A Million Words

I haven't done a lick of writing since the beginning of December, being consumed by the usual holiday busy-ness plus an ambitious succession of crafts and baking projects.   At the beginning of the month, I used the leftover fabric from my baby-carrier making to make bags for my mother, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law, plus a few small ones to wrap cookies in because the only tins I could find cost about 8 euro a pop.   For Mike's relatives over in Ireland I made the following: Aunt Big's Gingersnaps,  an old stand-by of mine, and two recipes that were new to me, Rugelach and Chocolate Candy Cane Cookies .  The rugelach I will definitely make again, despite the fact that it was a two-day process with a bit of fiddling.  The candy cane cookies were very yummy, but it is next to impossible to find striped peppermint candies in Ireland, even three weeks before Christmas, and I found the peppermint filling a bit much. The chocolate cookie part, however, was delicious. Then I ...

Nova's birthday was this Saturday, and despite the chaos of roommates moving out and in, and the kitchen being in complete disarray, I was determined to make Nova a cake.   It is an orange chiffon (sponge) cake with chocolate ganache between the layers and huge amounts of ridiculously sweet white chocolate buttercream icing all over.  We took it to Mike's mother's house for a small birthday party that night, and a good time was had by all.   At one year old, Nova is never still except when she's asleep.  She walks at breakneck speed, honing in on anything sharp, dangerous, or electronic.  Her favorite teethers are mobile phones.  She enjoys exploring the far reaches of her range.  In the library, she will stay and play in the children's section for a while, but then she'll get restless and wander over to the computers in the reference room.  She can make my computer do things I didn't know it was capable of.  She's a very sociable baby, but with all the ...

It's over, and I came in a winner, pulling past 50,000 words yesterday afternoon.  I didn't really think I'd make it for a while there, but I had signed up for the regional word war, and that gave me the motivational boost to stick with it and recover my losses.   In the end, I'd say it wasn't actually that hard to write 50,000 words in a month, but they were 50,000 reckless, adverb-heavy words of a fluffy romance novel which will need lots of further work before it's fit to read.   In the final eight days of the month, I put together a grant application, made Thanksgiving dinner,  baked a cake for Nova's first birthday, and wrote over 16,000 words while our now-ex-flatmates moved out, leaving us with no salt, coffee table, or wireless router, among other things.  It was kind of crazy, but I won.

I was just looking at Sherry's blog in which she shares the following tip: "Clean up your desk." It reminded me that I do not have  a desk at the moment. Our apartment is small and frequently over-populated.  My files are in boxes in closets and my current writing projects are mostly tucked into folders on the living room bookshel ves.  In October when I was working on four different projects and doing a lot of revision the lack of a desk was driving me crazy.  I wanted to convert the "spare" room into a study/nursery so I could have a fixed place to work and spread out my charts and marked up pages.   October passed and no room-re-arranging happened. Now it's November and I just finished day 9 of NaNoWriMo. Things have changed.  All I'm doing is writing -- adding words to a single document. I hardly even check my plot notes or the minimal research I've done.  Not having a desk is a distinct advantage at this stage of writing.   16k and counting!

Mike has been after me for months to make Nova a Cthulu costume, and last night it finally came together.  Mike made the wings, and I frankensteined the rest together from a cheap pair of boy's pajamas.  Here she is:  

I am signing up for the annual insanity of NNWM, National Novel Writing Month, a pledge to churn out 50,000 words by the end of the month. I got up at 6:30 this morning, and it was near 7:30 by the time I had the document open on my computer.  At 8:15, when Nova woke up, I'd only written about 500 words.  If she takes a nap today, I might be able to do another thousand, but I'm not optimistic.  Still, I'm looking forward to it in a sick sort of way. I'm planning to write a regency romance and take a break from my never-ending fantasy series.  We'll see how it goes.

