Category Archives: Holidailies

Locus of Control

Frankenstein Stamp
This is me at the beginning of the year

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions anymore. I think I’ve said that already in this blog, but I’ll say it again. It’s just that January 1 is such an arbitrary date to decide that you’re going to improve yourself. I used to make March 25 resolutions for reasons that are no longer relevant, but I don’t do that anymore either. But this year, I do have some goals, and I have decided to focus on various areas of my life — loci, because I like to use fancy words — that need attention and improvement. I’m listing them here to keep myself accountable, but you’re welcome to read them as well and comment just in case you want to.

Loci/Goals:

  • Writing: I want to focus even more on my writing and make it a larger priority. I want to end the year with at least fifty submissions; one hundred was manageable, but I think I’ve run out of market/manuscript combinations. I want to write some more stories so I can send different stuff out there. And finish one novel and at least start another.
    • Goal: To end the year with 182,500 words written. That’s a minimum of 500 words per day, which is easily done as long as I make it a priority. Those don’t count words on my blog, on Facebook, or on Twitter.
  • Daikaijuzine: My main goal for Daikaijuzine for the year is to switch platforms, from Drupal to WordPress. Drupal has issues that WordPress does not, and I know I can make it look better with WordPress. Also, I know WordPress a lot better than I know Drupal. Fortunately, there is a good Drupal → WordPress migration tool that I can use to help with this.
  • Health: Physical and mental. I’ve been doing pretty well with this already; Jennifer and I both signed up for Noom, and it’s helped quite a bit. We also signed up for The Outbreak Challenge, and that’s gotten us moving around a lot, and that also helps. My blood pressure is down, my resting heart rate is down, and I’ve lost ten pounds so far. Yay me. Just gotta keep on keepin’ on.
  • Church and Community: I plan on attending church more regularly, at least online. I haven’t for over two years now, primarily because of the pandemic (ugh, so much because of the pandemic), and I always feel better on a Sunday morning after going. I also want to get more involved in the community by doing some volunteering. I lump these two together since giving of oneself to the community is part of the Episcopal Church’s primary teachings. Love God, love your neighbor, change the world, and all that.
  • Learning: I already go to library school, and I enjoy that, and I aim to continue. Jennifer offered me a Master Class annual membership for my birthday, but after a lot of consideration I turned it down. I would like one, but I know that between work, school, and writing, I simply wouldn’t have time to devote to it. And that would make me sad. I should also read more nonfiction. Maybe write some nonfiction, too, but let’s not get too crazy.
  • Friends/Family: Reach out more often. I have many good friends (some I’ve known for thirty years or more), and that makes me happy.  I’ve always known this, and I cherish them, celebrate their accomplishments (and try to minimize my own sense of envy or jealousy if it comes up), and so on. I want to reach out to my friends more, especially my long-distance friends who make an effort to contact me from time to time. And family, too. I’ve been lax in calling my parents and sisters over the past couple of years. Let’s fix that, shall we?

Then there are some other areas of my life that need constant attention: the household (note: clean more), the cats (note: pet more), and so on. No specific goals come to mind for these, but I don’t want to ignore them.

And that, I think, is it. That’s a lot. I’ll keep on keeping on, and that’s a great thing to do. May the new year bring you peace, prosperity, and love.


That’s it for Holidailies!

I Should Write These Things Down

Dinosaur eating gnomes
My parents gave me this gnome-eating dinosaur

I have a terrible memory. I barely remember anything that happened this past year, save that I submitted one hundred manuscripts to various markets and received exactly one acceptance. I think that the whole sea shanty thing was this year as well? I don’t know. What else happened this year? I should write these things down, I suppose. I have a journal, but mostly it’s just things I have to do on a daily basis, priorities, and meetings, and not things that I’ve done. And this blog is an unreliable source of memories, as well; mostly I just blogged about writing and minor things.

Oh, and there was school. I won’t talk about school here, even though I have been enjoying it. Perhaps in my next blog post.

I am the unreliable narrator of my own life. When I finally do write my memoirs (tentatively titled An Unauthorized Autobiography Inspired by True Events), people will complain about that. Too bad for them, because unreliable narrators are all the rage in literary fiction.

