Yep, this is my 300th post. It’s probably more like 350, except that I used to delete the fluffy ones, back when I still cared about posterity. As Fal pointed out on her bicentennial post, it’s just a nice, round number. No biggie.

It does make one stop and think, however. When I started this blog, what did I set out to accomplish? Have I accomplished it? As needs necessarily change over time, so must one’s goals. Does updating this blog coincide with my goals at the moment?

I’ve been quite lackadaisical about posting, and the internet in general. I’ve trimmed the blogs I read daily by about half, and I haven’t been commenting much on the blogs I still read. I don’t care much about my daily hit count. I don’t keep the chat client up 24/7 like I used to. MySpace status hasn’t been updated in months. It’s a depletion I’m feeling, like I’ve used up my allotted digital time in the space of just a few years, and it’s time to go analog again.

Now that I think of it, I guess I’m just changing the things I do online. I’ve been doing Tarot readings for friends online (if anybody wants a free reading, holler), and learning about chakras. I do chat some, whenever I actually have something to say. I read more news online than I used to. I guess my browsing habits have matured. I’m using the internet as a tool, instead of being enslaved by it. It’s nice.

IRL, I’ve gotten quite a bit accomplished this week. I decided to take a break from the novel in progress and revisit an old story that I’d given up on. Reading it now, I can see I just needed to grow as a writer, and it has massive potential. This is a story that energized me from the beginning, so I’m happy to breathe life into it once again.

And yesterday I took apart the main bathroom’s toilet and replaced all the seals and bolts. People, there is just no pleasant way to do that. And seeing as how it was stamped 1964, and may not have been serviced since installation, there was a lot of stink waiting to be unearthed. But despite the initial horror, I feel grand now that it’s clean, above and below and inside and out, and leak-free.

Tomorrow I’ll be going to my aunt’s for Independence Day, and plan to have massive amounts of fun. I wish you all a good holiday, as well.

Turned out to be a busy weekend. Sunday I went to the casino with my mom and won a hundred bucks on a slot machine, so that was good. It paid for our museum outing on Saturday, plus some future watercolor supplies. (Thanks to Duma Key, Cheryl. Dare I try my hand at oils?)  Then after the casino I went to Midwest City and found a used bookstore. I need to make a list to carry with me, because inevitably when faced with a bookstore or library, my mind goes blank and I end up with nothing. I can’t even remember which authors I think I should be reading. I did buy one book, another Lois McMaster Bujold, but I only bought it because I could.

I installed a browser called Opera, which I’d used a little bit a few years ago. At the time it didn’t seem different enough from Internet Explorer to mess with, but it’s changed a lot since then. It’s like a one-stop-shopping center. Besides having the same toolbars on top like IE and Firefox, it has a left hand “panel” bar, where you have the normal bookmarks and history but also instant email access, widgets, a simple-to-use notebook, contacts, recent downloads, and whatever else you want to stick on there. It has a multitude of add-ons like Firefox, skins and games and widgets, all accessible through the panel system.

An interesting feature is the “speed dial” start page, where you can bookmark your nine favorites as thumbnails. Another is the “mouse gestures” navigation, but I haven’t figured out how to do that with the mouse pad on the laptop.

I believe you have to set up your chat clients separately, but once accessed they should be available all the time, like email, I think. Even gmail chat, which is normally integrated into the gmail page, doesn’t show up in the Opera browser, but there’s an option to set it up in the panels. I won’t test this one yet, since I downloaded Opera as a way to have chat-free access to my email.

The clincher for me was how little memory it uses. According to the Windows task manager, the new Firefox was using 100k, compared with IE’s 70-80k. I have three tabs open in Opera and the memory usage is sitting right at 46k. Can’t beat that.

I’ve found a few quirks that will take some getting used to. One is this: When I select text in my WordPress post window, it won’t let me type over, instead brings up a new window based on the text I was trying to put in. But the quirks are really low-priority ones, and over all I recommend Opera.

Did I forget to say that the Big Read List was missing two books? See the addendum here, or I’ll just tell you: Life of Pi and A Prayer for Owen Meaney.

Gearing up for a shift of focus. Things have felt stagnant lately. The same Internet which freed me from my housewiferly solitude is now my prison. I long to interact with people that I can touch, smell, hear. Instant Messaging has long seemed inadequate, and though this surprises the hell out of me, this socially awkward girl finds herself wishing for a phone conversation instead.

