A super-quick follow-up: if you, like me, need help getting started on tumblr, here’s a good place to begin: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/05/language-of-tumblr/

I’ve been flirting with tumblr for months and I didn’t know all the info in that article. Plus, links!

I’ve had website addictions come and go, but I think my current addiction to Tumblr might last a while.

Back in 2007, I liked Twitter a lot. I had it open most of the time, watching people I know having fun. It felt like eavesdropping on the people chatting by the coffee pot at work. I didn’t talk much, but I liked listening. Then it turned into a chaotic mess. People I liked stopped talking, and the relationship of follower-to-following went from friends chatting to a one-to-many communication means that way too many people were using as a sales tool. I still find occasional interesting stuff on Twitter, but I only go there when I’m desperately bored.

For a while, I checked Facebook every day. But it’s been ruined by the ads and the weird filtering for me. I go there at most once a week now, because all I see are the sponsored posts. It’s like choosing to turn on the television to watch commercials. Why would I bother? I check it mostly to make sure no one’s saying anything directly to me to which I am rudely not responding. I don’t even have it bookmarked anymore.

I never managed to get into Pinterest. It’s pretty, but it seems like so much work. And I’m sort of queasy about the idea of posting images that don’t belong to me. I just don’t see how Pinterest isn’t a violation of creator’s rights. Even if I pin something that I credit to the place where I found it, how do I know whether that person has properly credited the creator? I joined and browsed and I understand the appeal, but it never worked for me.

I’ve played with reddit, “front page of the internet.” It was fun for a while. I’d say three months. But I never found a place that felt like home there. With dozens of sub-reddits, it seems plausible that such a place exists, but if it does, it’s in some obscure corner that I never stumbled upon. I still visit sometimes–there’s a lot of interesting stuff there–but it doesn’t call me.

Tumblr, on the other hand, now beckons on an hourly basis. I didn’t get the point of tumblr. Like, not at all. It completely confused me. I joined it for #UFYH. I have no idea how I found #UFYH — I’m sure I stumbled upon it in a blog somewhere. But I joined tumblr so I could tell the #UFYH lady thank you. That was months and months ago. And I never really figured out what to do with it. Follow people? But how do I know who to follow or why? Lately, though, I’ve hit some critical mass of people that I’m following — plus discovered the like and reblog buttons! — and I’ve realized that tumblr is the bee’s knees. People are having conversations there. Interesting conversations that are taking place in a way that’s easy to follow. Profound conversations about life and media and symbolism and sex, and also amusing conversations about Supernatural and Sherlock and baby bunnies and cute boys. There are pictures — art and comics and gifs and incredible, drop-dead gorgeous scenery — and jokes and serious moments and political statements. It’s everything — the trivial, the serious, the thoughtful, the superficial. I’m pretty much in love.

Of course, they just got acquired by yahoo and so perhaps I’m at exactly the wrong moment in tumblr’s history — hitting its peak, just in time for the stupid sponsored ads to take over the show and end the party. But even if that happens, I’m really glad to be at the party right now. (Except, you know, for the fact that it’s a total time sink. But then the internet is like that!)

In other news, rain, rain, and more rain, surrounded by thunderstorms that last for hours. Zelda dislikes thunder. Yesterday, she tried to climb into my non-existent lap while I was standing at the sink, washing dishes. I tried to get a picture, but there wasn’t enough light. Here she is, however, preventing me from writing by sitting on my chest. Why she thinks on top of me is the safest place to be when the thunder rumbles, I couldn’t say.

There’s a mixed-race couple of ducks in my neighborhood that charms me. I like to imagine how they got together, to make up stories of what they thought when they met each other, who was the first one to decide, “Maybe you’re not so bad, I could do with you,” and whether she says to him every morning, “Okay, today we’ll stick together, but tomorrow you’re out.”

Male ducks are notorious rapists, forcing themselves on unwilling female ducks, and even ganging up in little packs to attack solo females. But in this case, the male is a mallard and the female is a big white duck, probably an escaped domestic. She’s 50% again his size. I don’t let the dog go near the ducks anyway — ducks have it rough enough without needing to escape curious Jack Russell terriers — but the white duck is bigger than Zelda, and I suspect she could do damage if she felt threatened. She’s definitely not letting the little mallard bully her.