So anyway. Today is my birthday, and I’m turning 54. I don’t mind that at all. It’s not as momentous a year as 50, of course, but I’m not mad about it. My fifties have been good to me — though, of course, there has been that inconvenient pandemic thing. I’ve gotten some great presents, including the above-pictured yard decoration. Jennifer and I won’t be putting it in our front yard, since things in our front yard tend to disappear (we used to have two really cool dragon statues that vanished from our front yard the very day we put them out). I got a desktop cell phone holder so I can have my phone next to me when I’m working. It’s pretty cool. And, of course, I got a BUNCH of books, including Buckaroo Banzai vs. the World Crime League, which I’ve been wanting to read ever since I heard it was coming out. I loved The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension and, like millions of fans across the world, was so disappointed when the promised sequel film never happened.

I also got several science books, a couple of horror books, and a science fiction novel. Oh, and my mother-in-law gave me the LEGO Space Station kit, and I’m planning on assembling that tomorrow. Oh, and a DVD collection of the British comedy series Mrs. Brown’s Boys, which I’m very much looking forward to watching.

As for 2022. I’m still processing the fact that we live in the 2000s; when I was a kid, the future seemed so far away. I was so anxious as a kid, and I was constantly scared of what the future might bring; and now that it’s here, it’s not so bad.

Anyway. Best wishes for a Happy New Year to you and your loved ones.


And Happy Holidailies to you!

Eye’ll Be Home For Christmas

Ever ones for tradition around here, Jennifer and I put up our Christmas tree very recently. I know, older tradition recommends putting up the tree on Christmas Eve itself, but we’re not that traditional. Partly it was procrastination, party we just aren’t all that into the Christmas spirit this year (see an earlier post I wrote where I discussed my feelings about the season), and partly we just weren’t sure we wanted the hassle of continually picking up ornaments that the cats had liberated from the tree to the floor.

But then we saw a show on Discovery+ (which we got specifically for the holiday baking shows). I forget the name of the show, but they did mention that “theme trees” are all the rage right now, the latest craze, the “in” thing. One tree that a pair of decorators came up with was particularly of interest to us, so we decided to replicate it.

So here you go:

Eyeball Tree
Can you feel its eyes on you?

(click to embiggen)

Yes, we put eyeballs on the tree. It wasn’t entirely like the tree we saw on television — that one had larger eyeballs, hand painted, and some of them were on servos so they could spin about. If I were engineeringly inclined, I’d do the same, but I’m not.

Turns out you can buy lots of things on Amazon, and even though I don’t trust or like Amazon, I do a lot of shopping there. You can get a package of 150 table tennis balls and a package of 300 small googly eyes for less than $30 total, and a bunch of ornament hooks at your local CVS for less than $2. So we put up the tree one evening, then spent another evening gluing googly eyes to table tennis balls and installing hooks. The above is the result.

Need a closer look?

Eyes in the tree
Eye See You

Jennifer has dubbed this tree “Eye’ll Be Home for Christmas”, and I like it. I couldn’t think of anything cosmic horror-ish to name the tree, so I’m going with Jennifer’s suggestion. I do like the idea that it’s a tree Santa would approve of, since he could probably install a wireless hotspot in the tree and add receivers and transmitters to each eyeball, et viola, the ultimate Santa Spy Tree.

You’re welcome.

And Merry Christmas.


Deck Those Halls with Holidailies

FORE!arm

Golfer's Elbow Happens Here
This diagram shows EXACTLY where my arm pain is! Astounding!

A couple of days ago I mentioned that pain in my right arm. Today I went to the doctor to have it looked at. My regular physician is on maternity leave, so I saw one of her colleagues, a new member of the practice. He was about an hour and a quarter late to the appointment, because everyone else in the practice was late and traffic in Sacramento was weird because water was falling from the sky and when that happens everyone freaks out. Nurses came in at twenty minute intervals to reassure me that I hadn’t been forgotten and when the doctor finally showed up he apologized profusely and frequently for his tardiness.

He looked over my chart, saw that I’m losing weight, that I’m exercising more, that my blood pressure is down and that my resting heart rate is down, made the appropriate “good job” noises, and then got to talking about my arm. The first thing he asked was whether I’d noticed any shortness of breath or chest pains or heart palpitations in addition to the arm pain. I told him I hadn’t noticed any, and that since this was my right arm and not my left I wasn’t particularly worried (until he mentioned it). He listened my heart, more to reassure me I think than himself.

After several tests which involved squeezing my arm with his gloved hand, rotating my wrists, and even a little arm-wrestling (I won) he was baffled. Until he saw the way I was sitting on the end of the bed.

