Tuesday 19 July 2011

Smoking and drinking...

... Two very useful vices for the incompetent playwright. For your characters, not (just) for you. Drinking lets them say things they wouldn't have otherwise said, and, in the modern era of health regulations, smoking lets them exit for a quick fag.

I'll try and post an excerpt tomorrow. I did a full hour today, which seems to add up to about 10 lines of dialogue. But more importantly, I am spending time in the company of my characters, getting to know them again, and figuring out what they are like. (James has become Sean. He was never a James.)

the daily swim 8 - washed out

Or drowned to be more accurate. Rain and more rain and more frigging rain and thunder and it's so cold I have to put on a sweater in the house. Okay, I know everyone in the UK has been wearing sweaters all summer but this is the South of France and it was 34 degrees two days ago.

Another catch up day tomorrow as me and the cat venture out of the house for the first time in 24 hours. Not with the same intention of course.

Photos uploaded...

I've done some amazing organizing of photos today. I'm feeling more comfortable now that the majority of my "Best (or Most Representative)" photos are uploaded to the Internet someplace, just in case my computer and my backups fail simultaneously. You know, the house burns down or something. And the DVDs I have stored other places fail. Or DVDs become obsolete. Anyway. I feel better.

Tomorrow goal is to go through the family trip that we went on in June, and organize those photos. There are people out there who are actually waiting to see those, so that is even more inspiring. Maybe I should have done those first...

En aquellas tiempos ...

Mi escritura de esta noche es la tarea para la clase de español mañana por la noche. Estamos practicando el impefecto, y marcas de tiempo. La tarea consiste en pensar en la vida de alguien en el pasado, y compararlo con cómo mi vida es hoy.

Un poco aburrido, tal vez, pero escritura es escritura, ¿no?

Cuando mi abuela estaba una niña, ella no tenía tantas de las cosas cuales yo subestimo. Ella se crío antes de World War I. No había ordenadores, no había máquinas de escribir electrónicas. No creo que su familia tenían larga distancia por el teléfono. Hoy en día, mí, no lo pienso dos veces si quiero hablar con mi familia o con mis amigos. Simplemente marco el teléfono. O, mejor, haga clic en un botón y tengo una llamada de vídeo de Skype. ¡Video! No creo que ella podría haber imaginado una cosa así en aquel tiempo.

Cuando yo viajaba por trabajo, me enviaron sus postales de mis varios viajes. Después de su muerte, hemos encontrado todas las postales que yo le había enviado, guardó en el cajón de su cómoda.

En aquellas días, mi abuela escribía cartas. Tenía que espera por días (¡semanas!) para recibir una repuesta. Ahora, si no recibe una respuesta de alguien immedieately, que se impaciente. No me puedo imaginar tener que esperar, como ella, de una respuesta - en especial de mi abuelo, cuando estaba luchando en el extranjero en WW2.

Tal vez, la vida era más simple entonces. Pero, porque sé de toda la tecnología de hoy, creo que fue más dificil.

Mitzi by the Sea, Day 8-ish?

Although I'm losing track of what day I'm up to - perhaps someone tecchy could stick a calendar app on this blog?! - it's the dailyness that keeps me going. A day isn't a day with the 30-day walk pledge in action.

Yesterday I finally rounded the curve of the shore and throroughly enjoyed seeing some new sites, which since January have been my local neighbourhood. Even though this picture is very murky, it shows an eel swimming languidly around in a creek that flows out from a storm-water drain into the bay.

Back in it!

I'm back in the game! While grudgingly doing my 30 minutes of photo organization last night, I realized that I had already selected the Best (or most representative) pictures from all of the months of last year, so all I would need to do was caption and tag them. That made the daunting task much less daunting.

So, tonight I captioned and tagged and uploaded the best of February, so I'm all done with 2011! Yay!

Only 6 months in 2010 left to caption and tag. That should take me about 6 days, and then I can move on to something more interesting in this whole activity.

Today I'm posting a picture from February of one of my daughter's cooking creations. She had decided that she could invent her own recipes (she's 5) and would use just about anything I'd allow her, and then we'd bake it and she'd even try it (and I'd pretend to). No real taste success so far, apparently. This one seems to contain marshmallows, green food coloring, flour... and who knows what else?

Day 7 - The Eye of Basil

I actually took two pictures today.  Broke my own rule I guess.  But I have found that the more I do this the more I want to do it; and isn't that the point?

I struggled with which picture to post.  I finally decided on this one because it's more interesting to me.  But, because I used my cell phone it didn't come out as well as I'd have liked, or might have if I were using my regular camera.  Can you guess what it is?

Yeah, I didn't think so.  I wouldn't know either if I hadn't been the one to take the picture.  I have herbs in pots in the backyard.  Bugs have eaten holes through the leaves of the basil.  This picture is looking through one of those holes to the leaves on the other side.   I think it would've worked better with a real camera rather than the cell phone camera, but still, it's interesting to me.

-kathi