Every year when November rolls around, I think, "I should participate in NaNoWriMo!"
Then I remember that I'll have just rolled off book deadline season and pretty much already did write 50,000 words in a month - twice - because I'm both a procrastinator and an idiot, and not necessarily in that order. Also for the past few years - and always right before deadline - I've been thrown a monkeywrench.
(Is this expression right? Now that I've typed it, it seems all foreign and wrong. And is the monkeywrench thrown at me? Or into the works? Because throwing a monkeywrench at me seems like it would be rather useful, e.g. "Here is a wrench; please catch it so you can fix all that needs a good wrenching.")
Regardless, last year's monkeywrench was my house sinking and filling with mold. This year, my dog got sick and my editor left. I don't recommend any of the above in terms of increasing productivity, although I'm really happy for my old editor and Maisy's treatment is going well. (According to the canine oncologist, anorexia is a common side effect when going through chemotherapy. Yet Maisy has gained nearly ten percent of her body weight and looks like a four-legged zeppelin, or a large, friendly tick.)
Point?
I've had to ask Fletch for some extra help around here in the past month. Mind you, Fletch is particularly gifted when it comes to killing arachnids and keeping me amused, but less so in terms of common household tasks. For example, we recently got a new five-way printer. When I say recently, I mean back in June, where upon arrival, it hung out behind my living room couch for three months, waiting for someone to connect it to a power source.
(Procrastination is contagious in this house.)
Anyway, last month Fletch finally put the printer together and hooked up the fax machine. Right around this time, our phone started acting oddly. Instead of the standard five rings, it would only ring twice and our voice mail would never engage. I spent three weeks sprinting away from my desk to answer the phone, and one week simply using my cell phone, as our line had gone completely dead. (If you called me last month... sorry!)
What's funny is at no point did my husband - a telecom engineer- wonder if these two events might be related. He had a number of theories on what might be going wrong, e.g. a bad switch, a glitch in the voicemail system, faulty wiring somewhere between the POP and our house, etc. We finally had a technician out who diagnosed the problem within fifteen seconds, leading to a great deal of smirking on my account, considering my first question also had been, "Is it possible anything is hooked up wrong?"
Which brings us to the rug. In our bedroom, we have a 10 X 12 sisal rug. In our city, we've had six weeks of perpetual rain. One might not think these factors are related, but one would be wrong. Because we've had so much rain, our backyard is completely squishy and Maisy hates to put her paws on wet grass, preferring to relieve herself on the dry grass of oh, say, a sisal rug.
So, four weeks ago when I was knee-deep in manuscript, I asked Fletch to please remedy the situation. I guess my assumption was that he'd take the rug off the hardwood, haul it down to the basement, and steam the section in question.
A while later, I heard my dog barking in the front yard. "Odd," I thought to myself. "Why would Loki be out front?" So I peeked out the window and saw that Fletch had taken the rug out of the bedroom, laid it out across our front lawn and sidewalk, and was spraying it down with a garden hose.
And I realized that in the history of every crappy neighborhood we lived in, with all the drug dealing and street fights and domestic violence and public intoxication and garbage-bag covered windows and dirty children running around in pajamas at 11:00 PM on a school night, this was in fact the most white-trash act I've ever witnessed.
Upon soaking the already hundred-pound sisal rug, Fletch discovered that it now weighed something like three hundred pounds and could not be moved until dry. For four days we had a carpeted front yard.
Eventually enough water leeched out for Fletch to roll the rug into an enormous, rotting, sisal burrito, and that sat in front of our house for another week, whereupon it got re-soaked by Chicago's torrential rains and Loki's uncanny aim.
We finally got a day of sun, and working together, we manged to haul it to the backyard where it sat in a sodden lump for another week and a half, until again, it dried just enough for us to hang it over a porch railing. And this is where it remains right now, getting drenched repeatedly by our daily deluge because if you weren't aware, Chicago is totally the new Forks, Washington.
I had lunch with my friend Stacey last week and I recounted the whole tale-of-rug-woe to her, whereupon she said, "You know you can't get sisal wet, right?" Now we're waiting for a break in the unmitigating rain so the rug can dry enough for us to roll it up and toss it in the trash.
The great irony here is that the damp sisal is a perfect breeding ground for spiders and the whole situation has been an endless source of amusement.
But the good news is I finally have the time to shop for a new rug. So there's that.
(Coming later this week - feral kittens in pumpkin costumes!)