So I’m turning off the chat for a while. Having Google Talk up all day pulls my brain in that direction: Who’s on now? Did I miss a beep? Okay, now who’s on? And while it doesn’t really take any time, because I’m not chatting much, it does divide my attention. Email will work fine to keep in touch, but even that seems too impersonal. I crave an organic connection, I realize after getting Falcon’s letter today, so if anybody wants to be pen pals, send me your address.

What I think is going to end up happening is I’m going to find a writer’s group close by–a hard thing to find here in the boondocks!– or maybe take an art class at the vo-tech. I’m ready to be part of regular society again.

Since I’ve been especially antsy lately, I took the kids to the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History this afternoon. DH wasn’t wanting to go, and I was getting all depressed thinking I would have to be here all day again, and it suddenly occurred to me I could take them by myself! For so long I’ve had small babies that require help on outings, but the youngest is four now. I can take them anywhere without a diaper bag or stroller or juice. It’s funny how much of a shock that realization was. I can do it myself.

I’m also so used to penny pinching that I just assume I can’t afford EVERYTHING. But admission to this museum is only five bucks for me, three for the kids. We spent more on lunch beforehand. Another shocking, but delightful, realization. I can afford to have fun.

So we had a great time. Nobody got mad or had a fit, and I was totally relaxed the whole time. We looked at the “Super Croc” (I could have stretched out inside his jawbone–scary!), and did the Discovery Room where we felt different animal pelts and learned a lot about uses for buffalo parts. I got a huge amount of information for one of the cultures I’ll develop in the Ea’s Gift series.

AND I finally found out what the fossils in my driveway gravel might be. One kind is definitely a brachiopod (looks like a clam to me) and another is possibly a bryzoan (a branching underwater creature) but the pictures I’ve found don’t look exactly like it, so I’m not sure. If I can get my camera working I’ll take some pictures.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

My yard is the Bermuda Triangle for kitties. I counted, and we’ve had 12 kittens disappear without a trace over our few years here, including the one on my lap, above. I’ve finally come to the conclusion that rescuing kitties is not my purpose in life anymore. How can I call it a “rescue” when all that awaits is … whatever has been happening to them? Probably death by owl or coyote or murderous neighbor dogs. I know for a fact my neighbors bury murdered cats they find on their property without remorse, but that probably doesn’t explain all the disappearances. Surely not. (I know it’s not the neighbor’s fault that my cats are going into their yard. I don’t blame them, but I don’t have to like their dogs. I don’t. We can’t play in that half of the yard because they menace us through the fence and scare my children.)

Squish, the mama, had four kittens, then we took in my cousin’s four orphans. The sad thing is, this was a temporary situation, because they were all nine of them going to a place in the country to be barn cats. But that great pile of kitties you see below has been reduced by half, the mother being one of the casualties, and God knows how many will make it to July 4, the day they’ll go to the country.

It saddens my heart, but it would be irresponsible to keep anymore cats. Time to get a goldfish, I think.

(Found this at Moonrat’s place. I feel like I’ve read a lot of classics. Maybe I’ve just read a lot of old stuff. Let’s see.)

The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How do you do?

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Well, I got 21, I guess that’s not too bad. Looking at this list, I realize that about half are YA, read when I was sucking up books like they were a chocolate milkshake. In recent years I’ve made an effort to expand my “classics” list, which resulted in The Great Gatsby being added to my list of all-time favorite books. Some of them I read as an adult not knowing they would be considered classics, like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I just read The Time Traveler’s Wife a couple of weeks ago. Many of the books on the list I tried to read and put down. And wait, was there no Hemingway on the list? Well, thank God. Blech, Hemingway.

Very few books do I plan to read. I read what crosses my path, mostly, and my classics campaign is done. And hey, listen. I know I’m a woman. I’ve read my share of romance novels. I’m not afraid of slightly archaic language. Yet I have tried and tried to read Jane Austen, and I just can’t do it. I’ve tried, really. I’m sorry.

[Addendum: Just Muttering noticed the omission of two numerals, and after backtracking the meme, discovered the missing titles: #44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving, and #51 Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Thus kills the meme that will not die.]

…because I just spent some time listening to polkas, specifically the “Chicken Dance” and “Put Your Little Foot.” Then I ran across this video showing the 2008 Kolache Festival in my hometown, Prague, OK. You say that “preg”, not “prahg.” This is Oklahoma, after all.

I miss the pseudo-Czechness of my former life.

I have kitty pictures to post, but they’re not uploaded yet. We have eight kittens, four natural and four adopted. If you think one kitten running through the grass is too cute, your head will explode with cute overload when you see my kitten swarm.

But that is not today.

