Yeah

One of those. Just gonna scribble a little, see where it goes, before I go for a second cup of joe and try to salvage the day from this rather inauspicious beginning.

No, no, nothing like that, I only mean inauspicious in that I am doing this and not updating a base-board schematic or determining the interposer's local power needs or drawing up a graphical explanation as to why I need the whatsit like this and not like that or, shoot, there's a guy I promised to help in the lab today. Yeah. Maybe I should just work.

Well, so, Scrivener has a free trial that's not just thirty days but for NaNo will extend from mid-October to the end of November so you can use it now for outlining and still get the 50% discount if you win. Doesn't say that on the website. I wrote to them. Now I want to outline shit. I just haven't had time yet.

My ex stepmother died, right? Last night her daughter came up to clear out her place and I met her so I could take away some stuff no one wanted but that I, perversely, did. Junk of this sort: Tapes, slides, movie reels. I will add it to the tapes and slides and movie reels I've collected from other dead pieces of family, and then sort and duplicate and discard.

Slides can be scanned in bulk once I buy the equipment. Worth doing because I've got all the color transparencies taken by my father (and now by his second wife), by his father, by my mother's father, and by my mother's brother-in-law. I'm excited about going through my grandfathers' slides because they were mostly taken in the 1950s and you never know what neat shit might be in there (I'm a born historian type evidently). We're talking perhaps 20,000 slides altogether.

The reel to reel tapes are useless except perhaps the one I heard about that is of my father reading stories when I was little. I should digitize that and then the whole lot can go into audio tape recycling, wherever that can be done (harder than you think); except that sort of material is ripe for conversion into art, so I'm keeping it to see what inspiration comes along in that respect.

The movies, aah. I have reels of stuff my mom's dad took in the 50s and 60s, probably of duck hunting trips, but there might be a few moments of his grandchildren tottering about. I also now have the 8mm film my father shot around 1970 or thereabouts. I want to have someone convert all of that into a digital format so I can see what there is. But the one I'm excited about I found in my father's effects, a small reel with a post-it note in my dad's handwriting that says, "Wedding, Yosemite, trip to Seattle." See, my parents married in 1949, honeymooned in Yosemite, and then moved to Seattle so Dad could pursue his doctorate at UW. After I found the reel I moved and it went missing again until I found it in literally the twelfth box of books I hauled down and went through in my storage unit at lunchtime yesterday. My mission is to get it onto a DVD because I'd bet my mother hasn't seen that film in sixty years and, let's face it, as healthy as she seems, she won't be around all that much longer.

But wait, she's only 86, and just went to New Orleans to visit her other son, and is now planning a trip next April to Ireland. Never been there before. Never really was all that interested but this time she figures, well, it's sort of like Scotland, and she's been there enough. I dunno, I think she aspires to be like her cousin-once-removed Geneva, i.e. traveling until forever, who was about that age (maybe a little younger) when on a tour bus getting rocks thrown at it in the Khyber Pass.

The ex step sister mentioned above wrote a novel. It's about 700,000 words long and though I've never seen it, my private suspicion is that it's not very good. She's extremely smart and a very good writer (and a hard worker), but a) no agent has yet referred her to an editor, which suggests to ignorant me that they are politely letting her go the self-publish route, and b) she's a technical writer by trade and I've no idea at all about her skills as a story teller. OK, so in my ignorance I'm being uncharitable. It's an impulse sometimes.

Her sister wrote a book too, some high-tech marketing brand recognition self-help thing, I dunno. These women, always in competition. The mother is alleged to have harbored a grudge for her daughters writing the books she wanted to but never could, and then finally succumbed to a series of strokes brought on by the very real effects of alcohol deprivation. Until she gave up her car last summer she became known at the local Safeway for her alcohol purchases. It makes me sad she was so unhappy but it does nothing to dim my memory of the intensely passionate, loving, artistically sensitive, highly intelligent and beautiful woman who, when she got to know me when I was about ten or so, saw a very sensitive boy who needed the encouragement and emotional confidence-building that affection and attention provides. I will always have something to be grateful to her for.

What the hell else was I going to write? There was something but now I forget. Maybe I should just attend to this job of mine. Bah. I came in at seven, you know, to attend a meeting that it turned out had not been scheduled for this week. Oh yes, I could have used the extra time to work -- well, I did, some -- but, ah, you know.

* * *

NOW I remember. Family stuff so adding it on. My mom has lived in various parts of Northern California but finally a little under a year ago wound up near me. She shopped around and found a church. Just recently joined the Altar Guild. Met a woman with the unusual name of Finette. Caught her attention because when she was a child her mother sometimes referred to a cousin by that name, the daughter of the sister of the woman her mother's brother had married. A cousin by marriage, you might say. So she mentioned this to her new acquaintance. Turned out to be the same woman.