This happens to me all too often. I look forward to Mondays because Monday is my first opportunity to work without interruption after a weekend of screaming kids and Hubster (Hubster does not scream, but he does keep me busy on the weekends). I enjoy my time with my family, but I do need time to work, so by the time Monday comes around, I’m usually chomping at the bit to get started. Then wouldn’t you know it? One of the kids is sick, there’s a doctor’s appointment to go to, Hubster decides to work at home which always completely disrupts my routine…

The last couple of weeks’ worth have been totally eaten by sick kids, sick me, and doctor appointments. And yesterday, when I thought I’d finally have the house to myself to work, Pixie came down with a fever. It’s been frustrating, I tell ya. I do most of my writing in the evenings after the kids are asleep and while Hubster is busy up in the office, but I still need a couple hours during the day to handle email, finances, story critiques, website updates, blogging, etc. If I don’t get that time, those tasks start to build up fast, and pretty soon I find myself staying up all hours of the night just to keep up. I hate it!

I recently read an article on author Jodi Picoult, a woman who’s written 17 novels in 18 years (and no, I haven’t read a single one of her books). She gets up at the crack of dawn, goes for a three mile walk, and then works until 3PM when her kids get home. I started to think, “Man! Wouldn’t that be great, to just write for six or seven hours straight? Think how much writing I’d get done! I wish I had her schedule.” Then I read that she gets 200 fan emails a day and she personally responds to all of them, and suddenly I realized I pretty much do have her work schedule. Not with the 200 fan emails a day of course (though I wouldn’t complain about that). But Jodi Picoult is also handling those same minor tasks that eat up so much of a writer’s time, and if she has kids, I’m betting she also has days where she’s got to take care of a sick child or spend all day in the doctor’s office instead of at her desk writing. And yet she still gets stuff done.

And I get stuff done too. A short story a week, two web comics, commissions for my computer graphics business, etc. In spite of all the juggling, it does all somehow get done.

Huzzah, it’s Tuesday. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to work!

That plan sort of worked. Last week I was still recovering from being sick with a sinus infection, and then Princess came down with some sort of stomach bug, and then we had a snow day so all my usual carefully laid plans went right out the window. I did manage to get on the Wii to exercise most mornings, but many days that was the only exercise I got, and I’m really striving for 2-3 periods of exercise each day. Those periods include: early morning Wii session before everyone else gets up; daytime fitness class at the Y or dojo; and half an hour or more outside working on the yard and garden. I only managed to get all three sessions in on one day, Friday. I must admit I felt tired when Friday evening hit, but I also felt good. Thanks to getting up early, the day’s schedule had gone well and I got in plenty of activity and even some fresh air. But that was the only day I accomplished all my physical activity. Most of the week I only got to workout on the Wii, and I was frustrated with that because those workouts were not as challenging as I would have liked.

Then I stumbled across a comment on the Wii Mommies forums about the “Combine” feature in Wii Fit Plus. One mom noted that when she combined the preset routines in Training Plus, she got a really good workout that burned 200 calories. That’s far more calories than I’ve usually been able to burn using Wii Fit Plus, so I decided to give this a try.

Sunday morning, I popped in Wii Fit Plus and went straight to Training Plus. I selected the Routines option and hit the “Combine” button where I picked six of the routines available and told Wii to let ‘er rip. Forty-two minutes later, I had actually worked up quite a sweat and burned 146 calories. Amazing! By combining the various routines, I was able to go through all areas of Wii Fit Plus – cardio, balance games, yoga and strength – and I even had fun in the process. The combined routines mixed everything up so I did a little of this, a little of that, and never got bored.

What I really liked is that I did all that exercise, burned plenty of calories, and still managed to take it easy on my knees. It’s that time of the month, folks, and with my hormones in full swing, my knees are really killing me. Wii Fit Plus is about the only home exercise I can do that won’t leave me crippled for life during this time. But compared to EASA and Gold’s Gym Cardio, Wii Fit Plus seemed seriously lacking in the calorie burning department.

