Things have been a bit nuts around here for a while, which is why I haven’t posted anything since last week. Just as we were finally reasonably cleared off from the last ice storm, we were hit with a heavy, wet snowfall, which almost immediately turned into another sheet of ice. The alternating periods of bitterly freezing cold and just warm enough for things to melt a while before they refreeze have done a lot to make the world a chill, hazardous place. My knees ache just thinking about it.
Also, the lovely wife came down with a horrendous case of the flu, so she has been out of work all week, and I’ve done what I can to take care of her. She’s feeling better now, so taking care of her basically means holding her down so that she’s not out trying to clear the ice for the street out front or something. The lovely wife doesn’t have a good concept of “resting” when she’s sick, unless she’s got it really, really bad, and is only now starting to connect her habit of pushing herself mercilessly to work harder, often on busy work, when she gets sick with the fact that she often gets sick and stays sick for long periods of time. Yes, her mother was a freak.
My mother has also had yet another health crisis, this one concerning her one good eye. She apparently has had an infection in it since she had cataract surgery early last year, and the only way to treat it now is to inject her eyeball with antibiotics. There’s a chance that she may lose her vision, which would be a tragedy, as she’s already blind in her other eye.
Work is all about having great big bags of manure stacked on my head these days. I’m waiting to hear if I’m to be offered a new position elsewhere, so I’m sort of in that twilight zone that happens when you’re just emotionally done with one place but haven’t found anyplace else to go to yet.
A friend of mine pointed me toward a screenplay competition sponsored by the Oscar people. I happen to have been working on a screenplay for a while now, originally for a microbudget movie that some friends and I were talking about making. In the occasional breaks between crises and hunkering down against the elements in the past week, I’ve been tweaking and polishing the script, and now it’s almost ready to send in. I just have to find the right brads. Inexplicably, the competition’s website makes a big deal about the brads used to bind a screenplay. Go figure.
Anyway, that’s what has been going on instead of thinking about my pulp novel and writing about it here. I hope to get back to this project sometime soon. Until then, keep warm.