Nova pulled herself to stand at 6 months and 3 weeks, and cruised almost immediately thereafter, but she didn't crawl at top speeds until a month after that, shuffling the normal order of infant skill acquisition. Now, at long last, after months of warm-ups she's finally walking on her own.   She took her first independent steps almost a month ago, and by this time last week she was stringing four or five steps together at a stretch.  Then, in the last few days, she's finally started to use this new "walking" skill to get from point A to point B.   Meanwhile, she's had a runny nose and possibly an invisible tooth coming in and has completely gone off solid food, so she's nursing like a newborn, but it's all really very exciting.   My mother says that at this age I had about a dozen words. I'm not sure how many words Nova has, or what counts. She hasn't said "baba" (arguably her first word) in months, so I don't know if she still h...

Just now, Nova took two steps in a row, totally on her own.  Last weekend she took a step on her own, then sat down, and all week she's been crouching and standing and crouching back down to crawl.   This step towards walking comes about a month after she first stood up on her own from the ground, without using anything for balance or support or to pull on.  Now I really do think she'll be walking soon.

I have not been writing.  I should have known better than to expect an uninterrupted half hour a day at my computer while visiting my parents.  I'd had great hopes for getting through the next few of my new draft while here, but the constant social whirl has gotten in my way.  In the week and a half I've been here, there has been only one night that my parents haven't had guests or gone out to some social event or other, which I am also required to attend.   When I complained, my mother said, "It's only the evenings!"  You might think so, but it's amazing how a dinner party can cast its shadow over the entire day. Last night, for example, we had a few relatives around for dinner.  When all was said and done, that meant 11 adults and Nova.  My mother and I spent a good while in the middle of the day figuring out a menu, whether anyone else could be counted on to contribute, and going shopping, all the while speculating about whether certain people would or ...

Nova is nine months old tomorrow and she's working on walking.  When she was younger, people often commented on how alert she seemed compared to other babies her age, and even in the womb, in the long weeks of gearing up for labor, her activity level drew comment whenever I had monitors strapped to me.   I attribute her frequent kicking and subsequent explorations in part to the constant stream of caffeine I send her, first through the umbilical cord and now through breastmilk, but I think it's also just her personality.  Still, it didn't seem important until recently, when she's gotten much more mobile.   We've met up with several babies her age lately, and she enjoys their company but she's crawling circles around them, poking at their eyes, grabbing their noses, and sometimes even stepping on them.  Many other babies her age, especially boys, are still inching around on thier bellies.  The differences are getting a lot more noticeable.  She's generally ha...

I finished reading Enchantress of Florence yesterday afternoon, while Nova was taking her second nap of the day. It was a good day for napping and reading, dark and rainy as Ireland's reputation, and much colder than August should be.  I am proud of myself for having finished the book in less than a month, which shouldn't be much of an accomplishment but it's the most I've read in a single month since Nova was born. Enchantress of Florence is by far the best book I've read this year, with the possible exception of Good Night, Gorilla . I also enjoyed it more than other Rushdie books I've read, namely The Moor's Last Sigh and the first 2/3 of Satanic Verses .  I loved the juxtaposition of Mughal India and Renaissance Florence, and the fluid boundaries between art, life, and death that characterize the story's world. It was, of course, beautifully written, but I never felt like the plot got lost in flowery description.  I should get around to finishing ...

I recently started a new draft of a novel, and I'm trying a new approach with this round. I've always written through start to finish, and then edited the whole manuscript in one go, or in blocks of about three chapters.  This time, I want to make sure my scenes are working, to analyze a bit as I go.  I plan to use this checklist primarily as an editing tool.  Many other scene lists are designed to be used before the scene is written, and I've tried that and found that it doesn't work so well for me.  I need to discover what's going on as I write, and I prefer to write without looking over to double-check my preconceived plans as I type. The scene checklist below is designed to catch some of my most common slip-ups, especially lack of tension and my tendency to rush through things too quickly. I looked at three scene checklists before writing this one:   The Big Twelve , a scene list from The Scriptorium , and another one I can't find the link for anymore, which...