Well, no longer. I’ll probably spend most of this week doing combined workouts so I can continue to take it easy on my knees. With luck, I’ll be able to work up a sweat every morning, and then go on to my next exercise period ready to rock and roll. We’ll see how this works out!

If anybody else is using Wii Fit Plus and has thoughts on the Combine function, let me know. Or if you have any tips on getting the most out of Wii Fit Plus, feel free to leave them here. I still think Wii Fit Plus is the most fun of all the fitness games I’ve tried, but I really want to sweat with it. If you can help me figure out how to do that, I’d be very grateful!

But now we’re all home and I’m content to sit on the couch and contemplate what’s currently going on in my life. And what’s currently going on is my budding new love affair…

With my local hardware store.

You have no idea how giddy and excited I am right now. Yesterday, after taking the kids to swim class, I headed to the post office to mail a couple packages. Post office was closed, unfortunately, but rather than declare the trip a bust, I decided to visit the nearby hardware store. It’s a Taylor’s DIY store, far smaller than Lowe’s or HQ, and I wasn’t expecting much from it, but when I pulled into the parking lot, I felt the first blush of attraction.

You see, the girls and I just planted seeds last week, in preparation to start this year’s container garden, and I’d been thinking about buying compost instead of potting soil, but wasn’t sure where I could easily get some. Well, there in the parking lot of Taylor’s was several bags of the stuff, along with bags of peat moss and vermiculite and other garden goodies. “Yes!” I thought. “Here’s a place where I can get exactly what I need for this year’s herbs and veggies, and maybe this time we’ll have a shot at harvesting more than two tiny shriveled tomatoes!”

Then I walked inside the store, and that was when I really fell in love. The place was clean and well lit, and I could clearly see the signs for where everything was. This place was not a massive, monumental maze of confusion like Lowe’s or HQ. It was small, tidy, and well organized. And it had staff! Helpful friendly staff! The girls and I weren’t even in the store two minutes before someone asked if they could help up find anything. And as soon as someone noticed I was in the store with a couple of antsy kids, a clerk headed over to the old-fashioned popcorn cart and started heating up a batch of fresh popcorn! I got to spend 45 minutes wandering through the entire store while the girls happily munched on popcorn!! There was no whining, no fussing, no arguing; just the quite munch-munch of two little girls happily devouring large bags of free popcorn!

And if that wasn’t enough to seal the deal on my undying love, Taylor’s had a very nice selection of stuff I actually would use, like heirloom vegetable seeds and bird feeders and gardening tools and pots. Lots of nice pots at very reasonable prices for my small container garden. I drooled my way through the store, smiling happily at the clerks who showed up every ten minutes to ask if I needed help or more popcorn. I left with a bag of dried corn cobs and a squirrel feeder to put them in, but I made plans to come back soon, very soon, with a long list of must-have items for my garden.

It’s crazy, I know. I’m hopeless as a gardener, and an even worse do-it-yourselfer, but being in that store with all those helpful friendly clerks and actually being able to find stuff made me feel like I could do anything! Or at least made me feel like I could tackle a few simple home projects this Spring and Summer and come out with half-decent results.

Where is this crazy new love affair headed, you ask? What will the results be? Here are the results I’m hoping for:

• A bigger, nicer container garden that produces plenty of herbs and even a few heirloom veggies!
• Pixie’s clunky old cargo box bed disassembled, sanded down, and painted a lovely shade of girly pink with little blue flowers and dragonflies on it.
• A small bookcase to fit in my master bathroom, so I finally have someplace nice to store all those books and magazines I like to read while I’m in the tub.
• Maybe even re-finish a few pieces of the old cargo box furniture in our living room to give the whole room a new look!

And so on and so on. I’ve got a list of home improvement and redecorating projects as long as my arm, and I’m just dying to get to work on them. Now that I’ve discovered my local hardware store, I think I might actually have a shot. Though to be really successful, I may need to expand this relationship. You know, make it a threesome? I hear there’s a very attractive fabric store in our area…

And this week’s cartoon pretty much sums up everything in the previous seven episodes – uncomfortable uniforms, mandatory football game attendance, required show of spirit, and bad haircuts all around. Plus evil upper classmen having fun at the rats’ expense.

