Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure

On Sunday, September 14th I will be participating in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. The "cure" we're looking for is the cure to breast cancer. Luckily for me, you don't have to run the whole way so I think I'll be able to manage. You can even walk if you want to and I may find myself taking advantage of that because I haven't lost as much weight as I'd like to have lost by now. On the other hand, if I keep waiting for the day when I'm in shape, I'll not only never be in shape but never participate in anything.

My employer is paying the entry fee for a team of us to do this race but I need support in the form of donations. I am including a link to my personal page on the organization's web site. This will take you to my personal page:


Irene's Page at the Komen Race for the Cure Web Site

Susgan G. Komen Race for the Cure for the Greater New York Area.

If you can make a donation, please go to my personal page so that I will get credit for it. If you can't make a donation, please send some positive energy my way on the morning of the 14th.

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Time sure flies...

...whether you are having fun or not. I can't believe that seven months have passed since I last wrote an entry here. I have been busy, of course. Since the last entry in this blog we have moved into our house. It wasn't by the end of June as we had hoped, but we were in by the end of July.

We have celebrated our first Christmas in our new home. My mother and father joined us and it was a most pleasant holiday. We didn't do all the decorating that I had planned on doing, but it was a pretty good holiday even so. My father has been in a nursing home since August and this is the first time he has visited our house. That would have made it special no matter what else was going on.

I'm pleased to say that now that winter is upon us, our house is nice and warm. There are no drafy places and we have been able to keep the temperature at 68 degrees without being too cold.

I love having my own office where I can close the door and write. It is particularly nice for working at home. I don't have to worry about annoying anyone else in the house if I want to listen to music while I work and I'm not distracted by whatever my husband and son are up to.

Warren has his own office too, so we can both work without causing distraction to each other. It's funny but sometimes being in love with your spouse is counter-productive. We enjoy talking to each other so much that we can't work in the same room and get anything done. We spend too much time talking to each other and not enough time working. I sometimes wonder how I managed to get any work done at all when we were living in my mother's home and had our computers side by side.

If you haven't visited the main part of my site lately, that has also changed since last spring. I completely changed the site so that it uses ASP .NET now instead of PHP. I was getting bored with the existing design so I started fresh. I still haven't gotten the photo album re-done but I'll get to it eventually.

New Year's Resolutions

It is that time of year. I have made two resolutions for this year. One is to continue losing weight. I want to lose at least 50 pounds this year. That is only one pound a week but I felt that it would be enough to make a visible change in me without being such a high number that I would be doomed to failure. The other goal? I want to make enough professional fiction sales to qualify to join the Science Fiction & Fnatasy Writers of America this eyar. That means three sales at professional rates or a single book. I've started working towards that goal by submitting two short short stories this week to publications that pay professional rates. I have vowed to keep submitting a story until it has either been published or submitted to every market that is appropriate for it. I will start with the highest paying markets and work my way down.

I have at least half a dozen more that I want to get submitted by the end of this weekend. I've decided to use the Fred Flintstone method to submit my stories. What is the Fred Flintstone method? There is one episode of The Flintstones where Fred and Barney go to a dancing school. When asked to demonstrate how he would go about asking a woman to dance, Fred says, I go to to her and say, (I am paraphrasing here because I don't remember the exact words) "Hey baby, want to shake a leg?" The instructor is horrified, of course, and she says to him, "You must get your face slapped a lot." (Again, I may be paraphrasing, don't pick if it's not exact.)

Fred replies, "Yes, but I get to dance a lot too."

So that will be me this year. I'm going to "get my face slapped a lot," in other words I'll pile up the rejections, but maybe I'll get to dance a lot too. We'll see.

Spring has (FINALLY) Sprung

For the first time this morning, I feel as though Spring--real Spring weather--is here. Of course, it might just be psychological. So far this has been one of those weekends that you just wish would go on forever. Yes, I mean more than usual. It has to do with more than the fact that I don't have to go to work on weekends.

