Spring Flu Season

So false alarm. turns out Doug just had his phone off. He called me back very chipper and feeling pretty much the same as he has been and said, "I found out I had left my phone off for the last few days. I was carrying it around with me, in my coat pocket, etc., but it wasn't on, so I have all these messages I'm returning now."

And I said, "phew."

Of course, soon after that both Terri and I came down with what my mother euphemistically calls "the creeping crud" and we've both been down for the count. Today is day 5. Day FIVE! of the flu.

On a good note I wrote a short story somewhere in those 5 days.

Hey, we take the good with the bad.

Now if I could only get the cats to stop asking to go out and in and out and in...

Ah, spring flu season!

Strange Relations

OK - I have to admit to being worried, and I know those who know me well will understand, but I still feel strange. My ex-husband's got Lymphoma. He's on treatment three - or is it four? and he's finally had to shave his head as he's been threatening and says he aches in his bones all the time. He's been putting on a brave front on his blog, but I see where he hasn't posted this week since his last Chemo treatment and so I called him on my lunch break. No answer.

I know he's probably at home feeling miserable and with the three dogs staring at him and wishing he'd pet them. I know he fell down and can't get up and doesn't have one of those little necklace thingys. I know he fell down a well and Lassy needs to go rescue him, I know I feel guilty because I'm his ex-wife and he should have someone with him right now and he's single and bored with his daily regiment and can't have folks over much due to his low immune system and...... I know. That's just dumb. We're divorced after all right?

But those of you who don't know us, won't realize that my partner Terri and I call Doug "Our Ex-Husband," and he and I paid like $76 bucks in some legal office with one legal guy and said, "divorce is done, you take the cat, I'll take that cooking pan, Phew! Let's go to lunch!" and he came to My and Terri's wedding and gifted us with a beautiful krokinole board he made (We'll need another post to explain krokinole, which I'm sure I'm mis-spelling) and he's one of my favorite people in the world and he deserves to have a partner with him at his side right now, hanging in there with him and... I know... I'm being dumb.

So, I'll just wait to hear from him when he's feeling better, 'cause I'm sure if I were home feeling crappy I wouldn't answer my phone either.

It's funny because most people who have only met me since I've lived in Montpelier have to hear that whole story with a puzzled look and they go "Oh! You were married before I didn't know that!" and it always makes me feel strange that folks don't GET that a woman who lives with and is in a committed relationship with a woman might actually have not been attacked, run over, molested, or raped by a zillion men to get there and/or just hate them out of some genetic requirement.

The fact is, I have been in love many times in my life. Never has the requirement been that the person had to be one gender or the other. So yes, Doug and I found eventually that though we cared about each other we just were miserable living together. We found after a short period of adjustment we could be friends, and it turned out to be the basis for why we weren't breaking up. I mean, we felt like "If I still like you I can't get a divorce 'cause we'll be required to hate each other..." Maybe that's the more idiotic idea, and we didn't make that one up.

I remember actually going to the therapist after my divorce - she was our couples therapist while we tried to work things out - and saying - "Man am I NORMAL? I'm happy. I'm not trying to break into my ex husband's house and steal the cat or the car or some conch shell we picked up on our honey moon and I'm not trailing him with a private eye or something..." and she said "Yeah. You're normal. Those other things people do are the abnormal behavior. That'll be $50." Hey, and I gladly paid that. Why not?

Relations are strange... But hey, Some day before I die I'll start to accept that actually, that fact is also the norm.

Vacation finally...

Well, I've finally made it to a week of vacation in March. Very nice. Where am I going did you say? My favorite vacation plans... nowhere...!

So now I get to settle in and rest & relax. One of the biggest things I've been looking forward to on this vacation is a chance to do some writing. I've done so little over the last month or two.

Just a quick report on how the panel went last Saturday. It was marvelous! A lot of work, but it was really worth it to be able to be in a room full of a dozen or more playwrights. To quote Sarah Brock, (who wrote an amazing play about 5 medieval women trying to keep their castle after the Lord dies called "Twist in the Rising") "It's good to be in a room full of people who don't think I'm crazy when I say I hear voices in my head."

The picture above is a shot of some of us speaking on the panel (From the left, Jeanne Beckwith, Sarah Brock, Dana Yeaton, Monica Callan, and James Lantz) - taken by a lovely friend of mine who agreed last minute to take the photos while I stood up and jibber jabbered - Thanks Mary Beth!!!

So far this past few days leading up to vacation I've created some lovely sheets on the panel which I hope to post at the vermontplaywrightscircle.org/ site soon - and I've started a short story which is actually a full blown fantasy based on some words from an exercise that the folks in my fiction writing group do once or twice a year. The exercise is called "Short Story in a Week." and is just that. A list of words is generated and everyone has to write a story using those words in the tense they are giving in.

Not sure what I'll call this yet as the ending's not written yet, but here's a sampling of the opening. (typos & all as you're not supposed to edit during this exercise...)

First, the words given: bray, pendulum, elixir, zealot, apse

Now the opening of the story:

"Start here…" the label on the map said. A drunken arrow lead from the word 'here' across the parchment and down the right side of the map to an almost indecipherable phrase – which had clearly been written by the same hand that drew the arrow – "Pendulum Fault." Alara smiled and sat down at her rickety desk to examine the map more closely. The fire crackled in the overlarge fireplace.

There was nothing she liked better then a mystery, and this map was proving to be just that. Shadows danced on the wall in the dim winter afternoon. Her sister huddled by the warmth of the fire in her gray traveling robes, which she hadn't even taken the time to change out of upon her return home. The drunken line ran from the Gerin Mountains far in the north down through the kingdom of Olikuma and finally to the sea. Through the thin cut window of the castle, a weak afternoon light tried to reach the table, to no avail. Alara moved the lamp closer to the map. Her sister had brought the map back from the Gerin Mountain Monastery where she had spent the past three turnings of the years as an initiate. She had procured the map from the Matron of Initiates, what was her name? Matra Inisthulen. That was it. How long had it sat on some dusty shelf waiting to be handed over to Alara's family?

"And this Matra was clear you were to keep the map a secret from Father and Bonin?" Alara looked up at her sister, who seemed to have blended into the gray rock of the fireplace where she huddled on a low stool.

"The Matra said, 'we have awaited you many generations, Child,' as she handed this to me. The monks were all out in the courtyard with Brother and Father. It seemed to me this map was not meant for the eyes of the men in our family." Ri rubbed her hands together to warm them then shrugged at Alara, "I got a sense of it, anyway, when she slammed the drawer shut as the door to her chambers opened. So I shoved it quickly into my robes and left to join Father and Bonin in the courtyard."



"'Start here…,' seems a bit puerile, don't you think?" Alara ran a gloved hand over the map. She had been out Falconing before the royal entourage arrived. The leather glove was thick. She couldn't feel a thing through it. She took it off and repeated the gesture. "Ahha…" She laughed. "Look," She said. She lifted the map and turned toward the shifting firelight. "Here at the center, embedded in the map, look here."



"What? What could possibly be fit inside of a map? It is only parchment isn't it, I – Oh…" Ri had come over to Alara and placed her hand on the map at center. Alara nodded.



"You feel it? See?" Alara stepped forward a bit so that the map came away from Ri's hand. In the firelight, in the faintest of shadows, the firelight illuminated a small wisp of an object. It could have been a hair or two caught and dried in the ink, or the spine of a feather if one did not know what to look for, but both Ri and Alara had seen such objects before.



"Dragon's breath!" Ri whispered.



***OK - That's all you get so far***