“You’re double-jointed, aren’t you?” he said.

“Why yes,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me to mention that detail. I keep forgetting about it because it’s not something that comes up in conversation that often.

Eventually after some more investigation he concluded that I have “golfer’s elbow”. It’s like tennis elbow, but on the inside instead of the outside, and you don’t have to golf to get it any more than you need to play tennis to get tennis elbow. I used to play golf when I was a teen, though, so it made sense to me.

Anyway. No new drugs, except to take some ibuprofen when it gets really bad, and some exercises including stretches and some resistance exercises. So my arm and I should be just fine.

Side note: Of course I avoided checking up on Google and WebMD for my symptoms. I’m under standing orders from my wife, my physician and my mother to never look up symptoms on those sites. That never ends well for anyone.

That’s all I have for today. Tonight we shall be putting up our Christmas tree with decorations planned to amuse the cats and ourselves. That’ll be fun. Pictures will follow.


Holidailies doesn’t hurt as much as my elbow

Cute Cat Picture Alert!

I’m not much of a photographer, even with the plethora of tools and equipment available to us these days (e.g., a phone with a camera in it), but today I snapped this picture of our foster fails Timmie and Guffaw snuggling together on our loveseat in our living room:

Timmie and Guffaw
Timmie and Guffaw, both foster fails in our home, snuggle together on our loveseat.

I showed it to Jennifer and she said it was ridiculously cute, so I have to post it. So here it is, on my blog.

Timmie is the first of our foster fails. She was found in a water feature in a park in Sacramento, and brought to Happy Tails, the organization we foster through. Because she was found “in a well” she was dubbed Timmie (as in, “What’s that Lassie? Timmy fell down the well again?” and if you don’t understand that reference, that’s okay, I just need to wait until the pain in my back goes away). She has some mild movement issues, but on the whole she is a very healthy and friendly and chonky cat. Guffaw is a more recent foster fail that we adopted because he seems to have chosen me as his person, a rarity. Almost all of our foster kitties glom on to Jennifer, and I haven’t had a cat glom on to me since Tangerine, so this makes my heart warm.

In other news, the contracts have all been signed, so I can officially spread the word that my short story “Arkham House Rules” will be published in an upcoming issue of Sci-Fi Lampoon. I don’t know what the details are, but I’m pleased with this turn of events.

Also, I have developed a pain in my tendon in my right arm, descending from my elbow to my wrist. No injuries occurred. It just sort of started about five days ago. Whee. I’m going to go to the doctor in a couple of days to have it checked out. Fun times.

Okay, that’s all I’ve got for today.


And a very Happy Holidailies to you!

Random Sampling

Christmas is coming! Huzzah! Hooray! Etc.! I don’t know. I don’t really get as excited about the holidays as I used to when I was a kid. The spiritual meaning of Christmas is not lost on me, of course, but the rampant consumerism and cultural baggage tend to leave me cold, and the right-wing talking points about a so-called “war on Christmas” make me cynical about the whole thing. The latest craze is to blame President Joe Biden for the supply chain problems the world has been having instead of the pandemic and the fiasco with the Ever Given in the Suez Canal earlier this year (yes, that was this year). Christmas is threatened because toys and other material goods might not make it into the stores? I suspect the true meaning of Christmas really is getting lost, but the right-wing folks are the ones who are losing it.

Of course, if you DO want to buy me a present, you can find my wishlist here on Giftster. It’s a wish list sharing site that my family uses instead of the ancient home-brewed one that I wrote in 2001 and never updated since.


Last night I wrote 500 words on And the Devil Will Drag You Under, and also jotted down some ideas for two short stories. This is the most productive I’ve been in weeks. Well, aside from stuff around the house and at work, of course. And even though I feel like the novel is basically stagnating right now, I’m excited to be moving forward on it again. And those two stories —  one is straight science fiction while the other is a mystery with a science fiction twist — are going to be BLAMMO when I finish them

BLAMMO. It’s a word now.


I don’t really have much to say that’s blog-worthy these days. In years past, I see, I used to complain a lot on this blog. Not so much these days, or at least I don’t think so. I mean, I have some complaints — like, new cat Guffaw gets excitable and jumps up on the kitchen counter too often —but it’s no longer a permanent state of mind. See, I’m growing as a person. Jennifer says I should post a picture a day as my blogging process, and maybe I’ll do that. Starting tomorrow, assuming I get my rear in gear and start taking pictures.

