The Big DumpTruck

Stupid Fenway tickets. Stupid waiting rooms and sold out games. Stupid not ever being able to take Junior to a Red Sox game yet, and he's nine.

So you know what? We picked up 3 tickets to a Sox/Orioles game IN Baltimore for September. Got onto their site, picked the game (9/8)...bing bang boom, done. So that's going to be a mini-vacation for us. I am going to find a fancy-pants hotel with a fantastic view, and I will get to enjoy a game in one of the parks I have ALWAYS wanted to visit. I am actually far more excited about this than I would be if I picked up 3 tickets for a home game.

If the step-kids are reading, sorry we didn't get 5 tickets. I'll have to owe you one...

Labels: Red_Sox, Vacation

Just in time for Jody Day, I got a package in the mail. I could not rip the package open fast enough, I tell you. Inside was the most glorious site ever. EVER. My novel, in book form. Oh my Lord in heaven, I just held it and giggled, because it was a real, live book. A crappy book, let's be clear, but I was holding a perfectly wonderful trade paperback version of my Nano Novel. The Candy Pooping Moose, with my name right there on the cover.

I wish I'd taken more time doing the PDF because I was missing a title page and some other stuff, but as I mentioned before, I uploaded it to Lulu.com the day before the deadline for the free copy. So I stupidly left out the title page, and other important bookly stuff. But that doesn't matter much because I'm not selling copies, only one exists and it's mine.

I started to read parts of it and found that in places, it is tremendously amusing. Maybe I'm not completely talentless. So now I'm thinking I'll attempt to clean it up some, maybe more than some, and make it available to you, my adoring public. I mean, what the hell, right? But it won't be any time soon, as out of the 50,000 words of the novel, only 30,000 of them are actually usable, and as I mentioned before, it doesn't have an ending.

Keep poking me with a stick and I'll see what I can do.

Jody, author

Labels: books, nanowrimo, writing

Okay, I should be honest. You can search the archives and determine my age. I'll be 42 on Saturday. I know that means some of you will stop reading my site because you thought I was some hot chick or something. I'm not. Mentally, sure, but that's about it. I'm a 42 year old mom. Well, I will be. Today, I'm just a 41 year old mom. Same for tomorrow. After that, 42.

I'm trying to not think about it. I don't want to get old. So let's agree, between you and me, that I'm only 25.

Thanks, you're the best.

I got the note that my Nano Novel, The Candy Pooping Moose, met the qualifications for free printing at lulu.com. (The qualifications were that it was a Nanowrimo novel, that you "won", and that you submit the novel before Jan 16th.)

I wasn't going to do it because the novel stinks, and I haven't edited it or finished it, but then I got to thinking..."You know, a free copy of the icky novel might be a fun thing to have." So I uploaded a .pdf of the danged thing. I look at this as a way of checking the quality of the stuff Lulu does...if it is professional enough, I may try to pull together a real book (probably non-fiction, though, as the whole finishing a novel thing seems to be beyond me) and publish it properly. As in, make sure it has an isbn number, a title page, actual chapters, etc. Maybe have someone proofread it first.

Of course, I waited until the deadline to submit my .pdf so I just used stock cover art available at lulu.com. I would have liked to use a picture of a moose, but I didn't want to have to go through the trouble of finding one to buy at a site like istockphoto.com, and then lay out the cover myself and upload it. If I had to do all that, I would have never gotten a free copy of my book.

For the record, it looks like the cost to buy extra copies is less than $8. So if any of you have a little something you want to see professionally printed and bound, you may want to consider lulu.*

*Note: I have not done thorough research on whether or not writing groups/websites have evaluated them to determine whether or not they are fair to writers. I wasn't as worried with something like a draft of a Nano novel as I would be with a "real" book that I planned to try to sell to the universe. Nothing jumped out at me (you know, like those sites where without you reading a ton of fine print, never upfront tell you they "own" the content the minute you upload it.) So use at your own discretion.

My little portion of Leominster is without power...it's been out for
about half an hour or so. Glad we didn't start a load of laundry. Of
course, because our power lines are underground, Junior hasn't
experienced too many power outages in his lifetime, so he's still busy
discovering all the things that don't work right now.

My laptop has power but no internet connection. We may have enough power
charged in the portable DVD player to watch a movie later...I'll save
that for later.

From our house we can see lights in a different neighborhood, which is
annoying. I'd drive over to my mom's but the temperature is dropping and
I don't want to be out if the roads freeze up.

Mr. Dump is off getting a pizza because we realized we don't really have
anything we can cook over the fire. That may not stop me from trying,
though.

I'm off to see what I can use to heat water in the fireplace so I can
have some tea...

The other day I was playing with the new camera, trying out some of the settings. This was actually not taken in B&W originally, I did it in Paint Shop Pro just to see what it would look like. I kind of like it. No retouching but I wish I'd moved the chair from the background.

On the other hand, anyone who has had to photograph a small kid or an animal knows you don't stop to fix the background.

If "burning" was a flavor instead of a feeling, that would cover these.

Every time I try to figure out what the flavor is (I think closer to Cool Ranch except, of course, for the Cool part) the Blazin' Buffalo kicks in. This isn't really a flavor, though, is it?

I'll say that if you like spicy, you'll probably like these okay. Me, I prefer my Ranch cool and my buffalo heat with blue cheese. (What kind of neanderthal restaurant chefs decided to pair buffalo sauced products with ranch? HEATHANS! I shall not darken your doorstep again!)

