author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Dear March: Please enjoy your very own Fictionette Freebie! "Please To Confirm Your Appointment With BRIGHT SMILES!" is now downloadable as a PDF from Patreon by one and all. You can also read it in its entirety on Wattpad.

Thank you, March, for going out like a lamb given that you came in like a lion. Although I think we have this lion-and-lamb thing mixed up. I mean, a mild snow-flurry on an otherwise pleasant day, versus a raging bright sun blasting down like a blow torch so that a fifteen-minute walk down 30th Street gives me an evening-killing sunburn from hell--which one would you describe as lion-like? Seriously.

At least there was no ice to make footing treacherous. Aside from the aforementioned blow torch from on high, my walk to the Big O Tires was fairly pleasant. Also the good techs at Big O managed to correctly diagnose and fix our arrhythmic and unreliable turn signals. I had forgotten what a healthy turn signal sounded like! "Augh! What's that clicking noise?! ...Oh." This helped make the rest of my errands slightly more bearable.

Today was a day of running errands. Even when I was at home, I was running errands. On the phone. A lot. Because it's April and we're moving in two weeks and there is so much to do. Thus:

• Brought car to Big O for check-up and aforementioned turn signal arrhythmia.
• Attempted to get in touch with the movers we briefly did business with last fall. Failed. Left messages in hope.
• Reserved a UHaul truck for Great Big Moving Day.
• Scheduled an ARC Thrift pick-up for the furniture items we no longer want.
• Made appointment with The Cleaning Fairies for Day Before Vacating Day.
• Got back-up referral from a friend for other movers. Made appointment with other movers for Great Big Moving Day.
• Canceled UHaul reservation because Boulder Moving LLC brings their own truck.
• Called back other numbers for movers as a courtesy. Felt awkward. "Just calling to say we're not doing business with you after all! Yes, the movers we went with ARE licensed and insured, thanks! Sorry." Call back quicker next time?
• Rescheduled ARC Thrift pick-up for the following week at the new address because the movers don't start work until 9 so there was no way we'd get the furniture downstairs by 8 AM.
• Put in address transfer order with Xcel Energy.
• Go get car at Big O. Get aforementioned sunburn.
• Go to Comcast/Xfinity office to put in address transfer order. Their in-person customer service is infinitely preferable to their 24/7 help hotline.
• Go to McGuckins for all the things.
• Go to the grocery for the rest of the things.
• Arrive home. Thank husband profusely for holding down the fort during the buyer's agent's day-before-closing walk-through. Drink a LaCroix, eat an entire baglet of Brussel Bites, collapse in bed.
• Until 8:30 PM.

Did that seem like a very long list? It was a very long list. It sadly failed to contain a preliminary trip to storage--we want to get whatever items out of the house that we can now--but perhaps that was aiming a little high.

Anyway. Fictionettes and blogging. About as much as I'm up for. You're welcome!

Tomorrow: Closing Day number 1. So excited.

As promised, the Friday Fictionette for March 27. I wasn't able to get it up over the weekend after all--that's the last time I predict that a weekend's roller derby content will "go a little easier on me." (How can three hours in one day be almost as exhausting as six hours over two days? I don't get it. I really don't get it.) In any case, here it is. It's called "Not Fade Away," it's about a sinister birthday gift (among other things) and you can read an excerpt here and also here.

After "The Divorce Arch," this one was a relief to write: much more fun, much less complicated, much less fraught with unfortunate implications. It was just a straightforward urban fantasy of the "subtle portal fantasy" design--which is to say, the main character doesn't realize it when they cross from the world of the everyday into the world of the fantastical. They're going along their normal, mundane life, when suddenly The Weird intrudes and nothing will be the same again. You don't get to Refuse The Call. You're in it now, whether you want to or not.

As they say: Life is what happens to you when you're making other plans.