My Friday started out rather hectically. I work at home on Friday and so I usually make all my doctor's appointments on Friday because then I can work around them. Unfortunately, this week the working around got kind of lost in the running around part. I had to put in most of a day between yesterday and today to make up for it. Things started getting better around 3:30 or so when I left to go away for the weekend. Friday night Weird Al Yankovic appeared in Stroudsberg, Pennsylvania and we had tickets.

Just before we left the house, we got a call from our lawyer to tell us that they had gotten back the signed contract for our house. Finally I can breath a sigh of relief and know that the house is mine. They also told us that the sheetrock was being installed so now my house actually has walls on the inside too. We should be able to be in by the end of June. I can't wait!

I have been listening to Weird Al's music for almost twenty years--ever since Even Worse came out in 1988. My step-son, who was only 14 at the time, introduced me to his music. (Fair trade I figure because I got him into playing computer games.) Anyway, since then I've managed to collect most of his CDs and list to them almost every day on the four hours that I spend on the train. When we discovered that he was going to be in Stroudsberg, we bought the tickets immediately.

My husband and I went to the show with my step-son and his wife and we all loved it. If the Straight Out of Lynwood tour is going to be in your area, and you're a Weird Al fan, you owe it to yourself to go. It is a fantastic show. In fact, it was so good I don't want to tell you too much. It will be more fun if you go to the show and find out or yourself. Go to http://www.myspace.com/weirdal for tour dates. And, no, I'm not getting anything out of this, just sharing.

So that was my Friday.

Saturday we got up and went out to breakfast, did a little bit of window shopping and then went to see Spider-Man 3. My ten-year old and I have been looking forward to this movie for a long time. We've been charting its progress on IMDB and checking out every reference we could find ever since the Spider-Man 2 came out in 2004.

Luckily we did a little bit more than window shop. Right before we went to the movie, we bought the Xbox 360 version of the Spider-Man 3 game and there was a free ticket in the package for the movie. So three of us got to go for the price of two. I am so glad we didn't decide to wait until after the movie to buy the game. Now I just have to wait for my chance to try out the game. I don't think I'll hold my breath. I should probably finish Oblivion first. I haven't played for weeks. I'm almost finished with the main quest but there always seems to be something else I have to do first. Oh well… I'll get there.

In a little while I'm going to stop writing and go to my mother's office to do a little maintenance on her computer. She got a new one a few months ago and it has a CD burner so I'm also going to show her how to burn her own CDs so she can back up her work on CD. Then we're going to go over to my house and I'm going to show her around. She's only seen pictures so far, so I'm really looking forward to showing it off.

This afternoon we're going to finish off this perfect weekend by going out to dinner for my mother's birthday. The restaurant we're going to has become the gathering place for our family. It's called "The Cornucopia" and it's the restaurant where we had our wedding reception. In fact, it's where we've had most of our family celebrations that include going out to dinner for the past twenty-five years or more.

Did you know…

I've been going through my stuff lately, getting ready to move, and I found copies of my games on CD. Did you know that Windows 3.1 applications will run on Vista? I sure didn't. My games were originally written for Windows 3.1 (using Visual Basic 3.0 if you can believe that!) and I never really expected them to work on Vista, but when I found the disk, I wanted to see if I could display anything that had my copyright on it. I wanted to show it to people at work and my name isn't anywhere on the outside of the package so I put the disk in the drive figuring that I could at least look at the readme which does have my name on it.

I don't know why I even bothered to double-click on the program. I was under the impression that the "thunking" dlls had been removed a long time ago. I remember hearing talk that the 95 code base had been removed from XP so I certainly never expected a pre-95 application to run. But it did. In fact, I'll prove it. I've uploaded a cropped screen shot of my Pyramid Solitaire game running on Vista. (The link will open a new window in Interent Explorer or a new tab in Firefox with the picture in it. Just so you know, it's a fairly large file as pictures go, almost 200k.)

