Back Again

I needed a place to post a page outlining the animal care at my house so I decided to resurrect my blog!  I've been out of graduate school for almost as long as I was in it now and times have changed.  I work full time as a psychiatric nurse practitioner in an inpatient setting and really love my work.  I'm figuring out how to age gracefully.  I work a lot, like A LOT, and have engaged a house manager to help me care for the animals and run the house.

I'll try to keep up better with my blog!

Wow, time passes!

I've been gone a long time.  I have looked up my blog  because I'm trying to join a writing group that requires we have a blog.  Much has changed.  I've changed jobs several times.  I love my current job.  One of my dogs died, and I have a new dog.  It's been really hot here.  I'll be back.

I have rediscovered my blog.  It's been so long since I posted here that the password had to be changed for me to gain access.  My new year's resolution for 2012 is to learn something new.  I tried to think of something that I have always wanted to learn and decided to learn to write fiction this year.  To that end I have dug out some old stories that I wrote 20  years ago and found that I don't hate them and have a much easier time editing them now than before.  I've also been reading books about writing.  I'm trying to check these books out of the library but they don't have everything that Amazon suggests.  For instance, Stein on Writing, is only available in the Seattle Public Library as an audiobook of all things.  I'm not sure why a book on writing would particularly lend itself to the audio format but there you are. 

I also signed up to go to Centrum this summer.  I signed up for two classes, one on flash fiction by Sam Ligon, and another class with Pam Houston.  I don't know if I'm ready for Pam Houston but thought it would give me something to work toward.  Surely I can handle a flash fiction boot camp.  Flash fiction is not even as long as a chart note in some cases.  I decided to read Sam Ligon's books and thought I might have to buy them but found them both on top of a box of poetry books in my overrun office.  I've been reading his stories themselves but so far have not liked any of the characters. 

Oh, my other new year's resolution is to lose 20 pounds.  Don't worry, I won't be posting my weight here every week!

nalo's blog | Nalo Hopkinson

I've been reading the science fiction of Olivia Butler, a series of books called Seed to Harvest. It is an interesting exploration of forms of slavery, power relationships, etc. Octavia E. Butler was a black female science fiction writier, very rare. She has died but in an interview she pointed me to Nalo Hopkinson. I think I'll read her next.

nalo's blog | Nalo Hopkinson

Good Morning Sunday!

I must have a sun overdose. I've had all kinds of energy. I've figured out how to fix the WordPress webzine for my professional organization but think I'll still hire someone else to do it. I found a WP template I like and now I want to start another blog for pete's sake, just to use the new template.

I've been looking at the letters and poetry files from the 80s and 90s and converting the ancient WordPerfect files over to Word docs. I wish I could convert them all at once like I did with the documents I used for my dissertation but I can't find any software that recognizes this very old file format.  It's from one of the early WordPerfect versions from the 80s that I used on that old 286.  I'm using a WordPerfect 2002 to read the files.  I have to open each file in order to convert it so it forces me to read the files, something I've been putting off for years.

I also spent some time spiffing up my blogger blog and found an interesting new tool called Zemanta which suggests related content for your blog post.  It also uses something called common tagging which is a real semantic web effort aimed at creating unified content across the web. 

Today, we are having my final birthday party of the year--the poker crew is coming over--yay!  I'm going to get Ezell's Chicken for the party,  We will probably play poker here in the heat in the kitchen because that's what we do.  We are having the party so early because we have a Seattle Storm game to attend this evening.  Hopefully we will win this one and go 20/2. We are playing the Tulsa Shock so victory shouldn't be too hard.

Time to go get me some fried chicken!