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.....

I usually think of February 23 as the anniversary of the date I started keeping a notebook (or diary or journal). I don't think I wrote the date down at the time, but it was certainly around that part of my fifth-grade year.

Well, fifth grade for me was the 1969-1970 school year … so that means that I have been chronicling my life for 50 years. A full half century.

Granted, I didn't do too much journaling from about my mid-20s into my early 30s. Too much chaos in my life. But hey, here I am, still writing, 50 years later.

Seriously! Today is in the high 60s (Fahrenheit) and there's not a cloud in the sky. The boy toy and I opened the windows in the condo, but I still wanted to be outside, so I decided to check out the surroundings. The front of my south-facing condo, while deliciously sunny, is still too bright for me to read the screen comfortably, but the screen looks acceptable now that I've moved my table and chair to the east side of the building. Of course, now I need a jacket because I'm not basking in the sun, but at least I'm under a pure blue sky and enjoying the nice day while worrying about stuff like "spectral resolution" and "cyclic AMP."

I think I found a mistake in the references of a review paper. The paragraph of text was about optical properties of cancer cells, but its footnote pointed to an article about coronary artery disease. Even though I haven't taken a biology class since the Ford administration, **I** can tell that those are different diseases.....

Soooo ... I'm trying, really trying, to write as much of my feature article (due August 15) as I can before my Pennsic trip (August 2 to 9). Wish me luck.

I know that many people (including Yves, based on our conversations of a few years ago) think that if I just write 10 percent of the article each day, the article will be done in 10 days. Er, it doesn't quite work that way, at least not with my thought processes. Usually I select one chunk and try to chew on it and organize it the best I can, and later tie all the chunks together with some smooth connecting words. At least the last feature I wrote had an obvious framework -- it was a retrospective on a speech given 60 years ago -- so I could start by describing the speech and then hanging comments from my interviewees on the framework, like ornaments on a Christmas tree. This one has a basic outline, but I still have to create everything from scratch.

Anyhow. This year I wrote up a Pennsic packing list as a Google Docs document and shared it with the boy toy. That way, he can help me a bit. Today he unearthed my stakes and air pump and he was just testing out my air mattress. I need more stakes and probably another air pump; he's going to shop for both tomorrow.

(Incidentally, my least favorite part of camping is inflating the air mattress. Just saying.)

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention ... I'm not going to Pennsic with T.V.P. after all. Last Thursday she told me she decided not to go to Pennsic this year because she wants/needs to spend more time with her new boyfriend, whose father is dying in Florida. So I said OK, because ... what else am I going to say? I don't think she is as emotionally invested in SCA-land as I am. Maybe she thought Pennsic was more like a Pagan festival. She's still my neighbor and friend, of course, and I reassured her that she's still welcome at Monday night dance practice.

I had hoped a little that I would be able to leave my car with the boy toy so he won't be so antsy to get out of the house after a week of no wheels. But we live on a bus line, so he'll just have to deal. And I won't have to worry that T.V.P. will want to leave before I'm ready to leave.

AAAnnnndddd... the news of the shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival is breaking on CNN. Boy toy went to high school in Morgan Hill, maybe 10 miles north of Gilroy, so he's told me all about the Garlic Festival. Thank goodness he's not there now. And, yeah, I do NOT need extra worries whether the local chuckleheads are going to lob something more dangerous than water balloons over the Pennsic fence....

1. I already wrote stuff about my Christmas-week trip to Massachusetts in my paper diary, so please pardon me for not rehashing it. I'm thankful for the people I did see and am sorry I didn't get to see more people. Schedules are always a bit tricky around the holidays. I'm just glad that I got to see people instead of interacting with them on Facebook. Not only had it been three years since I'd been to my native commonwealth, but also I hadn't visited with some friends for four or five years.

2. I am disgusted beyond words at the cruelty the Trump administration is inflicting on people -- unpaid federal employees and contractors, possibly food-stamp and Section 8 recipients, and who knows who else -- during this government shutdown. I have been living on the financial margins for eight years now, and I wouldn't inflict this on anybody, even for a month.

3. We're in the middle of a cold snap. Last night I wanted to see the total lunar eclipse, but I could stay out for only a few minutes at a time. (The last time I went out, I put my sweatpants on over my jeans.) I couldn't look at it through a window because the Moon was roughly straight overhead and my upstairs neighbors' balconies got in the way. It was really windy, too. I didn't think of looking up the temperature on my phone, but I sort of didn't want to know. (The lunar disc looked so three-dimensional during totality.)

4. Speaking of last night ... the Patriots are going to the Super Bowl yet again! But, geez, the latter part of that AFC championship game (fourth quarter and OT) were anxiety-inducing in the extreme. By the time the Pats actually won, I felt physically exhausted. Well, OK, maybe not as exhausted as the players, but still....

5. I should mention that I have started to work on a feature article that is due in mid-March.

... now I'm trying to get motivated.