Instead, I’m doing this Q&A meme I saw over at Darcknyt’s a little while ago.

1. What was I doing ten years ago. Let’s see, this is 2008, right? So ten years ago…I was three months into my marriage, five months pregnant with my first baby, living in a hovel, and seeing my life flash before my eyes. Woo, way to start the meme with a bang.

2. Five things on my to do list. Hm. I don’t really have a to-do list. I normally just float through my day and do whatever crosses my path. Thinking… I guess I need to take out the stumps of the shrubs I cut down. Replace the rotting siding revealed from said cutting down. I’d put “get published” on the list, but I’ve done everything I can do at this point. Write a post. Oh wait, I’m doing that already. How many is that, only two? The remaining three: Get new laptop, lose belly, take mature Latin lover who doesn’t mind belly.

3. Snacks I enjoy. Triscuits and cheddar cheese. French Silk ice cream. Oranges.

4. Places I’ve lived. Prague, OK. Shawnee, OK. Paden, OK. Tecumseh, OK. Oklahoma City, OK. Sparks, OK. North Rock Creek, OK. Each of these towns is less than an hour from any other town on the list. *dies of boredom*

5. Things I’d do if I were a billionaire. Well, the first thing I’d do is start a tour of remote vacation spots (see above). While on tour I’d start a foundation for some oppressed demographic. And of course I’d have to get my extended family out of debt and into new dwellings. And then I’d GO CRAZY WITH POWER.

6. People I want to know more about. Famous people I can find out about on Google. Regular people are more fascinating. I want to know every single person’s story. Motivations. Loves and hates. Regular people are fascinating. If any one person reading this wanted to send me his/her secrets, I’d be ecstatic.

7. Two things I have in common with Oprah. Interest in spirituality and skin color. [Editor's note: This is a joke. I'm not black. It's not funny. I know that now.]

8. You can tell a lot about a person by… Their about me page.

9. Are you a yeller when you get angry? Not really. I do yell sometimes, but I used to be much worse. Now I mostly fume.

10. Have I ever danced in public? Yes, many times, but long ago. Usually embarrassed myself, but I love to dance so much. I dance every day, at home. I miss dancing with other people.

11. What did I do to deserve my first detention? I’ve never had detention. I got licks once for fighting in the 7th grade, but the other girl started it.

12. What did I do to deserve my first paddling? Oh, I forgot about the one in kindergarten. Kristy wouldn’t give me the pink marker, even though she wasn’t using it. Teacher just wouldn’t listen.

13. Three things I love about my town. The beautiful countryside, the memories of being happy here as a child, the library.

14. Four things I love to do. singing, dancing, spending time in my office, running from the kitten swarm.

15. Something unusual I carry with me wherever I go. My brain.

16. My favorite website. This changes weekly, but the most consistently-favorited is the lolcatz.

17. Where and when was my first kiss. Freewill Baptist Church in Spencer, OK. I was 14, he was 15. Ray Ticer was his name, and he was so cool because he pushed up the sleeves on his jacket. I knew he was planning on kissing me that day, because he had told my cousin and my cousin told me. He took me behind the church, leaned in. I was so nervous. Our lips touched, I knew the tongue was coming, but I was totally unprepared for how it would feel to have a foreign tongue in my mouth.

Now I like foreign tongues. *waggles eyebrows*

18. What would an enemy have to say about me? “Why is she always so f***ing happy? She’s always singing, why is she always singing?” (Actual quote of an actual person.)

18 1/2. Are we almost done yet? Geez, this is long.

19. Favorite childhood memory. Gosh, that’s a hard one. I don’t know if this is my favorite, but we used to have a lot of fun playing in our flooded street after a hard rain. And no, it wasn’t really dangerous. There was no drainage, that’s why it flooded every time, so it wasn’t rushing anywhere. It was like a huge wading pool with all the neighborhood kids. In this very town, actually, the happiest time in my life. I’ve come full circle.

20. Any regrets? Y’all should know by now that I’m too philosophical for that. Would my life be better right now if I’d made better choices? No way to know. I do know that when I die I’ll be the most well-rounded, well-adjusted person ever. So… Nope. No regrets.

Ran across an interesting place this morning. I realized I knew nothing about Morocco (thinking about it because of the soap I’m using) so I did a Google search. Did you know that the CIA has a website? It had never occurred to me before, but it’s there, and on this website they have The World Factbook, which you’ve probably seen in print but is available here in a searchable electronic form.