But it was all good. I recall the above incident actually happening, though I can’t say if I was a rat at the time or an upper classmen. I just know it happened, and it struck me as funny.

I do believe this is the last of the 2×2 format comics. I know I’ve said that before, and then continued uploading more 2×2 comics. I have no idea why I went with 2 panels across by 2 rows down. Where on earth did I get the idea for that format? It certainly looked like nothing I ever saw in a newspaper. I have no idea how the Collegiate Times worked around my idiotic formatting choice, but they did, and they never sent me any nasty-grams about it, so I am forever grateful to them for that. They were very patient with me, and mercifully criticism-free to a newbie comic artist.

What really puzzles me is the format and quality of the cartoons that follow. You’ll see what I mean next week. I know that the 2×2 cartoons were the first ones I drew and the first ones that ran in the CT. After that, I have a hard time establishing what order the cartoons ran in. I spent an evening or two sorting through all the strips I had, and was able to sort them into Year 01, Year 02, etc. But I can’t necessarily say I got them in the correct order beyond that. I do know that the artwork suddenly started to look a lot better, probably because I found a different pen to ink with and because I got better at erasing my pencil lines. But for some reason, I never seemed to stick with the same kind of pen or paper for too long. You’ll see examples of what I mean as we get further along.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. Next week, we get more into the day-to-day details of life as a rat!

For some reason, these sorts of conversations happen to me all the time. I’m sitting in the dojo or at the park or in the play area of Chic-Fil-A, working on my latest evil project, and a mom I don’t know will ask, “So, what are you working on?” Fortunately, these conversations never last long…

I have not made a voodoo doll exactly. I did crochet a zombie and then a ninja, both of which I believe I’ve shown off here in the blog. Right now, I’m sewing a felt pillow/creature for Princess – a one-eyed, winged heart doll. It’s based on a little doodle I often like to draw. Princess is also sewing these days, making a heart dolly of her own for Pixie. Nobody is quite sure what Pixie is doing, but here is her latest artistic effort.

Apparently one of these figures is me with blood on my teeth, one of these figures is the Hubster with blood on his teeth, one of these is Pixie with blood on her teeth, and the shortest character is a baby with blood on its teeth. We’ve been talking about adopting a third child, and Pixie very much wants a baby sister. Princess was very upset not to be in this family portrait.

BTW, today’s cartoon also features my best friend Mary. I’ve known Mary since I was 11, which means I’ve now known her 30 years. Kind of scary. Mary knows pretty much everything about me, and yes, she would enjoy watching me give someone a heart attack and as a nurse, she’s more than qualified to perform CPR on my victims. Love ya, Mary!

I was doing pretty good with EA Sports Active for the first 4 weeks of the 6-week challenge, but then I hit a week where my hormones went all wonky. Two things happened then. I packed on about 4 lbs of water weight and I got massive sugar and salt cravings. I knew what was happening, but that didn’t stop me from throwing my healthy diet out the window so I could gorge on salty snacks and drink way too many sugared drinks. Now I’m paying the price for that.

I was sick on the couch all last week, so now that I feel better I’m going to restart my exercise and healthy eating plans. Starting today, I’ll be getting up at 6AM to exercise with Gold’s Gym Cardio and Wii Fit Plus on the Wii for 45 minutes or so. I did 6 weeks straight of nothing but EASA on the Wii so I’m a little bored with it right now. Gold’s Gym always makes me sweat and Wii Fit is good for fixing my balance and thus my knee problems as well.

In addition to this, I’m going back to my usual two diet rules. First, eat 2 vegetarian meals a day. Second, drink a glass of water before I drink anything else. I’m not giving up my 2-3 cups of tea a day, but drinking the extra water always seems to help slow down the appetite a bit.

I’ll be doing a denim check each Monday as well, trying on the same pair of jeans I tried on this morning to see how they fit. Again, it’s not about the number on the scale. It’s about eating healthy, getting plenty of exercise, drinking lots of water, and FITTING INTO MY JEANS!