On Saturday, the boy toy and I decided to go out for an afternoon drive. We toodled around Columbia and part of Baltimore County and ended up in downtown Ellicott City, which we've visited several times in the past. I took a few photos of the historic buildings, but then I got a "memory full" message -- and my old camera has a 16-GB SD card! So I didn't get any photos of costumes at cz_unit's and Phoenix's party, at which we ended up. It was great to see CZ and Phoenix and friends, and astounding how their kids have grown. We didn't stay too late because the boy toy never likes to stay out late. Such an "old man."

On Sunday I didn't go to church (I will next week), so the boy toy and I just went to the farmers' market and the grocery store. It rained most of the afternoon. I spent most of the day trying to finish up a cover letter for a part-time permanent job with partial benefits. I had already told the boy toy that I'd finished writing the cover letter, because in the past, when I say I'm going to finish a job application and then I don't (even if it's for a reasonable reason, like it's time for supper or I have to go to a meeting), he gets pissed off. So this time, I said I had finished the cover letter, even though I hadn't (yet).

I finally got it done, but now I'm trying to get motivated to do my next couple of freelance writing assignments. You'd think the MONEY would motivate me, but ... I just feel incredibly scatterbrained, like I want to do a bazillion things *other* than what I'm supposed to be doing. Yeah, I know all the mental tricks: give yourself a short-term goal followed by a small reward, break down the big task into smaller chunks, blah blah blah. I think these tactics seldom work on my aging brain because I've done them all before.

On top of all this is the siren song of NaNoWriMo (and spinoffs such as "NaBloPoMo"). I don't know how people manage to get a novel written in November. I mean, I'm going to an SCA Crown Tourney (which my local barony is hosting for the Kingdom), two SF conventions, and a regional Toastmasters conference. And I have actual freelance writing for PAY to accomplish, too. *sigh* I know I spend way too much time on Facebook, but that seems to be where all the interpersonal communication happens these days, especially among my SCA peeps.

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.

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....

Back when I had a job -- five years ago, now -- my employer had this thing where, as part of the annual review process, we would list our goals for the coming year. Some ordinary, achievable goals, and then some "stretch goals" that would be a bit more difficult to reach. Somehow, all these individual goals would get mushed together into group goals, and then departmental goals, and then one year later, we'd all sit down and calculate how much was actually achieved. And if we had collectively achieved a certain percentage of these goals, everyone in the organization would get the same amount of year-end bonus, regardless of our rank or salary.

Gee, did I ever mention how much I've missed getting a chunk of change, like $900 to $1200, dropped into my bank account during the first week of December?

However, I digress. Now that it's getting dark earlier in the evenings and the local community college has sent out its winter catalog of non-credit classes, it's time to think about what to do next.

Yes, I am a freelance science writer. I'm not giving that up. Indeed, I am working on a historical feature article due next Monday. But it's NOT enough to pay the bills. Yes, I have been applying for full-time jobs for five years now. No, I am not going to get hired. Not only do I have a five-year gap in my resume -- because freelancing isn't a "real" job -- but also my first name, Patricia, just screams "Born in the 1950s!!!!" In person, I don't look 56 years old, but on paper I seem to be in my 60s, no matter how much I chop off the bottom end of my chronological resume.

I keep thinking that, as a hedge against declining opportunities (and pay) in science writing, I should do something else in addition to science writing. You know how you sometimes see an author described as "a writer, yoga instructor, blues musician and adjunct professor of aerospace engineering"? Yeah, that sort of thing. (Never mind that I suck at yoga, teaching, and building paper airplanes.) Right now my resume says writing, writing, writing (and a bit of editing). But I know that I can do so much more.

But what?

Whatever I choose, it's got to be something I can pick up with a minimum of additional education and cash outlay. I have two bachelor's degrees and a master's degree. I do NOT need another academic degree. I cannot afford one, anyhow.

Take a couple continuing-ed courses and become a notary public?

Do the lessons on Codecademy.com?

Buy out Mistress Martelle's equipment and supplies for making things with beeswax? (She's selling them to focus on fiber arts.)

Write that book based on my diaries of the 1970s?

Start some sort of podcast and try to find a corporate sponsor?

All of the above?

(Taking a quick break from my friends-locked musings to note something here.)

I'm not sure *exactly* which day in February 1970 I started to scribble into a notebook. But somehow I think I remember it as February 23. So ... today makes the 45th anniversary of the day that I, fueled by youthful enthusiasm and a desire to emulate both Anne Frank and Harriet the Spy, started keeping a "notebook" or "diary" or "journal" or whatever you choose to call it.

I spent a *lot* of time scribbling all through the '70s. Based on some very preliminary transcribing I've done, I wouldn't be surprised if I wrote 200,000 words during that decade -- all by hand! Since then, my journaling has gone up and down and I have had some breaks, but I've been here on LJ since 2003 (and on DW since 2010).

Forty-five years ... wow.

Anyhow, back to "work" (for some freelance value of "work") and ranting.