evernote account for future reference.

I could go on and on about politics in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks, including the detestable reaction of these governors (mostly Republicans) who don't want "those" refugees. I'm glad Maryland's Larry Hogan isn't (yet) one of them. Perhaps a few rounds of aggressive chemotherapy while in his first year as governor have given him a new insight on humanity. Let's hope.

Last night's news from Paris was certainly horrific. I changed the photo on the top of my Facebook page to an image of an old-fashioned postcard showing the American and French flags with the slogan "They Wave for Liberty." It looks like something printed up for World War I. I got it from a Facebook group called "French Canadian Descendants" (yes, I am in a whole lotta FB groups, just as I joined a bazillion LJ communities back in the day, even though almost all of them are dead now).

Today I got away from the sad news for a while and did something I've been wanting to do for more than a month: the boy toy and I went to see The Martian at our local multiplex. What a wonderful movie! Not only was it the kind of hard SF I like the best, but it was just so refreshing to watch a science fiction movie that was all about problem-solving instead of blowing up and shooting up "the others." Awesome!!! Now, of course, I really want to read the original book. (I also have a lot of respect for how the author, Andy Weir, crowdsourced the science while he was writing the book. Gotta think about how to do something like that in other contexts.)

(And, of course, I do have a few nits to pick about the plot, but in general it was one of the most "realistic" SF movies I've seen. And I've seen some awful stuff -- see, for example, Spacecamp. Bleah!)

Tonight I munched on homemade popcorn (the movie-theater stuff is way too expensive) while watching an hour-long YouTube video of Andy Weir, Adam Savage, and Chris Hadfield talking about The Martian. Now I'm listening to the Democratic debate while the boy toy watches Doctor Who in the other room. I'm following two live blogging/tweeting websites: Media Nation and Slate. Certainly Bernie Sanders is firing off some zingers....

When it comes to the four classical elements, I'm all about earth, air and fire. Not so much water.

When I was a kid, I *hated* getting water up my nose with a passion. So I developed something of a phobia about it. I never got the hang of rhythmic breathing no matter how many swim classes I took at the municipal pool and Girl Scout camp. By my last year of Girl Scout camp, I was the *only* girl in my unit still at the Advanced Beginner level. Everyone else was at least an Intermediate. True, I had the Advanced Beginner counselor all to myself, but I'll bet that she would have rather had the time slot to herself.

Anyway, I'd lived here in Maryland for many years without setting foot in my current community's municipal pool, but I'm glad I've started taking water aerobics classes there. I don't have to put my face in the water, but I still get some exercise.

The secret: a flotation belt that straps around the waist. (OK, so it rides up a bit during the class.) You get into the deep end of the pool and you are just suspended there like an astronaut training for an EVA in a neutral-buoyancy tank. No weight on your feet, no pounding on your knees, but you can get lots of great abdominal exercise by lifting your legs.

Some days, like today, I haven't felt like exercising, but then I drag myself to the pool, and afterwards I feel better and I'm glad I've done it. After all these years, I guess I've become a pool rat!

Once YET AGAIN, a really brief placeholder entry to satisfy #nablopomo. Had a nice evening dinner with friends, one that was planned a month ago. But now I really, really have to finish that freelance article....

More good times today. Sonia and Maugie held a baby shower for a dance-group couple who are adopting a baby, so their nearly 4-month-old son was the guest of honor. He was pretty mellow and good-natured, considering he was surrounded by a dozen or more adults he'd never seen before. The other couple who had a baby in April also brought their daughter. It was the first time I'd seen either infant in person. Sooooo cute, both of them.

Lately I've been snacking on PopCrinkles. The "sea salt" flavor. They taste like ... something I ate in my youth, but I can't quite place it. Not quite like Pringle's ... but maybe a precursor to Pringle's ... or some other snack food from the late '60s or early '70s. Perhaps the "inventor" of PopCrinkles did a search on expired food patents from way back when.

Everything old is new again.

Yesterday I stole a glance at Target.com to see what the site had for plus-size activewear, since the activewear in my local Target is only for women who are already skinny. So I clicked on "plus sizes" and looked at all the categories there ... and, would you believe it, there's an entire category called '70s style trend. Fringe, fake-fur vests ... stuff that crawled out of the back pages of the yearbooks of the classes that graduated from high school just before I did.

Everything old is new again.

Last night I went to my first deep-water aerobics class since the city's indoor pool reopened (it had been closed for six or seven weeks to get a new roof and other repairs). It all felt familiar, even though there was no more sunlight coming in through the big plate-glass windows at the deep end of the pool building, because it gets dark so early now. And then I went back into the freshly painted women's locker room to shower and change into dry clothes ... and realized that I'd forgotten to pack my underwear. So I had to "go commando" to drive home. Six or seven weeks is long enough to forget my prep work, I guess....

Everything old is new again.