So I went to the drop-down menu, selected Morocco, and voila! All I ever wanted to know about Morocco, including geography, topography, population (it seems that old people don’t stand a chance in Morocco–can you say Logan’s Run?), and it occurred to me this would be a fabulous resource for researching locations at the basic level for a novel. I’ve branched out for the first time ever in my work to include people from other real-world countries (since most of my work has been in heroic fantasy, I’ve just made up all the countries) so I think this will be helpful.

And speaking of the Moroccan soap, you might remember that the good people at Caress Fed-exed me a full-size bottle of the Brazilian body wash to try. I’ve been using it for about a week now, and while it doesn’t smell nearly as good as the Moroccan, which for some reason hits my smell receptors like opium hits the visual cortex, the Brazilian does smell nice. The body wash is creamy and lathery and skin-soften…y. Way better than the bar soap, though the scent of the bar soap is purer. I might buy some Moroccan-scented body wash after my soap is gone.

That is all.

I had a bit of a hard time yesterday, the first time in a long time I’d allowed myself to dwell on a painful subject. I felt silly after posting, thought about taking it down, as it seemed whiny. I decided to leave it, because it was an exercise in feeling.

Strong emotion scares me, so I work hard to control any spontaneous outbursts. Too many times I’ve blurted something and wished I could take it back, as most people probably have, but I’m only now figuring out that one mistake doesn’t condemn me to a friendless pit. Folks are mostly as forgiving of me as I am of them. Now I just have to get out of the habit of squashing my emotions.

Anger especially scares me. Any kind of aggression, really. I don’t know how to respond to it in others, don’t feel I have to right to express my own. I envy those of you who feel comfortable expressing yourselves that way, though you make me nervous. I’d love to become comfortable with my aggressive drive. It is every bit as part of us as human beings as the nobler emotions, and it must be integrated into the whole. Up to now, I’ve just ignored it, but the universe spent the whole year so far making it very clear I need to gain skill in this area by thrusting upon me opportunities to practice handling other people’s aggression. I’m not sure I’ve done a very good job.

I’m absolutely terrified to try this one out. Expressing anger to someone is like being naked. No, it’s more like being naked and spread-eagle with a spotlight on my privates. With people pointing and laughing. I have to do it, though, I have to explore this side. I have no idea where to do this. I have no idea how to start, or whom to practice on, or where to find those people. How to get past the fear of alienation. The guilt of causing anger in others, which will undoubtedly happen.

Sherri doesn’t want to blossom. Blossoming hurts. How do the flowers do it?

I’m going to try not to bum anybody out here. I’ve healed so much since the first two fatherless posts, I guess that’s why it took me so long to write another. I’ve been processing everything I’ve learned. But today is Father’s Day, and as I watch my kids give my husband their homemade cards I’m thinking about my own dad.

It didn’t even occur to me to send my father a card. It never does. It’s too late now. I guess I could call him, but what would I say?

A recent commenter on Fatherless Daughter Part 2 said, “All I’ve ever wanted was a Daddy…A daddy that would worry about the boys I dated, treat me to my favorite ice cream bar or just simply tuck me in bed and call me his princesse.” I don’t remember thinking of specific things that having a father would do for me. I tried not to think about it. And really, I had no idea what a blessing a good father could be in a girl’s life.

In college I worked at Wal-Mart, and a man came through the check-out with a bunch of new tools and a shiny red toolbox to give to his daughter as a “first apartment” gift. And he said that even though he was getting them for her, he’d probably be the one using them. That one encounter with someone else’s father sent me into a tailspin. I wanted to be cared for. Why shouldn’t I have been cared for?

Throughout life, the yearning for that kind of attention had gone undefined, yet had been there the whole time.

These little-girl dreams of what it would be like to have a father are only dreams, of course. Realistically, if my father had been a daily presence in my life, it would have been less than ideal, perhaps just as damaging as not having him at all has been. Of course there’s no way to know for sure.

What do I feel about my dad at this moment? I feel sorry for him. I want to fix him. I know now that his rejection of me was a passive thing, doing what was easy. His self-esteem is lower than mine, and I believe he truly can’t comprehend what his absence meant for this girl.

I vacillate between wanting to reach out until he gets it and just throwing my hands up. I stopped being mad at him a long time ago, once I finally figured out how damaged he was. I can’t say I love him. I can’t say I yearn for him anymore. But I can say I understand him. I pray for his healing. I forgive him. I’m in a position now to be grateful for the role he played in my life, the person it made me today.

So although he won’t read this, I forgot to send him a card, and I can’t bring myself to call him, I wish him a happy Father’s Day via the universe.