Ah, football. How I hated that sport.

The Virginia Tech Cadet Corps was required to attend every home football game when I was a cadet. I’m sure they still are. The year I became a freshman at Tech was the year after the university had been involved in some sort of recruiting scandal, and as a result they were forbidden to recruit for the next four years. Or something like that. Remember, I didn’t really care for the game so I wasn’t paying attention to the details.

But even I had to notice that the Hokies lost more games than they won that year… And the year after that… And the year after that… And that was a problem for me and every other freshman cadet who came along. You see, we were required to cheer for our team, and if the Hokies didn’t win, it was because we didn’t cheer hard enough! Yes, folks, this was the kind of logic I was dealing with in college. And whenever the Hokies lost a football game, we rats lost privileges like weekend pass. No weekend pass meant we didn’t get to go anywhere but the dining hall and the toilet that weekend, and let me tell you, that kind of sucked.

What also sucked was the uniforms we had to wear to the game. The one I’ve drawn here is the dark blue blouse with the white ducks. The blouse is that heavy hips to neck thing, made out of wool. The white ducks are the pants we were wearing. The blouse sucked because in the fall, the weather could go anywhere from freezing to “OMFG! I’m dying of heat prostration here!” And the blouse wasn’t really adequate clothing for either end of that spectrum. Plus it had a really stiff collar that chaffed like nobody’s business. The white ducks were bad because they had to be pressed and starched just so, and because they got dirty if you even so much as looked at them. Seriously. I’d put my pants on and before I got out to formation, they’d go from white to grey. I got into a lot of trouble for that, let me tell ya.

The cup chain incident really did happen, by the way. One of the ways we rats could show spirit was by collecting the plastic cups everyone got their drinks in and stacking them into a chain that ran up and down the stadium. We never had enough cups so we always had to beg the civilian students for them. Well, one time the civilians got a little too enthusiastic with the giving and the next thing you know, the stadium pretty much exploded with plastic cups. They were coming at us from every which way, and a lot of them still had soda in them. We got into a little bit of trouble for that one.

I’ve been getting feedback from some former cadets of the good ol’ VTCC. Thank you all for the kind comments. I hope you are all enjoying the cartoons. I got plenty of ‘em!

Sorry. Usually I’m far more enthusiastic about birthdays, but yesterday, on my birthday, I came down with some sort of nasty sinus infecting crud and have ended up spending most of the day on the couch answering e-mail and watching Scooby Doo with the youngest child. Not a pretty sight, I can assure you.

But since I am just turned 41, I though I’d take a moment today to look at what I’ve done so far with my writing career and then discuss what I want to do during Year 41. I consider my writing career to have started on my 34th birthday, in spite of the fact that I had already published 3 short stories prior to that. Those 3 short stories were written and published years apart, so I wasn’t so much a writer as a wannabe who had somehow managed to get into print. Writers, in my opinion, are people who write every day, and work to get themselves published. And I did not really start doing that until the day I turned 34, which coincidentally also happened to be the day after I came home from the hospital with my first born child.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll repeat it now. Until I became a parent, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I worked at various jobs, all of which I hated. I spent 11 years in the Army Reserves. I had quit my last job to “find myself” as it were, and after 2 years didn’t have much to show for it. I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do or how I wanted to do it. But boy howdy, when I came home with that screaming bundle of joy, I certainly figured it out then. The urge to write was overwhelming, and it was prompted in part by a) the fact that I realized if I wanted to do something with my life, I needed to start now, and b) post-partum hormones and a need to distract myself somehow from the pain of breastfeeding a squalling infant around the clock.

Writing = Ass In Chair. I think we all know that equation. With breastfeeding, I suddenly had a lot of ass-in-chair time, and thus I decided to put it to good use and write. Now seven years later, I have written nearly 150 short stories, 135 of those for the Heat Flash Erotica Podcast; one novel; and produced a weekly audio show for the last 2 1/2 years. I also have a weekly webcomic that I write and draw, plus another comic that I’m restoring and publishing online. I get invited to 4 conventions a year to be a writing/podcasting guest. I’ve been in half a dozen anthologies. And probably most surprisingly, I know quite a few e-publishers by first name. At this point in my writing career, I am out of the slush pile, well-known enough to have a small fan base, and I get the occasional invite to participate in various anthologies and projects. It’s not a bad place to be, I have to admit.