Character-Conflict-Change Scene protagonist: Who is he/she? What does he/she want? How does he/she feel? What actions does he/she take to reach the goal? Scene antagonist: Who is he/she/it? What does he/she/it want? How does he/she/it feel? What actions does he/she/it take to reach goal? Other characters: Role in scene? Is each necessary? Distinct as an individual? Is the conflict strong and/or clear enough? What is the worst thing that could happen in this scene? Scene-Setting-Senses-Story What does the reader learn about the story’s world in this scene? Do they need to know that information at this point? Can any information be held off until later? Is any necessary information missing? Does the reader get a vivid, multi-sensory sense of the setting? Does the setting contribute to scene tension? Are the character’s senses and emotions engaged? Does the scene stop at a point with forward momentum? Do you want to turn the page to the next scene? If not, can you end the ...

One should never trust a woman who tells her real age. If she tells that, she'll tell anything. --Oscar Wilde Once upon a time I knew a woman who lied about her age. She said that she was “almost thirty” when in fact she was a decade older. I always kind of wondered how she got away with it. I certainly never guessed until someone told me about it, and her other lies had begun to catch up with her. Now I have a birthday coming up this week, the once that will push me over the edge from mid- to late-thirties. I can see 40 on the horizon, but it looks like a pretty benign signpost from here. I’m married now, and have a baby, which makes it easier to look at the future without anxiety. If I were still alone, I think 40 would look pretty lonely, but I like to think I wouldn’t get too wound up about it. What I can see, now, is how easy it would be to just drop a decade and turn 28 this week. My old acquaintance looked a little weather-beaten for a 29-year-old, but she had...

I haven't looked at my blog in a week and a half.  I'd like to say that I've been busy writing, but that would be only half true.  I've been busy thinking about writing instead of actually doing it -- what I should be working on and whether I'm up for this rewrite. I spent a lot of time thinking about what it takes to make a living as a novelist.  I've known a few people who've done it, so I know it's possible, but I also know that very few writers ever make it to that level.  I understand that hard work is more important than talent, and that connections can be handy but won't carry anyone all the way, and that luck has almost nothing to do with it.   I figure that about 1,000 living writers are making a living as novelists in the English language market today.  I know a couple of them, a handful of writers who have published novels but won't be quitting their day jobs any time soon, and many, many more who are steadily working at their craft an...

At 8 months old, Nova is crawling, climbing stairs, standing with support, and pulling things of shelves.  She's speeding ahead as usual, but the last week has been tough, with a head cold, two new teeth cutting in, and immunizations to top it all off.  She's getting sticky and dirty and occasionally a bit bruised and scraped from her crawling and climbing adventures, but she's still having a good time.   She's also enjoying "eating"and I think some of the food has started to go in.  So far, I'm having mixed success keeping her off salt, sugar, wheat and dairy, since that's all most people eat around here.  She's still enjoying her carrots, apples, bananas, pears, porridge, avocado, rice cakes, etc.  It's nice being able to set her up with her own tray of food when we're all eating dinner, so we don't have to take turns holding her while we eat.   She's also getting a lot better at keeping herself entertained, especially when she ha...

The weekend before last I had my flood of inspiration, and for most of the past week I've been planning my next re-write of Scrapplings. I drafted this version of the story at the 1369 in November-December 2006, re-wrote it and edited it during the first half of 2007, then sent out 59 queries and submission packs as Nova got ready to be born. A steady stream of rejections trickled back to me, and some are still out there, unread and un-responded-to.   As I sit down to write again I find myself hesitating.  What makes me think that this time will be different?  I've written, re-written, and pitched this novel, and the second one, so many times that it seems to be futile.  Earlier this year, I was thinking that the premise, the whole idea that my fantasy world was built on, was fundamentally un-salable. Now that I've seen the plot from a new angle, will it make any difference?  Should I really sacrifice all this time and energy for a story that has always let me down in the p...

I do not get it. I have fallen through the rabbit hole for the second time into an online world that puzzles me: Competitive shopping. The first time, it was diapers. I was looking for something practical and reasonably attractive for Nova’s bum, and discovered that there’s a whole world of women making diapers that very nearly qualify as art. That much, I thought was pretty cool. What I find odd is the whole culture of shopping, where women hover over their computers to get on waiting lists for the most sought after diapers. There are lots of nice diapers out there! You can make your own, even! Why the fixation on a particular brand? They’re not that much better than the others! The babywearing scene is just as bad, if not worse. Hundreds or thousands of women all over the planet are sitting at their sewing machines, making baby carriers. Making a good one takes some skill, some design testing, some good materials, but again, it’s not all that hard to make a nice, functional c...