I am actually making an assumption about the white duck–it could be a male. But it used to be alone. A little flock of mallards patrolled the lake, while the white duck hung out in a corner by itself. Then the mallards split up into pairs, leaving a lone male to sulk on the side of the lake, moping and making the occasional hostile run at the others. Over the past week or so, lone male mallard and white duck have moved closer and closer together. Several days ago, as we were walking down the path, lone male gave a warning chirp and woke up white duck. They waddled away in the same direction. Yesterday and today, they were together. Not snuggled, not like the pairs of mallards, wing-to-wing as they float on the peaceful water, but with only a couple of feet separating them.

Two lonely ducks, finding each other.

It might actually be the most romantic thing I’ve ever witnessed.

No picture of the ducks, because I can’t seem to remember to carry my phone with me, but here are some pretty flowers.

I have no idea what these flowers are, but I like them.

So it’s been ten days or so since my hard drive died and I’m finally truly back online. My apologies for the comments I let sit in the queue while I was gone — I wasn’t logged into the blog on my iPad and I knew I didn’t want to try to write any posts, so it was only this morning when I started to write that I realized a) that I didn’t know the password to my blog and b) that there were comments. Oops.

Most important lesson learned: Passwords. Argh. Double argh. I try to be good and make reasonably challenging passwords and differentiate them for different sites — you know, the basics of password safety. I kept an obscure document on my hard drive with codes that I would understand but that anyone else would have trouble figuring out to remind me what my passwords were. Not the kind of thing that someone else could find and make sense of, but hints for me. Like: A-Pbd-Rn#2, which would mean that my Amazon password was my friend’s birthday followed by my son’s name with a couple obvious numbers substituted for letters. Safe, right? Until I lost my hard drive. Password recovery has been tedious to say the least. If I hadn’t had my iPad, I could easily have gotten trapped in a nightmare where sites would send my passwords to email addresses that I couldn’t access because I didn’t have the password. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Still, I definitely need to find a new password system. I may try one of the sites that manage them for you, but at the very least, I’m going to be putting my mysterious codes onto actual paper from now on!

Second lesson: Windows 8 is hell. Whose idea was it to make the trackpad consider a swipe to the left as a signal to change applications? How are you supposed to move the cursor if every swipe puts you into a different application? Finding where my applications hid after I installed them was tedious. Realizing that classic Spider solitaire was gone was … well, probably good for me, but I may have a few anxiety attacks over it in the future. Setting up my mail turned out to be impossible. I kept talking to the computer, telling it that my iPad managed just fine with the exact same information, and the computer kept telling me, nope, can’t help you. I finally gave up. From now on, I’ll be reading email on my iPad and if I need to write anything lengthy, I’ll turn back to the laptop and use the web. Color me not impressed.

However — third lesson — I am impressed with my iPad. I used Pages to write with an external keyboard. It took me a bit to get used to it. There are definitely usability changes, like the way it saves documents and the clunky filing system, which required some adaptation on my part. Needing to select with fingers was frustrating — I want a keyboard command that lets me start a selection and cursor arrow control so that I don’t have to keep taking my hands off the keyboard to make minor changes. And it doesn’t have commenting, so long-term, there’s no way I’m going to use it. I can’t imagine trying to do revisions without the ability to leave notes for myself that are easily findable and deletable. But overall, Pages is great. The simplicity, the clarity, the style — I’m not actually sure what it was that made it such a pleasant writing experience. It wasn’t perfect. The dog was not a fan at all, because she couldn’t cuddle up to my side without blocking my view of the iPad. But I found it much better than I expected to and actually enjoyed writing on it. When I opened up a Word document yesterday, I was tempted to go back to Pages.

Fourth lesson: writing. It turns out that losing my hard drive may have been a blessing in disguise. I’ve been writing Time for so long now — in a few weeks, it will have been a full year! — but a huge amount of that time has been revising the same scenes over and over and over again. There’s a scene in Maggie’s bistro that I had probably a solid dozen versions of. It’s a conversation with Nat and Grace and Akira and Sylvie and it covered a lot of ground in terms of both back-story and world-building. Every time I rewrote it, I tried to save the best parts from the previous versions, the parts that worked. The final version — now lost — was a patchwork quilt. I think it was a pretty good patchwork quilt. I was actually satisfied with the last version of it. But rewriting it, without having the previous versions to base my ideas on, is almost liberating. It’s flowing instead of chunking its way along.

