I started asking if my letters had sufficient postage because I wanted an excuse to hand my letter to the clerk. Not that I needed one, mind you; I could just have easily said “Here!” and left it at that. Still, it made me feel less self-conscious.
And guess what? Some of my letters actually did need more postage. Perhaps I should buy a postal scale.
I recently found a writer’s group which is about to have its second meeting. One of the things we’re planning to do at the meeting is read what we wrote using a given first line.
I had a surprising amount of fun doing this. Rather predictably, I started out by writing a poem, which then somehow morphed into a quite different story. The poem does have a place — well, sort of — in the story. I’m eager to see — er, hear — what the others have written. I’m sure they’ll all be quite different.
One of the things I do when I drive is try to be a good citizen and let other people make turns when they need to. In any case, I’ve made a private study of noticing how often this results in any slow down in my own commute.
The answer is almost never. Face it, if there’s enough traffic to make it difficult for someone else to make a turn into it, being one car further back isn’t going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference.
Plus usually the person turns in another direction at the next corner. It’s amazing how seldom the other car continues to drive in front of me.
I spent some time this morning filling out an !!! ### form online. It would have been a significant help if they’d have called up last year’s version of the same form so we could either just re-use the information (where it was the same) or have it to compare against.
After railing against their lack of this feature it occurred to me that one of the reasons they don’t do this is that they probably purge their database of this information after you submit it. If they kept everybody’s information they’d soon run out of places to store it all.
It is not, however, an unsolvable problem. They could let folks store their own information on their own computers and provide a way to upload last year’s saved information, validate it, etc.
Of course, it would mean significantly more work on their part but it would make our lives a lot easier.
Not that I expect this nifty feature to be available any time soon, but I can keep dreaming.
In the mean time, we printed out a copy of this year’s form and saved it.
I was driving to work this morning thinking about playing the piccolo. I was trying to remember how long I’ve been playing. I could of course call A., the guy I bought the piccolo from, and ask him to look up when I bought the thing but no, why disturb him for what is really a piece of trivia?
Anyway I think I’ve been playing around ten years or so, which is significantly less time than I’ve been playing the flute. I took flute lessons for eight years as a kid and then took it up again when my oldest son, who just turned twenty-five this past Saturday, was a baby.
I was driving slowly because I was trying to figure out how long I’d been playing. Therefore I drove slowly past the cop hidden behind a snow bank who was doubtless trolling for speeders. Just another example of how God looks out for writers.
I stopped at the library on the way home the day before yesterday. After collecting a number of paperbacks from the “recent paperbacks” section I stopped to look at the hardcovers. I was lucky enough to find the Spider Robinson/Robert A. Heinlein “Variable Start” which I snapped up and am now reading.
I just love libraries.
Last night I dreamed I was back in Florida. I wasn’t at the hotel we stayed at but at one where the stairs up to the rooms were on the right as you entered the rather small lobby. Up half a flight was the dining room, and up still further were the rooms.
I had interviewed for three jobs and was inquiring of the head hunter about my prospects. She said that I was about to be offered all three and that there was a fourth company who wanted to interview me.
Then I woke up to find that tomorrow’s weather prediction calls for the possibility of a significant snow storm.
Dream job, indeed!
I am back from a week’s vacation in sunny Palm Beach, Florida where amoung other things I went to about five yoga classes.
I never thought of myself as a particularly visually-oriented person and was therefore a bit surprised when I was pretty much unable to keep from mirroring the instructor instead of following the left-right instructions. In my defense I can only say that I spent years in dance classes where mirroring was the norm.
I’ve also been writing more poems about the weather — sunsets, winter and the like — not at all my usual thing. It just goes to show that you never can tell what’s coming next — either in writing or in life.
