Wednesday, May 03, 2017

Updates as Events Warrant

I'm in a hotel in LA tonight. I am speaking at a conference tomorrow, so I drove up today. Traffic was less fun than usual, thanks to an accident in Orange County. But on the bright side, I'm almost all caught up on my favorite podcasts now!

Giving seminars is a funny thing for me. In the days leading up to the seminar, I experience a bit of impostor syndrome. I am sure that what I have to say is obvious, and that everyone will hate me. And then I give the seminar, and it goes great, and I love the energy and I want to do more. I honestly don't know if that will ever change, but at least I recognize what's going on now and can deal with it.

Anyway, between the pre-seminar jitters and the news about the AHCA, I need some distracting. Also, I met a friend for dinner and had a couple of beers, and I'm not quite ready to go to sleep yet. So, to distract myself, I'm going to give you updates about things you probably aren't wondering about.

At the beginning of the year, I made a list of personal goals. I've got progress to report on three of them!

1. Paint the baseboards in the hall. Mr. Snarky surprised me and did this, but I'm still claiming it as a win, because we're a team, right?

2. Buy a new mattress. We bought one last Saturday, during our romantic date night. (We also had dinner out and visited a couple of beer tasting rooms, so it wasn't all mattress shopping...) It arrives Saturday and I am soooo excited. I hope this means I'll wake up feeling refreshed and will be less tired. OK, more realistically, I think it should at least help with some back aches I've been having.

3. Volunteer. I found a place! I'm going to help mentor foster kids who are aging out of the system. I go to my orientation and training next week. I'm very excited.

I'm also doing a pretty good job of keeping up my exercise routine, and have even added some low key weight training back in. I'm in trouble when I get too strong for the two sets of dumbbells I have now, but I'll deal with that when I get there.

In other news,  I have a great name for a collection of essays. I do not, however, have either a collection of essays or a deal to publish a collection were I to write one. (Yes, I know I run a publishing company, but having read, or at least attempted to read, quite a few self-published memoirs, I am firm in my conviction that a collection of my personal essays is something I'd want another party to agree is worth publishing before I unleashed it on the world.)

Anyway, having a name and no book is a stark reversal of my usual situation. I did, however, finally come up with a name for my next Taster Flight collection. It will be called Hemmed In. It is an anthology of classic short stories about women's lives. I hope to get it out within the next six weeks. I've got the stories selected and assembled. I "just" need to find the illustrations and do the formatting.

And now I'm starting to feel a bit sleepy, so I think I'll try to go to bed. I'm glad I'll be busy tomorrow, so I can't follow the news as the House of Representatives votes to make it very, very expensive, and perhaps impossible, for someone like me to by health insurance. I hope every single congressperson who votes for this travesty loses their seat in 2018. There are real problems with the ACA. They could have tried to fix those problems. I still don't have a clear statement from the people supporting this bill of what problems it will actually fix. I suspect that is because the problem it is fixing is a political one of their own making, and not anything to do with actually improving healthcare in this country.

Oh well. Good night!

1 comment:

  1. I'd love to hear about the place you're volunteering and how that goes! That's exactly one of the kinds of work I really want to do in the future when I can afford to spend fewer hours on paid full time work and more hours on things that matter that might not pay as well or at all.

    Spent today in a nail biting sort of bubble waiting for the probably inevitable.

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