Washington, Almost

2015 was the year we almost moved to Washington State, to a town near Seattle.  The beauty of that area--on a sunny day in February, cold and bright--has returned to my thoughts quite often this year.  I still peruse the real estate listings for that area.

The San Francisco Bay Area has far more sunny days, but the sunny days in Washington are more spectacular--and more precious, I'm sure, to the inhabitants of that region.  Could I withstand all the rain and gloom?  Or would I long for this drought-stricken, sun-soaked state?

I might never know.  But I do know that the idea of a couple of acres and a house with a view of Puget Sound (for half or a third of the price of houses around here) has a hold on my imagination.

Getting Back to It

I've been away from the actual crafting of stories for a long time now, two weeks...it's starting to get to me.

Yes, it's been busy.  Yes, my six-year-old son has been out of school since the 18th.  Yes, the Christmas shopping, and wrapping and planning and card-writing and social visits and all that.  But.

If I don't dive back into the writing I'm going to go nuts.

No More Sugar Blues

I've managed to kick the sugary-food habit for a little over a week.  I've kept to 20 grams of sugar or less per day since December 21st, and have stopped eating cookies, cake and chocolate.  (Okay I did eat a single Junior Mint a couple of times.  Nobody's perfect.)

It feels silly to write about this...but given my previous penchant for sugar indulgences of all kinds, I know why it's not so silly that I'm sticking to this diet.

Even better than the fact of staying low-sugar:  I no longer crave sugary foods as much as before.  I can think about cake, etc. without feeling an intense longing.

Enough talk about eating.  No more sugar blues, and no more blogging about it.

Six Years Old; Time to Start Looking

Suddenly, out of the blue as we were hiking to a local farm:  "I have something to tell you, Mommy.  When I'm a grownup, I'll have to find a mate."

Yesterday it was God and the universe, today, finding a mate...I can't wait for tomorrow's pronouncement.

The Universe and The Waltons

I don't know if there was a cause-effect relationship; I think it had more to do with my son being sick for the last four or five days, and being on vacation at the same time--thus he's spent a lot of time daydreaming recently.  But it might have had something to do, also, with the fact that we were watching The Waltons this evening.  It's a slow-paced TV show about life in the Great Depression for one rural Virginia family, in which a lot of big-picture questions come up, questions about right and wrong, life and death, truth and lies...my son suddenly asked, a propos of almost nothing:  "Mommy do you know who created the great orb called the Universe?  God?"  The next question out of his mouth was, "Mommy, do you know when the first humans came to Earth?"

I was stumped, both times...I guessed 3 million years ago, for the second question.  (Okay, now that I've looked it up:  the latest scientific research suggests that while the ancestors of homo sapiens have been around for at least 2 million years, homo sapiens itself has existed for about two hundred thousand years.)  I didn't have an answer for the first question.  Which proves, I guess, that I'm an agnostic.

My son is not.  I turned things around and asked him, "Who do you think created the universe?" and he said, very quickly, "God."

The thing to know here is that my son is a very cheerful guy, who doesn't spend his days lost in serious thought--in other words, he's a normal six-year-old.  But I do think that all six-year-olds, even normal ones, spend at least part of their time asking the big questions--they're not afraid of them, and aren't afraid of being criticized for the wrong answer.  Their thoughts are, therefore, far more interesting than the typical grad student's.

I remember asking the same kinds of questions when I was his age.  The big one for me was, when you travel all the way to the end of the universe, what do you see there?

Actually I posed this question to my son this evening, and he had another answer.  "White."

He could be right.  I hope he gets to find out.

Originality

The current Star Wars film has made so many people happy, including members of my extended family, because even if it lifted the plot almost wholesale from the first Star Wars film, "it has done it so well."

Isn't this still called plagiarism?  And beyond that...has our collective aesthetic sensibility dulled to such a degree that we believe a repetition of the same plot from the first Star Wars movie makes sense--as long as the new movie has good production values?  

I will have to see the movie to judge fairly...but I see this overt copying in an iconic movie franchise as another example of an originality deficit in this country, across many different genres.

One week left

I still want to finish the stories this year...but if I rush it at this point, it just won't be done right; that's almost guaranteed.

New, final deadline for getting them out is January 8th.

And now, off to watch a movie.  It is Christmas Eve after all.