Looking over the first couple of paragraphs of this entry again, though, I do see some complaining going on. Ah, well. I’m not complaining constantly about my job these days, and that’s nice.


No more story acceptances since the last time I wrote about my story submission process, but I got a fresh rejection. I still have eight stories on submission right now, some with markets that can take nearly a full year to respond, so we’ll see what happens in the coming weeks and months. I think that I will try again in 2022 for one hundred submissions, but I do need to get some new stories written first.


I haven’t been reading as much as I should be; you can see what I’m currently reading in the handy-dandy widget from Library Thing to the right of this entry. It shows that currently I’m reading a couple of novels that my friends Andrea Stewart and Megan O’Keefe have written, as well as a couple of books about the craft of writing and a book about pirates. But I’m also reading a couple of books for my novel-writing critique group, so I need to concentrate on those as well.

The Bone Shard Daughter was an excellent book by an excellent writer. I’m only one chapter in to the sequel, The Bone Shard Emperor, and it’s just as well-written. Andrea Stewart did not win the Hugo Award for these novels (wasn’t even nominated, from what I can tell). She was robbed. And Megan’s Protectorate Trilogy didn’t make it either. She was robbed too.


I leave you with my favorite Christmas song, which I post every year to my blog and to Facebook and Twitter, but what the heck, it’s a great song: “The Season’s Upon Us” by Dropkick Murphys, my favorite Boston-based Irish punk band.

Merry Christmas to you all, and in case I don’t blog again, Happy New Year as well! May 2022 be a better one for us all.


Happy Holidailies to us all!

A Musical Holiday

I figured I’d make this a post about some of my favorite Christmas songs. So here you go.

Up first is “The Season’s Upon Us” by Dropkick Murphys, a lovely Irish punk band out of Boston:

I was planning on seeing them when they came to Sacramento with Flogging Molly a while back, but then it slipped my mind what with being laid off and all, and I forgot, and now I has a sad.

Next is “White Winter Hymnal”.

This is, of course, the Pentatonix version. The original is by a British band called Fleet Foxes. I kind of prefer this version (though I like the FF video better). When I first heard this song, I assumed right away it was British, since it’s full of strange, haunting imagery, which I know can be full of this sort of imagery. Particular post-War Britain. Man, the Great War did some horrific things to the British mindset. Turns out I was wrong, though. Fleet Foxes just made up the imagery themselves.

Next, “A Christmas Canon” by Trans-Siberian Orchestra because why not:

A couple of years ago my parents gave Jennifer and me tickets to see this group in person at the Golden One arena in Sacramento. They put on a hell of a show, with flames and fireworks and fiddlers in the scaffolding. The recordings I’ve heard just don’t do the show justice. If you ever get a chance to see them live, DO NOT MISS IT.

Next: “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues. Why? Because who doesn’t love the Pogues? Well, lots of people, I suppose. But this song, despite some of its questionable lyrics, is still one of my favorites. You might want to skip this one.

Among some of my friends, this is the quintessential holiday song. I hang out with these friends when I’m feeling too cheerful and need to be brought down a bit.

Finally, a parody song called “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fishmen”, by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society. I don’t know if this is an official video or not, but I think it’s pretty silly:

Fun fact: I’m a fan of H. P. Lovecraft, although I find his sexism and blatant racism and classism problematic at best. I know he felt he should have been born in England a hundred years before he actually was born. I sometimes feel the same way, though I know I’d miss some elements of the modern day, such as medicines that keep my lungs breathing and my brain working properly.

I still don’t quite “get” the secular Christmas holiday, and sometimes it grates on my nerves, but some of the music is pretty spiffy.

Bonus video: Here’s the Fleet Foxes video for “White Winter Hymnal”:

The video, I think, is very sad. I’m especially touched by the guy who’s holding the bunny, hiding its eyes from the inevitable march of time, and who then despairs that the bunny has disappeared from his lap.

That’s all I got for tonight.

Happy Holidailies to you.

Next!

