How do you view Oklahoma?

Posted on July 17, 2008 by Sherri Cornelius

I’m typing this with my eyes closed. Please forgive any typos. Sinus trouble. The trouble with sinus trouble is that my body and brain work fine, but not my eyes. How in the hell can a person go around without using her eyes all day? Wait, blind people do it. Maybe I should just learn to read brail and put a scarf around my eyes on these days. If stimulating my purple chakra doesn’t work (not as dirty as it sounds) that’s what I’ll try next.

Anyhoo, I went and watched Saving Grace, about which I posted yesterday. On the website they had the pilot and the season finale, so I missed all the stuff that came in the middle, but I wasn’t totally lost or anything. Some of the details they got wrong, like the sideways stoplight that should have been hanging upright, are incidental and don’t change the way I feel about the show itself.

Some things annoyed me, like the endless sea of cowboy hats, and how Grace finds a teenage boy (who’s into heavy metal, no less) hanging out alone at a cattle sale for no discernible reason. But still, I appreciate the effort they made. As a writer and a former theater major, I understand the need to make up places and people and events to fit the storyline. It’s fiction. Theater. They can only approximate the feel of Oklahoma City, since they’re not filming much here, and nobody on the coasts know anything about us anyway.

Here’s a list of the things I imagine the average coastal person knows about Oklahoma:

  • The Dust Bowl. They wonder why our bowl is not in the BCS.
  • University of Oklahoma football. What they don’t know is that Bob Stoops’ real name is Bob Christ.
  • Native Americans. They don’t have pow-wows every night. Then again, I’ve never been invited to a pow-wow so I may be wrong.
  • The Murrah bombing. That was as bad as you think it was.
  • Farmers and ranchers. We do have these, but it’s quite likely you’ll go all day without encountering anyone wearing a cowboy hat. The baseball cap is the preferred headgear, if any.
  • Tornadoes. We don’t live in fear, but I do have a cellar.

I know most of my readers are from other places, so what else does Oklahoma make you think of, good OR bad? Do you think of us at all?

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Redirect to a hi-Larious post

Posted on July 16, 2008 by Sherri Cornelius

It was funny to this Okie, maybe notsomuch for those outside the OKC area. For those who’ve never seen Saving Grace, like me, it’s a show which stars Holly Hunter as an Oklahoma City cop. I keep thinking I need to watch it because it’s set here, but I get so little tv time nowadays that I always miss it. Maybe I’m not missing much, after all.

Go to The Lost Ogle to read the post.

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Newbie’s Publishing Book

Posted on July 11, 2008 by Sherri Cornelius

From the comments on yesterday’s post, I see that THREE WHOLE PEOPLE still like me. Thanks guys, that earns you each an extra link: Angela, Vanessa, and Ian. May this put you over the top at Technorati.

In my travels through the blogisphere I see that writer J.A. Konrath has put a book together about the publishing biz. On his blog about publishing, from whence the material in the book originated, Konrath says it’s “An all-inclusive writing book over four years in the making, filled with more than 750 pages of tips, tricks, and advice… That’s more than 250k words worth of material, organized, indexed, and bookmarked for your reading convenience.” The Newbie’s Guide to Publishing Book is available in pdf format for free. Go to his website to download. I already did.

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I’m totally paranoid now.

Posted on July 10, 2008 by Sherri Cornelius

Here’s a snippit from a weeks-long astrological influence in my horoscope, according to astro.com:

Past behavior patterns that have become completely unconscious now become active and come into play without your knowing it. Your efforts at self-assertion are undermined by these behavior patterns that you are not even aware of. And unfortunately the people who are alienated by these actions probably will not come out and say so, but will work behind the scenes to block your efforts.

Well, holy crap! If I’m not aware of these behavior patterns, how can I possibly work around this influence? Whatever it is, am I doing it now? Do you feel alienated? Of course you won’t tell me, it says so right there. I didn’t even know I was trying to assert myself, that’s how unaware I am.

I wondered why it was so quiet around here lately. Now I know. Before I go crawl in a hole to await the passing of this influence, I’d like to apologize in advance for doing… you know, whatever.