I didn't manage to read to the end of two books in the month of June, as I'd resolved, but this morning I turned the last page of Writer Mama:  How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids by Christina Katz .   Writer Mama  is a pretty good book, a focused program for building a career as a non-fiction writer in whatever time you can snatch from the daily round of child-rearing and housekeeping.  It advises starting out small, with short articles and local publications, then building up to the better-paying markets and feature writing, followed by the possibility of a non-fiction book deal.   I could do this, I really could. I know what to write, how to query, and where to send it.  The trouble with Chirstina Katz's program is that non-fiction doesn't really fire me up. I might write an article here and there, but I always feel like it's a distraction from my serious work, fiction. The trouble with fiction is that the career path of a novelist is formula-resist...

Earlier this week, I was leafing through the internet or a book, and came across the advice that one should read to babies starting from the very beginning.   Now, I would love to read to Nova, but she sees books first and foremost as a thing to chew on.   Goodnight Gorilla   already sports quite an array of toothmarks.  I went onto one of the parenting chat sites I waste so much time on and asked for advice.  People had all sorts of opinions, as you might imagine, but all in all I was encouraged to give it another go.  The night before last, we turned all the pages of Goodnight Gorilla .   One piece of advice I found interesting was that you can read a baby your  books, by which the poster obviously meant whatever books you are reading, but that wasn't how I read it at first glance. I thought, "Aha!  I can read Nova Scrapplings  and all the other books in the Anamat series that I've been trying to write since 2002."  So last night, as I lay there just this side of sl...

A few weeks ago, I resolved to write during Nova's naptimes.  She often naps for an hour or two in the morning, and sometimes for an hour or two in the afternoon, as well.  If she did nap for three hours, that would theoretically be three working hours in a day -- a perfect amount of time. But today is like many other days.  I start off the day with my cup of tea and Nova amuses herself and practices standing and crawling for an hour or so while I make myself breakfast and perhaps check in with the world of the internet.  While she's nursing, I play scrabulous and surf around innumerable time-wasting sites devoted to the hippy fringe of parenting, or go off on a tangent and look at fabrics on-line. Sooner or later she nods off.  Some mornings it only takes 10 minutes of nursing until she nods off, this morning it was well over an hour (with a short interruption, when I thought she was asleep). The real problem, though, is me.  Once she's safely settled in her slumbers, I ge...

I know it's early yet, but I think Nova may have said her first word at seven months on the dot.  This weekend, when the three of us were wandering around town, she said "baba" every time she saw someone in a stroller, or a kid under the age of ten.  She also said "baba" a few times in between, and it is her most frequent babbling sound, so I thought maybe it was just coincidence, but she said "baba" again yesterday at an appropriate time, so I'm starting to think it's a word. She also says "mamamumumum" when she's tired and hungry, and is beginning to connect the sound with me, I think.  This morning she made a "papa" sound, so there's hope for Mike, too.  

Crash.  Whirr, creak, rattle, CRASH!  That's been the story since sometime between 3 and 5 AM and now, getting on towards 11.  When the barge pulled up along our side of the docks on Saturday, I kind of knew that it wasn't here for the scrap metal.  I half hoped it was just here for a restful visit to Galway, maybe a little pub crawl for the crew, then quietly off over the horizon of Galway Bay. But no.  It's here on business.  Loud, just outside the window business.  Shortly after the barge arrived the other day, a giant, rusty funnel was set beside it.  Now all morning trucks have been lining up underneath it and the local crane has been scooping and dumping with rattles and crashes, waking me up at every turn.   Much as I love our view of all the activity on the harbor, this is one of those times when I think that a little quiet would be nice.