I’m 18,000 words into the story now, about half of where I was, and it’s actually moving well. Instead of feeling like I’m grinding the words out, continually going back and checking what I’d written before, trying to make pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, I know what the story is and I’m just writing it. And the characters are having fun. Grace took over a scene in a very Grace-like way, with dialog that amused me enough that I had that little glow of delight that is the best part of writing. First time I’ve felt that in months.

Anyway…I’m going to go back to writing Time now, because just remembering how I felt about it before I got distracted by the arrival of a replacement computer brightens my day. But I’m not mourning my hard drive anymore. I wish it hadn’t died, but it’s okay that it did. But thank you all for your sympathy!

I’m wondering if I can write a book on an iPad. I think the answer is probably not.

I’ll skip most of the details, but my laptop’s hard drive appears to be dead. About 24 hours into the nightmare, I decided it might be time to give up on saving my files. Goodbye 80 zillion versions of A Gift of Time, goodbye my outline. Goodbye all my notes for A Lonely Magic, goodbye everything except the first thousand words of Akira’s trip to Belize. Goodbye Belize cover, goodbye…okay, then I decided that maybe it would be worth trying harder.

Another 6 hours, $60, massive frustration and — I admit it — a few tears, and it appears that not only my hard drive failed, my USB backup drive failed. That just kills me. Like… no. Just no, no, no.

It’s the kind of problem that under other circumstances I would just throw money at. Find a good IT guy — maybe the laptop place I used once before — and pay whatever it takes to see what he or she could do. I’m pretty sure that the hard drive at least has recoverable files. But I don’t have any money these days, so even though I can pretty much guarantee that I’m going to wind up spending something on this, I want it to be as sensible a spending as possible and that means thinking about it.

Password recovery over the next few weeks is going to be such a hassle. And A Gift of Time — well, I told R sometime yesterday afternoon that this was feeling like it, that this was simply not a project meant to be happen, and I should find out if McDonald’s is hiring, and he told me not to be stupid. I glared, he apologized and said what he had to say a little more politely. But the idea that I’m starting over again – this time not by choice — is… well, it doesn’t feel good. I know I can resurrect a lot. It wouldn’t be like starting at the very first word. But… maybe I’ll go watch TV for a while.

Eight years ago, I came home from a meeting that had been like a lightning bolt to the heart and said to R, oh, so carefully, “Are M and W the same to you?”

Eagerly and with no hesitation, he said, “Yes! And 3 and E — why are they all alike?”

I didn’t cry. I wanted to. I’d just spent an hour listening to an academic psychologist tell me of the results of two days of intensive testing. My boy — my brilliant, delightful, wonderful, charming boy — tested as severely learning disabled. His ability to decode letters was below the 1% mark.

The psychologist — with every kind intention, I believe — told me that I should be prepared for him to never learn to read. But that it was okay, really. No better time to have a profound learning disability. Dictation software, audio books, a society that understood (more or less) that dyslexia had been proven via functional magnetic resonance imaging to be a brain-based difference, not a stubborn refusal to learn or stupidity — it would be okay that he was dyslexic.

It wasn’t okay with me. Or rather, it was okay that he was dyslexic, but it wasn’t okay with me that he wouldn’t read. Reading had always been my greatest joy. Escaping into other worlds saved my life. Books were what made life bearable. The idea that R could never share that? Totally not okay.

Yesterday was his last day of 11th grade. He’s going to Seattle for his senior year. He wants to try a public school. He wants to experience big classes and lots of people and school buses. (He’s out of luck on the last, but maybe there’ll be a field trip or something.) He only needs one math class to graduate from his current school and they’re going to accept his Seattle adventure, so however it goes overall, he’ll probably come back here to graduate next year. But mostly, my participation in his education is done.

He got a 98 on his final paper for AP English. He got a 34 (out of 36) on the reading portion of the ACT. He read the Game of Thrones series for fun.