(I just did it, didn’t I?)

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My vision board

Posted on July 9, 2008 by Sherri Cornelius

I’ve been telling my brother all about my vision board, and it occurred to me I could post a picture and then everybody could see it. Not that it means anything at all for anyone but me, but it could inspire you to make your own.

A vision board is just a piece of poster board or foam board onto which you glue pictures and phrases that mean something to you, or things that you’d like to see come into your life. I’ve found that my vision board serves more than one purpose:

  • It reminds me of my goals. With the reminder right in front of me, I’m more likely to be alert to opportunities and jump on them when they arise
  • If I have an epiphany sometimes I forget it over time, so I paste reminders here. That way I’m able to build on it rather than learning the same thing over and over.
  • Inspirational messages help to replace the negative loop that wants to play in my head.
  • Beautiful images induce gratitude and peace.

My vision board evolves often. If you look closely, you can see where some old pictures peek out from behind new ones, and other places where I’ve torn off old images. The first incarnation of the board was mostly about peace and tranquility. That’s where the floating lanterns came from, and the flowers and plants.

A lot of the images are meant to invoke a feeling. Like the mixing bowls and the breakfast nook, right of center. I want my home to be airy and clean, and full of life and color. I don’t necessarily want that table and those bowls. I do, however, want that laptop below the bowls.

There are several references to my writing goals, some of them I printed myself and glued on. See that big stack of books on top/center? I wrote the names of my novels on the spines. They were blank for a long time. Below that is the tag from my editor appointment at the conference I went to in May. Below and to the left of that, just under the forest scene, is a Publishers Marketplace “deal” I wrote for myself. I think if you click on the picture it will be big enough to read it. You’ll notice I made it a major deal for North American rights, not world. Hey, if I’m gonna go, I need to go big.

Does anybody else have a vision board? What’s on it?

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♪♪ the bombs bursting in air ♪♪

Posted on July 7, 2008 by Sherri Cornelius

It’s a miracle nobody died.

I went to my Aunt Vicky and Uncle Joe’s house for the 4th of July for the first time in ages. At the beginning of the fireworks portion, a punk and a bag of explosives materialized into each child’s hand as if by magic. And I include the adult children in that statement. Before long roman candles and pop bottle rockets were flying all around as we huddled in our lawn chairs, and I got a taste of what the battle described in the National Anthem must have been like.

Finally, my aunt’s voice rang out over the countryside as she yelled out the back door, “Y’all get over there away from my pool like I said before, and I mean business!” Then later, my cousin told one of the kids, “If you wanna blow yourself up, that’s fine, but you’re not gonna blow us up, too. Get over there. Go on.” The tone was identical, and all too familiar, as I realized I had inherited that McEwin, “I mean business” gene. Or maybe it’s just a mom gene. Actually, it’s probably the trait of a woman who reached the end of her patience with the men of the house years ago. That sounds about right.

I used to be one of those kids running crazy with a punk and a bag of Black Cats getting yelled at by Aunt Vicky, though I admit I was never entirely comfortable courting danger. I admit it, I was a wimp. I rarely held a firecracker while lighting it, I never threw one at another child to “git ‘im”, and the rides Uncle Joe gave us on his tractor, while fun, induced a little too much adreneline to course through my body.

And though the tractor had been exchanged for a golf cart with suntanned children hanging off every corner like monkeys, that adrenaline spiked just a little when Uncle Joe took the cart down a steep hill and yelled, “Oh shit, I got no brakes!” As I cringed, the monkeys squealed and hooted, because they knew he was joking.

Sure did bring back memories.

Like I said, it’s a miracle nobody died.

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300

Posted on July 3, 2008 by Sherri Cornelius

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.

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Opera 9.5

Posted on June 30, 2008 by Sherri Cornelius

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.

Filed under: Life, technology | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Much randomness

Posted on June 28, 2008 by Sherri Cornelius

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!

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Kitties

Posted on June 26, 2008 by Sherri Cornelius

Jumpy

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.

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