As I mentioned before, I was recently laid off from my job of fifteen years. I wasn’t all that upset, though sometimes I miss my co-workers. These things happened, and, to be honest, I’d sort of seen it coming from a few yards away. I enjoyed the work there and I’m glad I was part of the organization. I’m still in touch with a few of my ex-coworkers, too, which makes me happy. I don’t quite have a full-time job yet, but I’m confident. For now, I’ve been working as a contract worker for a minuscule little company who is shrouded in secrecy, not because it’s a skunk-ops government operation or part of a grand conspiracy, but because it’s a startup in its infancy. The pay is good, the hours are good, and the work is especially enjoyable. In particular, it’s getting things working on a Linux server, and making  different pieces of software talking to each other. And it’s in a field that always needs better technology, so I’m happy to be a part of it. What happens next? There’s definitely more to be seen. In other news, the holidays are upon us. I have to admit that there are times when I don’t quite “get” Christmas. It’s the season of caring, of sharing, of… something else that rhymes with “caring”, and so on, but I don’t get why this should be different than any other time of year. I mean, I do get it from a spiritual perspective (and here’s the Episcopalian in me coming out): it’s the season celebrating the birth of Jesus, the day when God became manifest on Earth. But the tinsel, the lights, the reindeer, the “ho ho ho”? All of it baffles me. It’s not that I don’t participate. We put up a Christmas tree in our house, put lights on the outside, and put funny hats on the cats, where’s the spiritual significance in all that? The secular holiday of Christmas is for kids, I think. To the rest of it, I say Bah! Humbug.
Oh! And, happy Holidailies!

The 300(+)

Sigh.

Despite walking at least 3,000 steps per day (far short of my goal of 5,000, granted), and despite writing down everything I’ve eaten, and sticking within my Weight Watchers Points range, I somehow managed to gain three pounds since I posted my entry last week. That puts me back over three hundred pounds, which sucks.

Ah well. Much like writing, when I have a setback, I just need to go ahead and start again where I left off. Or, rather, since I get tired of thinking “I have to start again”, I need to continue. Not start over. Continue.

In other news, today a co-worker of mine gave me a copy of How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci by Michael J. Gelb. It’s one of many self-help or self-enrichment books that I bought back in the heady days of the mid to late 90s, but at some point I had lost my copy, and recently I’ve been thinking about it. Actually, Leonardo da Vinci has been on my mind quite a bit. So much so that I actually purchased the audiobook of Walter Isaacson’s biography of the man. I’ve been listening to it while driving or walking, and I’m really enjoying it. It’s fascinating to learn about da Vinci’s life and the times he lived in, as well as his creativity and artistic output. I certainly don’t think I’m going to become a great Renaissance man of da Vinci’s stature, but maybe I’ll be able to expand my brain just a little bit. I’ll keep you all posted on my progress, if you so desire. Or not. Heck, I’ll do it anyway, in the form of the occasional blog post.

And that’s all I’ve got for you today.

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Holidailies! Find other great blogs!

The high speed romancealogical database!

(The title is a reference to a Futurama episode. So there.)

A few years ago, I created this. It’s an online SyFy original movie generator. It’s eleven years old, but still relevant, since those movies are still pretty awful. Of course, they don’t have to be good; they only have to make back more in advertising revenue than their budgets, which often run into the tens of dollars. I should probably update the code to make it more interactive, I suppose, but I think it stands well as it is.

Now, last night Jennifer and I watched a Netflix original movie called A Christmas Prince. It was… an experience. Well, okay, it was stupid. It was a bad film. Just as a bad SyFy film can be full of tropes and cliches, so can a bad romance. And this one ticked all the boxes: the plucky heroine who doesn’t know how beautiful she is; the stupidly handsome reluctant prince; the mischievous young girl. Etc. The dialogue was awful. With one exception (the editor), the acting wasn’t horrible, because Rose McIver (who also plays Olivia in iZombie) is pretty good. But on the whole, this is a bad movie.

So Jennifer suggested, “Why don’t you create an online romance film plot generator? Just like your SyFy movie generator?” This strikes me as a pretty good idea, except that I’d have to watch a lot of these bad romance films and take notes just to make sure I know what tropes and cliches are abused in these films, and I am not willing to do that. I suspect I’d need an insulin shot afterwards.

So I turn to you, my plucky readers. What elements should I include in my online romance plot generator? What types of characters? Situations? Plots? Give ’em to me. So I don’t have to watch them myself.


Note: I don’t mean to devalue the romance genre as a whole. I know that there are good quality romance novels and movies out there. I just haven’t read them or seen them, and that’s only because I don’t seek them out because it’s not a genre I’m particularly interested in. But just as my SyFy movie generator is not meant to devalue science fiction as a whole, so my romance movie generator won’t either.

Hm, now I’m thinking I ought to create a horror movie generator as well.


Ho ho holidailies!