See? There is my copyright notice on the About window, the game itself, and under that you can see a Windows Explorer window showing the contents of the CD. See VBRUN300.DLL there? Visual Basic 3.0 creates Windows 3.1 meaning that this is a 16- instead of 32-bit application. Oh well… live and learn.

When I look at this program, I find it hard to believe that it has been 13 years since this program came out. I had a good run too. Solitaire, Dice Games, and Casino Nights all came out in 1994 right before Windows 95 and I received royalty payments on them until 1998!

I was like the Little Red Hen on these games too. Except for the card graphics, I created all of the pictures in Microsoft Paint. Can you believe that? I still remember drawing the lines for the Craps table pixel by pixel. I wrote the code, I created the graphics, I wrote the text and compiled the help files. The games were published through a company called SofSource. They were originally released on 3.5" disk and then were re-released on CD. I think one of the most exciting things for me was going to K-Mart and Electronics Boutique and seeing my games on the rack. I even got some fan mail.

Guess that's about it for now. I've got to get working on Sentience now. I've started rewriting/restructuring it so I can actually send it out an maybe get it published some time in this century. More soon.

And it only Took Half a Century

Finally, at almost 48 years of age, I am going to have my own house. I can't believe it's actually going to happen. We made the offer last week and they have accepted it.

We should be able to move in by the end of summer. You see, not only am I getting my own house, it is a brand new house that nobody has ever lived in before. In fact, as I'm writing this, it hasn't even been built yet. That might be the most exciting part of all.

When we first saw the house, it was just a shell. There were no windows or doors and everything was plain wood. Now they've shingled the roof and the windows and some of the doors have been installed. It's really shaping up. This is what is in store for us:

• Granite counter-tops in the kitchen
  
• Stainless steel appliances (stove and dishwasher)
  
• Hardwood floors throughout.
  

The house has three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, living room, dining room, and kitchen. We also have a one-car attached garage, a bonus room upstairs above the garage, and a full-basement. The living room has a gas fireplace and a bay window.

I am getting more excited and more anxious to get things done every day. A couple of years ago, this wouldn't have been possible. When we first came back here from Washington, it seemed as if we were never going to have our own house again. There were times when I despaired of ever getting out of my mother's house. I have to admit that there were times when I felt like a bit fat failure.

Happy Valentine's Day

Today is the 13th anniversary of the day when my husband proposed. Actually, yesterday is the anniversary. Today is the anniversary of when I accepted. You see, back in 1994 when my husband proposed to me, we were both working long hours on opposite schedules (I worked days, he worked nights) and we both had to work on Valentine's Day. We went out Saturday. I won't go into all of the details, but it was a long day and it seemed as though Warren was deliberately dragging it out. We spent the day window-shopping, went out to dinner and even went to the movies. By the time we were going home, it was after midnight but Warren insisted that we stop at his mother's house for coffee.

We were also stopping by to drop off my father's video camera that his mother had borrowed. I was told that she was borrowing it to make a video tape of his sister's house for the Real Estate broker. It was the same kind of weather we're having today too. It was cold and icy and the last thing I wanted to do was sit around and chit-chat. We got to her house and she made coffee and we sat around talking and then Warren suggested that I show his mother how to use the camera. If you look at the video tape, you can see that I am not in a happy mood (that's putting it mildly!) and you can guess that this isn't something I want to be doing.

Warren gets down on one knee and makes the beautiful, eloquent speech I've ever heard. By the end, I'm practically blubbering. But before I can say yes, he tells me that if I want to get engaged on Valentine's Day then I should wait until after midnight to give him my official answer. And I did. I called him at one minute after midnight and said yes. The rest, of course, is history. We got engaged on Valentine's Day 1994 and married on August 13, 2004. For Valentine's Day I received a pair of gold heart earrings (pink and yellow gold just like my wedding ring) and thirteen roses, one for each year we've been married.