It's late in the afternoon and Nova is having a nap of epic proportions, 2.5 hours and counting.  She's probably tired from our weekend's adventures in Donegal, which I plan to write about at some point, once we get the video up on youtube.   Helen did the following meme, and filling it in is about as coherent as my writing is likely to get today. What were you doing 10 years ago? In June 1998, I was moving from Lowell Street in Somerville into the dorms at EDS , and starting my dreadful summer of Clinical Pastoral Education at New England Baptist Hospital.  5 things on your to-do list for today Organize for tomorrow's sling meet (lots of steps to that one) Wash diapers Sew diapers Trim Nova's fingernails Write something.  What would you do if you were a billionaire? Buying a house would be high on the agenda, and not just any house but a historic mansion or even a castle. I would restore it and fix it up so that we could have massive house parties. Mike c...

Last night, I finally finished reading  What's Going on in There ,  which I started in December or thereabouts.  Since then, long weeks have passed in which I did not read at all, or picked it up only to read one or two pages. Between January and mid-May, I don't think I read more than ten pages on any one day, and usually much less than that. When Nova went to sleep earlier than usual three nights ago I set out to read 15 pages and wound up reading nearly 40.  It felt so good to really get into a book and feel my brain stir to life again.  I nodded off with only one chapter left to read (the second-to-last, because I'd skipped around).  The following night I was too tired to pick it up at all, but last night I read those last 15 pages.  I have now read a full-length book with Nova at my side. What's Going on in There was pretty good, but like many books, it dragged in the middle. I found myself more interested again towards the end when it started talking about languag...

Last Friday, June 6th, was our Cake Day.  Mike and I performed many feats of bureaucratic contortion and form-filling in our quest to get married, and June 6th was the final day set for our Irish wedding.   Here is an abbreviated version of the saga: Last fall, when Nova was still snug inside my belly, Mike and I started to talk about getting married so we could all live together in the same country, but I didn't want to rush into it, and didn't want to tie the knot while my brain was addled with pregnancy hormones.  We planned, tentatively, to get married without family or fuss at Cambridge City Hall in December. Well, Nova was supposed to come out in early November, but she was actually born on November 29th, which meant that by the time she and I had recovered from childbirth, Christmas was upon us and so was the end of Mike's 90-day visa to the US.  We planned to get married after our return from a visit to Ireland in early January.  Mike didn't get a visa to come b...

This past Monday, June 9th, about twenty fishing boats lined up to blockade Galway Harbor in protest.  I was not 100% clear on what they were protesting, but one thing they wanted was for the government to stop taxing gasoline.  Here are some pictures from the day: Many of the fishermen are still here, flying banners which say: "Save Our Livelihoods" "Brussles Betray, Costal Communities Decay" "Third World starves while Ireland forced to dump dead fish" "Fishermen demand fair and effective laws" etc. Most of these signs are spray-painted onto sheets, and are accompanied by big placards from Sinn Fein urging people to vote against the Lisbon treaty.   Watching all those boats line up to blockade the harbor was a good morning's entertainment, but I find myself strangely unsympathetic to the fishermen's plight.  I don't really know the issues very well, but it seems to me that the fundamental problem is that a century of industrial ...

I'm fully enjoying motherhood, but one of the things that's beginning to drive me crazy is the fact that I'm having an awfully hard time reading anything longer than a short article.  Since December, I've been reading What's Going on in There , and a few weeks ago I started reading my friend Nicki's book, Crossed.   I had hoped to finish at least one of them by the end of May, but no dice.  I resolve to finish reading both  of these books in the next few weeks, or at least by the end of June.  Wish me luck.  I'll need it.

It's now been about three months since I started practicing EC with Nova most of the time.  I didn't realize until today that I hadn't blogged about it since late March.  At that point, I was washing roughly 18 diapers every day, was bleary-eyed and confused and only half settled in to our new home.   On our trip back to America in late April, I started to discover how far we'd come.  Once I got out of the urban environment of Galway and into the woods, it became much easier to respond when Nova seemed to need to pee.  We just had to be in a place where it was all right to just stop and tinkle into the bushes.  I didn't have to work so hard at finding places to pee because the whole outdoors was at our disposal.  The warm, sunny weather helped, too. Back in Galway, where the environment around us is all people and pavement, we need to make special detours to find places to pee -- pub toilets, occasional parks, and home are nearly the only options.  I started keeping...

