Friday
This rainbow greeted me first thing this morning.
It’s Valentine’s Day here in Guam, but honestly I didn’t even have it on my radar until we went into the NEX/commissary on base yesterday. Oh, look! Balloons! Flowers!
We picked up a box of chocolates for today, but each of us had one last night after dinner–bagged Caesar salad while watching Dexter on Netflix. I’m still not drinking alcohol, so I guess champagne is out for tonight.
Honestly? I don’t really care. Life has been in such turmoil with the move and everything, I don’t feel the need for any more “variety.” Give me a bagged salad, a frozen burrito, a can of Diet Coke, and another episode or two of Dexter, and I’ll be good.
Not exactly romantic, but whatever.
We’ve canceled Netflix as of March 2, so I’m trying to finish up the series. We are tired of the perennially increasing costs of streamer services. I’m going to watch Tubi (I’m loving the new Lauren Graham show, The Z Suite, and there are a ton of old movies and shows on there!) Hopefully we can pick up some local over-the-air channels here. Otherwise, I’ll amuse myself with reading and writing and podcasts and Substacks.
Speaking of tech, last night we finally exchanged our faulty internet router and jack line and voila! We have service again! It’s such a relief to be connected officially again as I’d been using a portable hot-spot someone let us borrow and didn’t feel right about all the data usage I’d been eating up.
Meanwhile, I managed to work on The Peony Hotel offline on my trusty new Chromebook. Last February, the old Chromebook ate my document when I tried to save my work offline and sync it up with my drive using a hot spot on my phone. I was up north in Maine at the time with no internet service.
Seems crazy that it was a year ago I was schlepping over to the small, local library in my parents’ town so I could work on edits for Night Moves. It’s true about getting older. Time speeds up or compresses or something. Months are like weeks. Years are like months. I’ll blink and we’ll be moving back Stateside.
Maybe our household goods will arrive by then. <Snort!>
Meanwhile, I finished up Chapter 1 on Peony to my liking yesterday (it’s always super important to me to get the first line, first paragraph, first chapter as tight as I can manage) and began on Chapter 2. I also have 7K plus words of “pre-drafting” including snippets of dialogue and backstory and narrative written out, so writing the chapters is “just” a matter of flushing out these notes.
Mostly, I’m realizing how joyful writing a new story can be when I’m not thinking about how to publish it, how I’ll get people to read it, etc. I’ve decided to worry about all that stuff later. I mean, I have some options, but I don’t even care about that right now. Telling myself the story is keeping me sane, gives me something to think about, provides an outlet for my creativity.
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I’ll link here to the short story I posted for Valentine’s Day a few years back for anyone who didn’t read it yet.
Thanks for sharing the latest. Variety, hmm, yes, there are different kinds – some not as good as others. Hope you have more of the good variety experiences in the near future.
Yeah sometimes variety isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Sounds as if your writing life is enjoying the sojourn in the Pacific! At least you have some energy left for the creative stuff and it gives you a high.
Our container of goods took 3 months to arrive, so there’s hope for yours still 🙂
I can assure you that one day when you look back on your life, you will have forgotten these currently frustrating, exasperating and depressing details.
“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” (G. K. Chesterton)
Hi Debbie: We were told two weeks, but who’s counting? The hardest part, honestly, is not having cooking equipment. We have to keep eating premade foods and it’s not so great for us health wise. We can’t eat out every single day. So it’s interesting. I have some carrots and hummus. Sounds like lunch to me.
PS: That rainbow greeted me first thing this morning when I stepped outside! It was HUGE. The biggest rainbow I’ve ever seen. It seemed very close. I could almost see that pot of gold!