The video might not be the most flattering but, as Warren says in the video, it proves to Matt that Daddy really did get down on one knee.

Where have I been?

I haven't had the time or energy to even think about this web site since September. If you're wondering why, it's because I got a job. Believe it or not, it has taken this long to get used to working. Well, not working exactly, it took this long to get used to the commute. I leave the house at 5:30 in the morning and don't get home until 8:00 at night, a long day no matter how you slice it. Most of my extracurricular activities have had to go by the wayside.

The good news is that I love my job. Other than the fact that it took a long time to become accustomed to the commuting, I enjoy working in New York City. Despite the fact that it left me overly tired for a long time, the commute isn't that bad either. It gives me a lot of time to read or write and I'm actually beginning to be able to use the time to my advantage instead of using it to catch up on sleep.

Life is good. I have a job that pays well and that I enjoy enough that I don't mind going to work, the bills are getting paid and we're even paying off the credit card bills we racked up during the time I was out of work. In fact, we're even beginning to think about looking for a house. This is the first time since I left Microsoft that I haven't felt as though I made a huge mistake.

If I had any complaint at all, it is that I have been verbally constipated for most of the last five months. I haven't written any significant pieces of fiction since I started the job. On the other hand, I'm beginning to feel the pressure to create again so maybe the fallow period has done me some good.

I have good tools to work with now too. I got a new Pocket PC for Christmas, an HP IPAQ that I adore. It has wi-fi, it has lots more RAM than the Jornada I had before and it's much faster as well. It runs on Windows Mobile 5.0 and it has become my constant companion. I have started to use it to write on the train in the morning. Typing with a stylus may be slower, but it's more comfortable than trying to balance a laptop on my lap.

I also have a new desktip machine that I just bought a week ago. It's also an HP, an HP Media Center PC, with all of the goodies I've been wanting to have in a computer including a 22" widescreen monitor, 2gb of RAM, and lots more. It even has a TV tuner. The Media Center Software (Vista, not XP by the way) lets the computer pause and record live TV which I can then transfer to DVDs so I can watch television on my portable DVD player on the way to work in the morning. The video card is a "real" video card, not one on the motherboard and it has 512 mb of RAM. I was concerned when I bought it that I might have to replace the video card right away in order to play games like Oblivion, but it runs it just fine with the highest quality video settings. FINALLY I can play Oblivion on the PC and really enjoy the beauty of it. Just in time for the expansion pack they are releasing next month.

I love Vista too, by the way. My computer came with Home Premium and so far I haven't seen a need to upgrade. The two things I thought weren't part of Home Premium, IIS and remote desktop, seem to be there. It is also working seamlessly with the home network so I'm not sure I'll ever need more than I have now. I'll keep you posted.

I guess that's it for now. I can't possibly hope to catch you up on everything that has happened for the past five months. I should actually be able to get on here more often now because I've started working home one day a week, but I can't promise because I have to invest at least some of that precious five hours that I get back by not having to go to work into writing. It's time.

Oh, and after all the frustration I was having with trying to lose weight back in the summer, I've lost twenty pounds since I started my job. I guess the fact that I'm hardly ever home does have some benefits. It means I have less time to pig out on empty calories. A few more pounds and I should actually look like I've lost weight. I know my clothes are much looser and I am actually beginning to feel better too.

A Little Slip...

Ok, so it was a big slip but I haven't skipped walking as many times as I've skipped writing. It's been a weird week and a half or so. Matthew's first few days of vacation threw off my writing schedule and it has taken a while to get back in the groove. On the good side, I've only skipped a few days of walking and am still doing my 2.2 per day as I reported in my last entry.

The main reason I ended up skipping the walk for a few days is that my Mom needed me to work for her and, by the time Warren got home from work, I didn't have time to walk before going down there. It sounds like an excuse, but unless I wake up Matt and make him go with me, there's no way I can walk until Warren gets home.