So what do I want to do with the next year? Where do I want to go? On one hand, I’d like to step up on a few things – more novel writing, more publications, maybe even a couple more convention spots. On the other hand, I’d like to tone things down a notch. I am still, after all, a stay-at-home mom with two small children to take care of. And I’d like very much to have the time to enjoy my life and indulge in a few hobbies and passions. Can I balance those what I’ve got in those two hands? This is the year I intend to find out.

Here’s the plan. I’ve been podcasting a short story a week for the last 2 1/2 years. That’s been great in terms of getting my name out and building an audience, but it doesn’t allow me any time left over to write novels. And boy howdy, do I have some novels I want to write. And podcast as well. I’ve talked to some publishers I work with and they have said they would be interested in publishing a novel I podcast. That’s always great to hear, because I think podcast novels are a great way to build an audience for current and future work. So the plan is that at the end of the third season of Heat Flash – that’s this September – I’ll wrap up the short stories, take a bit of a hiatus, and get to work on the first of what I hope to be many a string of novels. Then I’ll come back in the new year and podcast that novel a chapter at a time. Taking time off from podcasting will obviously cause me to lose some audience members, but it’s a necessity at this point. I swear to you, I am on the go from dawn to midnight, and there simply is no spare time in my day to write anything more than what I’m already doing. Even if I stopped blogging and cartooning, I still don’t think there’d be enough time. And I’ve already given up TV, so what else is there to cut out of my schedule? Sleep?

Ah, sleep. That’s been another problem. I don’t get enough of it. I’ve been getting up at 5AM for the last couple of years, and it’s starting to get harder and harder. So I’ve decided that I need more and not less. The 5AM wake-up call is going away for a while. Right now I’m thinking 6AM might work, though if I still find myself tired getting up that early, I’m willing to stay in bed until 7AM. In lieu of working early in the morning, the plan is to get the kids to bed earlier and write in the evenings. It’s a switch I can live with, and one that will put my schedule in synch with the Hubster’s. I married the man, I would like to at least be awake when he comes to bed so I can kiss him goodnight.

Beyond that, I am in general trimming some things out of my schedule to make more time for writing and family. My post on Oh Get A Grip this Friday will be my last there. I’ll miss participating on OGG, but I need that time back. And once I get through the current novella I’m writing, I’m not picking up any new writing projects until I get past the third season of Heat Flash. I’m hoping that this summer, I’ll be able to squeeze in a little extra work time in the afternoons, since I won’t have to be at the bus stop at 3:30PM. The kids are quite capable of entertaining themselves in the afternoon while I work, I know that from previous summers.

And that’s the general plan for next year. Start clearing out my workload, get a little extra sleep, and switch over from short stories to novels come September. I think it will work, and hopefully getting more novels published will mean more book sales. Nothing wrong with that, right?

Thoughts and opinions on my plan are welcome. You can leave a comment below

Yep, this is exactly what I want and pretty much how I expect the day to go. And don’t forget, I have a dental appointment today! Yee-HAW!

In all seriousness, I got some very nice presents from the Hubster and my sister, and have already been informed by my in-laws and parents that there’s a little something from both of them on the way. I’ll be spending this weekend with family as we celebrate my mother-in-law’s birthday (she was born on Leap Day; how cool is that?!). And then I’m thinking that the next Friday, I’m blowing everything off and going to hide in the bookstore for the afternoon until I absolutely have to leave to get the kids. Or maybe I’ll just sit at my computer and play around with my graphics programs? Who knows! The thing is, I’ve been trying to take a day off for the last two months and something’s always come up. Not this time. Not if I can help it.

So here’s hoping everyone with a birthday today has a great day, and the rest of you too! See ya!