To work or not to work, that is the question that plagues me now as I watch Nova sleeping in her car seat, which rocks her back to sleep when she startles.  I feel lucky even to have the choice. As Nova crests the 6-month mark, I am considering whether to get a regular, paid day-job. I would like to get out a little more, have a little more grown-up time, and make some money, but when I run the numbers it just doesn't add up.   It seems like most of my peers in America are compelled to go back to full time work six weeks after their babies are born, or three months later if they're lucky.  Here in Ireland, most wait until six or seven months, about Nova's age now.  The little ones go into daycare at rates that cancel out ordinary wages, but if you're a well-paid professional you come out a little bit ahead financially and, more importantly, stay up to date in your career of choice.  The babies are generally fine, but a whole load of natural parenting options go out the...

This is is a list of the top 106 books that lie unread on people’s shelves, by LibraryThing. I saw it on Helen's blog, and thought I would have a go at it because I actually read a few pages of real book this week, not just drivel on the internet. You have to bold the ones you’ve read of your own accord, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish, and are supposed to underline the ones you had to read for school or university, but I can't figure out how to underline on this so I'm just making a note afterwards. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Anna Karenina Crime and Punishment Catch-22 One Hundred Years of Solitude I can't remember if I finished it or not. Wuthering Heights The Silmarillion  Life of Pi : a novel The Name of the Rose Don Quixote Moby Dick Ulysses Madame Bovary The Odyssey Pride and Prejudice Jane Eyre The [A] Tale of Two Cities The Brothers Karamazov Guns, Germs, and Steel War and Peace Vanity Fair The Time Traveler’s Wife The Iliad Emma The...

For the past month and a half, I have been obsessed with cloth diapers.  It started with what I thought was a simple idea:  I would make Nova some training pants, trim cloth diapers which could be pulled down or snapped closed.  I didn't even think about buying them, really, because the ones that were available ran about $15/pair, which seemed like too much.  Besides, I like researching random obscure information. And so it came to pass that I fell through the rabbit hole into the strange and puzzling world of cloth diaper makers, as found on Mothering.com and in the Diaper Sewing Divas group.  Meanwhile, a woman I know here brought it to my attention that some people collect  diapers, and will pay hundreds of dollars  for a single diaper.  The current "hot diapers" are by a group called Good Mamas.  I've seen some, and frankly I don't understand what all the excitement is about.  Sure, they're nice, but not that  nice.   Meanwhile, I was making my own.  I loo...

This week, Nova sat up on her own, rolled back to front, and started babbling. We went out to dinner last night and she tore the restaurant apart.   I haven't been writing much, but I might start again soon.

The truly impressive thing about this wedding, if I do say so myself, is that the party came together on 48 hours' notice -- including ordering a gigantic cake.   We had planned to get married here in December or January, but Nova's late arrival, followed by the usual busyness of Christmas, then Mike's getting stuck in Ireland, fouled up that plan.  Next, we had a date in late March all lined up in Ireland, but the lawyer had given us bad advice regarding the byzantine workings of Ireland's Health Board, which governs civil marriages over there.  They told us that we didn't have the papers in order for a late March wedding, and gave us a date of May 1st.  We were all set for that when the news came in that we had to be back here to deal with a legal issue.  This sudden trip derailed that plan, so we were re-scheduled for June 6th with the bureaucrats at Shantalla.   The issue which had called me back was finally resolved on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning, ...

We're getting married today! 

We all made it through immigration, so now I'm back "home."  It's strange being here where everything is so familiar Regarding my previous post, I realized that I am still carrying way more than I need.  We didn't use the spare outfit but I still think it was a good thing to have.  I didn't use the blanket at all -- for the third time in a row.  Airplane blankets work fine, and you don't have to jam them back into the bag at the end of the flight.  I didn't take a towel after all, but I did bring a washcloth and a shawl which was good to put on the changing tables.  Halfway through the flight, I forgot to take the shawl to the toilet with us, so I used the Ergo carrier.  That was much handier.   For the next flight, we'll pack even less.  

