{my topography}

Today I am…
sipping the first iced latte of the year…
letting my hair dry naturally…(it gets curly)
gathering chapter ideas
letting the dishes sit in the sink…
listening to my rosters out-crow each other…
cutting forsythia for vases to go in sunny windowsills…
working from home today…

…and feeling grateful for you today (in terrible resolution, but still. You get the idea.)

ARGH!

So I left my laptop power cord at work this afternoon which means that my laptop has run out of battery juice and I’m left stranded in an all-PC household unable to finish the video component of the Kickstarter project I so very much wanted to launch tonight. I work almost 45 minutes away from where I live, so there wasn’t really an option of clocking an additional 90 minutes (which ironically is about all the “free” time I have anyway)… and I called a friend who lives just a few minutes away but his Mac is older than my little Airbook and our power cables don’t speak the same language. So alas, it will have to wait, and I’m going to have to settle for doing some non-screen time things including a run on the treadmill tonight, and revising the paper draft of the first three chapters of my novel that should have been sent to my mentor for revision two weeks ago. A tip I learned doing Nanowrimo this winter: email yourself a copy of your entire manuscript every so often. Or get a Dropbox account (aren’t they cool? I don’t have one yet, but am tempted, esp. after tonight!

That said, I’m going to clunk away on DH’s keyboard for a few more minutes (it seems so HUGE compared to my laptop. I have no idea where to put my fingers. Kinesthetic memory is so interesting…) and share some things that have caught my eye lately.

First off, if you live in New England, I just discovered the best (almost local) tomatoes (second only to true back yard garden tomatoes in the summer!) They taste like actual tomatoes with that lovely biting, viney fragrance. Which is a dream in the middle of winter here… And because I’m pretty committed to local & non-GMO food, I emailed them to see how they grow their tomatoes, and got a prompt (and very awesome) next day email from Tim Cunniff:

“We do not use ANY GMO seeds, they are all done through traditional hybrid methods, cross breeding various varieties. We use an integrated Pest Management system that replicates a balance between beneficial insects like lady bugs and wasps to control white fly population.”

Also agricultural: I just finished this book about a year in the life of this farm, and I loved how honest and detailed and raw the description was. I came away from it inspired to really put in a garden this year. And to figure out composting.

And now all kinds of random: Gorgeous photographs. An interesting take on digital media and all things literary and current. This whimsical and mysterious take on reviving paper mail. This way of thinking about the future…And this series about how to write a novel.

Off to do that now.

PS–I loved your links & replies from yesterday.

Doing: Whoa, it’s been one heck of a couple of weeks with both kiddos underfoot. Lots of sledding and cookie baking and general revelry. Not enough writing though. Or painting. Or time without the ruckus, giddy, non-stop noise making of two small boys.

Speaking of: Sprout is standing and almost walking. He’s thisclose. He’s hilarious. He plays hide and seek. He initiates chase games around the house and crawls pell-mell at top speed, then bursts into adorable peels of laughter. I tried to teach him to paint a few days ago–because I did with Bean at around this age, and it was an utter disaster. He ATE the brushes and got so frustrated when I’d take them out of his hand and try to turn them around so the bristles went on the paper. So not his thing.

Bean on the other hand is totally into drawing. He makes airplanes and houses with doorbells wired in to the walls. Tonight he drew a picture of our cat stalking mice. Each mouse had a lovely, loopy, curly tail. I can’t really believe that he is almost five and suddenly all cool and adorable: a big+little mashup. Yesterday he said, “When I’m big I’m gonna build robots. I’m going to design one to be a remote control that I control–and then another robot that the first robot controls.” He’s like that. Totally coming up with the coolest things ever. An engineer in the making.

Reading: it’s been haphazard at best this week. Mostly about the end of the world as we know it. Which really is rather unsettling . Though not entirely hopeless. I’m already thinking of what my garden will look like this spring.

Wishing for: a few solid hunks of time I can call MY OWN to get things crossed off the to-do list and sink back into writing and creating and feeling like myself again.

Eating: I’ve perfected pizza dough and a really great bread recipe. I’ll share both, but not tonight. Somehow it’s bedtime already. Where did the day go?

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Wondering tonight: what do you worry about? What are your greatest fears–the big, worst-case-scenario ones…and the little ones that nag and gnaw?

I like the way the world looks now: tender, undercover, monochrome. I like the way this month starts off in sleep: the longest nights, the shortest days. I like the way we hurtle down hillsides on sleds; the way driving home from a New Year’s Day party with friends we saw five trees illuminated by the light of a car dealership, each branch crowded with the black silhouettes of sleeping crows.

I like how anything can happen before it does, now, at the beginning of a new year; and also looking back, considering the pulse and tremolo of the year gone by.

I like how it’s always possible to feel at the cusp of something grand at the start of a new year. Like there’s a chance for anything to happen, and everywhere all over the world people are throwing themselves towards their lives with renewed gusto.

People are picking words, and I like that. Looking back, I’d like to say that last year’s word was cocoon, because it was a dreamy, blurry, nestled year of slow motion, present tense stumbling; of new baby love and making ends meet. It was a domestic year. A quiet year. A year of sustaining; of inward growing. Now I’m ready for real action.

I want accomplishment and tangible returns. I want the satisfaction of crossing things off my list. Some years I’ve had heady, dreamy goals. This year it’s all about the down-to-earth and practical. It’s about getting things done. Enough of next year and sometime and when the time is right.

It’s the beginning of a decade. Time to get things started off on the right foot.

Non-negotiable: Financial stability, daily joy, and finishing my novel manuscript. The rest I’ll put up on this year’s list at the end of the month.

What is non-negotiable for you this year?