I am so proud of what he’s accomplished that I could explode with it. But I’m also filled with something that feels like — I don’t know what. We moved to Florida so that he could go to a school that specialized in learning disabilities. We moved to our current house so that he could go to his current school. We live where we live because I thought he’d have the best chance of getting an education that would fit him perfectly here. And now… I’m done. I did it. He did it.

It’s like letting go of a balloon and watching it rise into the sky. You’re half delighted to see the balloon go — WOW! Look how high it can fly — and you’re half broken-hearted at the loss.

My boy is flying. I’m so proud of him.

While we were away, my dad finished cleaning out his house, which meant that my house got flooded with stuff. We came back to a place that looked ready to star in an episode of Hoarders.* We didn’t quite have to climb over the furniture to move from room to room, but  it was a near thing. Couches, chairs, objects, just…stuff…was everywhere.

Slowly and steadily over the past week, I’ve been finding places for it. Counting the outside furniture, we have 24 chairs. Also three couches and a stool. Never, ever, ever — I say this with complete conviction — will I ever need seating for 30 people in my house.

Never.

But I keep walking into my living room and thinking, wow, this looks different. Finished. If it weren’t for the books still piled in corners everywhere and the paintings and artwork leaning up against the furniture, it would look … it would look like a grown-up’s house.

Now, of course, I’ve been grown up for a long time. And I’ve lived in lots of houses. I even own real furniture — a comfortable couch, a kitchen table, a dresser. But this influx of stuff changed something.

I finally decided — it’s the table lamps.

Table lamps apparently are a magic ticket to conveying an illusion of adulthood.

*Digression: Actually, I’ve never seen an episode of Hoarders, only heard about it, but I just got distracted and read all about it for twenty minutes so now I know that we were, in fact, nowhere close. Clutter, yes, but my version of clutter is nowhere close to pathological.

R and I had the most awkward conversation imaginable, at the end of which he said to me, in his typical low-key, calm sort of way, “I am both offended and annoyed that you felt like you needed to say that.”

I completely sympathized. Completely. And I told him so. But, you know, some parents in Steubensville, Ohio, felt as if they never needed to have that conversation with their sons. And they were wrong.

Way, way, way back when, I wanted to have a daughter, for a lot of reasons but among them was the idea that I’d be able to understand her experience better. I don’t know what it’s like to be a teenage boy. I truly just don’t.

But I was really pretty sure that my boy would be as completely disgusted by the behavior of those boys in Ohio as I was. I had the conversation anyway, and I was so glad to be right. But I’m also glad that I bit the bullet and had the conversation. Yeah, it was incredibly awkward and uncomfortable and he’s annoyed with me right now, but I’m still glad to know that it’s been said.

OMG, Justified.

OMG, more Justified.

OMG, still more Justified.

I want to write Boyd fanfic. I want to give him a happy ending. I have no idea how an evil white supremacist who clearly can’t stay away from the dark side winds up happy, but I want to try nonetheless.

I want to write Ava fanfic. What the hell is the fanfic community doing? 200 stories and she’s practically ignored? Are you guys insane? She’s beautiful and hot and fundamentally so tragic, and having seen three shows into the first season and about 5 into the second, I want her to have happy. I want her to have babies and fried chicken and contentment and joy. Come on, fanfic community. Give me her happy-ever-after stories.

And Raylan. OMG, Raylan. We hate Winona. Ick. Just ick, ick, ick. We’ve gotten stuck on the robbery because honestly, watching Raylan risk himself to save that selfish creep is just not fun. But Raylan himself? Wow, I just melt.

Um, so yeah. If you’re not watching Justified, you should give it a try. It is television at its best. The language, the poetry, the imagery, the…well, let’s be real, the hormones. Raylan would be fun. Raylan plus Boyd is an estrogen overdose that reminds me of why it’s good to be female. Way, way too much fun.

PS: Anyone out there have a WordPress blog? Do you know how to turn the little traffic counter off? To the best of my knowledge, my blogspot blog had no readers, except for me and Carol and Judy, but this WordPress blog has a creepy little traffic monitor icon and it’s ,,, well, yeah, creepy. Not that I’m not happy to welcome readers (hi, Andrew! hi, Suzanne!) but I don’t want to have to think about it. Someone tell me how to turn that monitor off, please, or at least not have it show up in my toolbar.