So I give these a 5 out of 10, but only because I don't like mouth blisters.

Labels: food, restaurant, review

It was chilly this morning. What nerve, the January weather has, to be cold. Now Saturday's weather, that was a perfect January day, don't you think? I am going to stick my neck out and suggest that we keep all of our winter weather in the fifty to seventy degree range from this point forward. I think that it will help with our home heating bills, and it will help with our not wanting to scrape ice of the windshield, or drive in the snow. I'm not going to lie to you, this is the best January ever. And each day that there is no snow and ice I know I am that much closer to spring, and that brings me great joy.

I, of course, will take credit (or the blame, if you insist on harshing my mellow) for the lack of snow on the ground, because for Christmas we bought my step-son a full snowboard package (kit? setup?) of the board, the bindings and the boots. Not cheap to do that, so OF COURSE he hasn't been able to use them at all this year. Not once. This makes him sad, so I try not to do a happy dance of joy about 70 degree days when he's around.

What was also nice about Saturday is that is was Junior's actual birthday, and he picked out the bike he wanted that was his Christmas/birthday present from Grandma and Grandpa...and he actually got to go outside and enjoy it. I too, am a January baby (gift list is over on the right - I included all the expensive stuff because I knew you would want me to) and I remember the year I got a bike for my birthday - it was purple and it had a banana seat with flowers on it and streamers hanging from the handlebars...and I couldn't do a thing with it until after the spring thaw. That was just torture! So I'm glad he got to ride it this weekend. I'm sure my parents feel that it makes it worth spending the money, actually.

Labels: birthdays, weather, winter

Aw, man, I went to the BDT archives to see what I was writing about at this time 9 years ago. The thing is, 9 years ago it wasn't a daily update, because everything had to be coded by hand and then uploaded via FTP, so I used to kind of do everything in an "issue" type setup. And there wasn't anything posted between Dec 26 of 97 and Jan 26th 98. Big bummer. I had another "site" I was running simultaneously, Mookie's Driver Training Page, or something like that. That's where all the Mookie news went. Mookie being Junior, by the way. Mookie was his in-vitro name, which we actually stopped calling him as soon as he was born, but it stuck on the website for a while. See, he was born 9 years ago tomorrow. I went into the hospital at about 6pm 9 years ago today to have my water broken. As I said to him this morning, "Hey, it's Applebees night! We have to go to Applebees and stare up at Leominster Hospital and think "Oh my God, I'm going in there and I'm going to leave with an extra person" because that's what Mr. Dump and I did that afternoon after my doctor said I'd gone long enough with my blood pressure slowly rising. My due date was the 7th, so there was no problem inducing. Well, you know, that and the fact that he was 8 pounds 12 ounces(!!) a fact I was blissfully unaware of until the maternity nurse said "Wow, you're all baby." "What?" "You've got a big baby in there."

How did I get to that point with nobody telling me he was big?

He's still big, and getting bigger, for the record. Still my baby, but still up at the top of the charts. Happy birthday, Mookie!



I did skip forward a couple of issues and present you this "best of" entry from Feb 1998:

User Name Suggestions

I was signing up for a site on the web that required a user name (so that I could post messages and it could keep track of me) the other day. I know that the odds of me being the only "Jody" on this service were slim to none, but I entered it anyway. I got the following Java Alert message:"Username Jody not available, here are some suggestions. KILLER SCHAEFERD HUMAYUN KENNICUTTA ANDREASEK KUTCHERA"

I'm not sure what those have to do with "Jody", and I especially like the option "Killer" but I didn't take any of their obviously well thought out suggestions. I went with "Jodyl"

Labels: birthdays, junior, mommy, mookie

Okay, I don't think I should open THAT can of worms, knowing most of you are probably up late every night trying to work that puzzle out on your own. But the Worcester Telegram did figure out a way to annoy me today, and I figured I'd complain about it here because that's why I pay hosting fees and domain registration fees every year. That's what it's all about, my people.

The Telegram, a good source of local (Leominster) news, decided that instead of having a page of news items of specific interest to the "North" (which is where the Leominster, Fitchburg, Gardner, etc. stories were), and another for West, and another for Blackstone Valley, etc., they would just lump us under the heading "Suburbs".

Great. No offense to Hopkinton, but your news stories aren't really all that important to me. And I'm sure mine are not to you. So what the Telegram has effectively done, is go the Boston Media route of closing their eyes, blocking their ears with their fingers and saying "Nya nay nya I can't see you! You don't exist!" to anything outside of the 128 belt.

If I didn't have such a long history of being completely annoyed with the way the Fitchburg Sentinel is run (I love LOVE LOVE! when they run stories about events after they happen, not before, so that I can sit and feel badly that I didn't know about it. No, really, that's fantastic.

So ya, there may be a war going on, people dying and starving, etc., but I'm really ticked off that the paper has decided they can't be bothered to give us our own page any more.

Labels: 01453, Leominster, News, Sentinel, Telegram

Mr. Dump and Junior started yelling as they headed out of the house this morning. Our reward for dragging ourselves out of bed was this really vividly red double rainbow. The sunrise was pretty red and pink this morning, so I don't know if that has anything to do with the reds showing up so strongly. Either way, I didn't notice the start of the 2nd rainbow until after they left, so this is for them.