Nova is about to embark on her fourth transatlantic flight since she got out of the womb.  I wish we didn't have to go back and forth so much, but that's just how it's turned out. The first flight was on New Year's Eve, when she was just over a month old.  She surprised me by sleeping almost the whole way from Newark airport to her grandmother's house in Galway.  On the next two flights, I traveled alone with her, and honestly it wasn't so bad.  The flight attendants on Continental pretty much ignored us, and offered me no extra help.  Aer Lingus was a different story, with the flight attendants all offering to hold her and walk up and down the aisles, or sit with her if I needed to go to the toilet.   Each time, I've brought a little less with us.  This time Nova's equipment will consist of a stack of disposable diapers, a small towel, a blanket, a change of clothes, some cotton wool, a teething ring, baby tylenol and bum ointment just in case, maybe a ...

Writing with a baby is not impossible, but I've had an awfully hard time doing it.  It doesn't help that every time I turn around we need to make another trip across the Atlantic.  I don't want to get into the reasons here, just now, but next week we'll be flying back for another few weeks in the US.  Of course my parents will be happy to see Nova, and I'll be glad to see what friends I can, but I'm unhappy about hurrying off just when we were starting to get settled in.   I had a script-writing project planned for the month of April, which got off to a flying start on the 1st and 2nd, then fell by the wayside.  I don't think I'll be able to do it now, my brain is just too scattered.   Meanwhile I've picked up another baby-related project.  We're working at the limits of our current nappy supply, so I've decided to make some diaper/training pants.  I have since discovered a vast on-line community of diaper-makers.  I had no idea how complex d...

When I was in college, I spent a semester in Nepal.  I lived with a family in a small farming village on the edge of the city of Kathmandu.  A lot of things were different there -- among them a lack of indoor plumbing and, outside of the city, a general absence of diapers.  Years later, when I taught English in China, I again noticed the lack of diapers.  Babies wore split-crotch pants and their little bums hung out into the cold.  They seemed quite comfortable that way, more comfortable than a kid in a dirty diaper back home.   I knew that I didn't like diapers as a way of dealing with waste.  After all, would you want to sit in your pee or poo a large part of the day?  Of course not.  Although it's not culturally acceptable to have kids running around here with naked bottoms here in the postmodern west, there is a small fringe movement aimed at keeping babies' bottoms clean by helping them use the toilet, potty, or sink instead of their pants, at least some of the time.  ...

It's a quiet day under a grey sky.  The seascape is dominated by rain and hail, lightened with occasional sunshine through the clouds.  At the moment there are no large ships in port, and the lock is closed.  Last night someone was welding on one of the smaller boats berthed along the near edge of the harbor.  The pilot boat is parked by the lock.  Stillness.

We have officially been in our new place for a week and a half.  I am getting used to the view, and also getting used to spending most mornings around the house waiting for the plumber/electrician/tiler/landlord/NTL installer.  The list of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo which we have to deal with never seems to get any shorter, no matter how many items I cross off the list.  Piles of boxes still clutter the apartment. Still, some semblance of routine is creeping in.  Nova and I spend most mornings here, doing laundry and having breakfast, then wander around town socializing and maybe doing a few errands until Mike comes home a little after five.  Sometimes I manage to write a little.  I've been to aikido a couple of times in the evening.  I'm getting used to line-drying the cloth diapers.  I have a pretty good idea of where to find 80% of the groceries I want.  I am spending much less time with Mike's mum, which is good for my sense of independence.   I think that this week I wil...

This week has been a total loss in terms of writing.  Not only were we moving, but we didn't have an internet connection until yesterday afternoon, and we've been dealing with the byzantine Irish bureaucracy so we can get married.  There has also been a stream of tradesmen coming and going from the apartment, fixing the hot water and the showers, the heaters and fans, etc.  I think I've spent half the week waiting to let them in and texting the landlord about what has or hasn't been done.   And then, there is the laundry.  It's not so bad, just a load or two every morning, but I think I had become accustomed to the help of Nova's grandmothers in that area, not to mention the convenience of having a dryer.  Here, we have lots of light and air and I've bought an enormous clothes drying rack which would hold probably three days worth of diapers at a stretch, but because there's always something else to wash and they do get stinky lying around, I've been...