Then we had a flood. Really. It wasn't as bad for Port Jervis as they predicted ahead of time but it was bad enough. I took my camera with me on my walk yesterday and took some pictures of both the Delaware and Neversink Rivers. The Neversink is pretty much back to normal, non-flooding status but it wouldn't take much to make the Delware overflow its banks again. Take a look...



We were supposed to go fishing today. I turned down an appointment with the car place because of it and now, we're not going. It's a nice day too. A shame.

I'm in the process of creating a new Web site. I have registered a new domain and I'm starting from scratch, recreating all of my tutorials with updates to reflect the current state of software and web techniques. I've been putting lots of time into getting the design right and not so much time into anything else. In fact, I'm going to publish this entry and get going on that now.

2.2 Miles and Counting

I measured my route today and discovered that it is 2.2 miles from the starting point (at my house) to the end-point (also my house, of course) and right now I'm moving much more slowly than I thought. It takes me just over an hour to make the circuit and 2.2 miles per hour is pretty slow. At least, I think it's slow. When does walking become jogging? Is it five miles an hour, six, more? As I said yesterday, I'd like to get to the point where I'm making more than a single circuit a day.

Today is the last day of school. When Matt comes home, he has asked that I take him to the park near our house. I'll have to see. It was raining on an off during my walk and I don't want to take him over there if it's going to rain. On the other hand, a visit to the park could be fun if I take a book with me or, better yet, a notebook so I can write while he plays.

Unfortunately, right now I'm more ready for a nap than a walk to the park. Today's walk was a difficult one. Because it is so humid, I was soaked with perspiration by the time I got home. There were several points along the way when I thought, "I'll never make it." I just wanted to sit down and forget about the whole thing. Fortunately for me, I didn't take my phone with me today. The pants that I'm wearing don't have pockets and since I thought it was going to rain hard, I needed one hand for my umbrella and the other to carry my keys.

The good news is that although as of yesterday I had gained three pounds, today I weighed myself and not only are the extra three pounds gone, I've lost a pound too. For once it was three steps backward and four steps ahead instead of the usual three steps forward and two steps back. I was weak this morning though. I let Warren take me out to breakfast. It is the last chance we'll have to go to breakfast just the two of us, after all. I'm pleased to say that I didn't eat a bunch of potatoes or pancakes or anything. I had a mozzerella cheese omelet, half a slice of rye bread toast, and one mouthful of home fries and two large glasses of water to drink.

On the Writing Front

I've decided to cut back the minimum word count for the blog. Instead of two thousand words a day, I am going to write one thousand for the blog. The other thousand words will be fiction. I can work on a short story or one of the books I'm writing. In fact, I have a good idea for reworking my NaNoWriMo book. I was letting my mind wander a bit as I made the circuit today and the idea of how to fix my anthropological Science Fiction novel. I was calling it A.P.E.S. in Space but I think I need to come up with something that fits it better. My original intention was to create a funny book and the title fits that but I ended up with a serious anthropological story with a little love story on the side. The title doesn't fit any more but I can't come up with something better.

What's missing from the book (and the reason I think it hasn't gone anywhere) is that there isn't enough happening in the middle. Things go too easily, despite the bodies strewn about the landscape. I need to add a little depth to the plot. Although I know where it's going, I shouldn't give it up so easily. Maybe it's just that I had to let the book sit around for a while before I could complete it. The biggest question I have now is whether the book is a Science Fiction novel with an incidental romance or a Romance Novel with a Science Fiction background. Again, maybe that's why it hasn't been published yet. I need to decide what the book is to be and then send it out. I've been operating under the assumption that it is a Science Fiction novel but maybe it isn't. Maybe the important thing should be the romance. I know there is a thriving market in romantic science fiction.

On the other hand, I have yet to read a space travel romance. Maybe I need to get rid of the romance instead of developing it. My goal for this afternoon is to write about 1300 new words for that novel.