With this Friday Fictionette, I am all caught up at last. With any luck I'll be right on time with tomorrow's Fictionette Freebie and the first Friday Fictionette of April. I may also start producing the promised audio versions Very Soon Now. Turns out, I proofread by reading aloud anyway so I might as well do the reading aloud into a microphone and an Audacity project file. I just figured this out tonight, so, yes, there is already a recording of "Not Fade Away." Not sure what, if any, I'll do for musical accompaniment. My piano's out of tune, and it won't get tuned until we move (next week! Eek!). Maybe I'll tootle on my flute.

So. Moving! That begins happening after we close on the purchase on April 7. The bulk of the moving-stuff ordeal will be April 8--but the bulk of the planning will be tomorrow. I have all of the phone calls to make. And then we're going to start transporting the contents of our closets to storage.

In other words, please do not expect any miracles of literary productivity out of me this week or next. And maybe not the week after that, either, since that's the week culminating in the Bleeding Heartlands B-Cup Tournament. Oh dear. Basically, I'm just about going to manage fictionettes and daily blogging; anything beyond that should be considered pure buttercream frosting. (Mmm, frosting.)

The weekend was as full of derby as advertised. Fuller, even. More full than I actually expected; turns out that I was permitted to participate in C Team practice. So I did. The only thing I wasn't allowed to do, as a skater without an up to date skills assessment, was scrimmage. Except I ended up scrimmaging a little after all so that the coaches could score my jammer, blocker, and pack awareness skills as part of my assessment. (John typically writes our numbers on our shoulders with a Sharpie marker before scrimmage. "Five Zero Four. It's been a while since I last wrote this number," he said. "I know," I said, "I've missed it.") Then, after scrimmage, they put me through the rest of my paces and completed my assessment. I didn't expect that, either; I thought we'd get some of that done, but that some of it would have to wait for Thursday.

I also didn't expect to utterly collapse during the post-derby periods of each day, which includes today as well. It's amazing how eight weeks off-skates can return a body to a state of Utterly Unprepared to Exercise.

So no, Friday's Fictionette remains not done yet. I might manage to finish it tonight. I might not. I am having trouble with Scrivener, which seems to be having trouble with Dropbox, which is itself having trouble believing me when I tell it I don't want it to run at startup, nor do I in fact want it installed. In any case, I thought I'd write this blog post now rather than leaving it for my usual midnight scramble.

In addition to roller derby, there was bowling. We had a small team-building party after practice Sunday at the bowling lanes in Longmont. It was a lot of fun, and I hope we do it again sometime. But it was fun that involved Unaccustomed Exertions, namely, hefting a 12lb bowling ball for two hours and nearly three whole games. My upper back and right shoulder were tight and sore by the time we were done, and they just got tighter and more sore over the course of the evening. This probably has something to do with the headache that kept me uselessly horizontal most of today.

I'm hoping that as I get back into condition, physical activity will cease to exact quite so high a price. It has to if I'm going to function at all, because there's going to be a lot of physical activity in my near future.

I understand that the "Respectable career woman by day, hard-hitting roller derby skater by night" format of skater bio causes a certain amount of exasperated eye-rolling among participants and fans, and for the same reason fans of the sequential art storytelling format roll their eyes at yet another headline of the "Wham! Bam! Pow! Comic books aren't just for kids anymore!" format. And yet, that skater bio is so accurate. Full-time writer by day, roller derby skater by night. Pretty much every night, these days. And also all day Sunday. And some Saturdays, according to the current season's bout and tournament schedule.

Because the result of this weekend's skills assessment is, I'm a "BombStar." I've not only been put back on our B Team, my beloved Bombshells for whom I've skated since the team's formation in 2012, but I was also offered the chance I've feared and hoped for all this time, to additionally join our A Team, the All Stars. The practice schedule of a crossover (two-team) skater is a crowded and exhausting one. I'm having a hard enough time fitting all the things I want to do into the same life with only one team to skate for. But this is the next step in my roller derby career, and I'm going to take it. It's not just the chance to compete as part of our league's WFTDA charter. That's exciting, yes--and also terrifying! But more important to me is the chance to practice at the WFTDA charter level. More will be expected of me, and I'll become a stronger and better skater because of it.

That's the season-long view of things. Meanwhile, my immediate goal is to not have this development change my cheesy bio to "Hibernating bear by day..." I suppose, given a few weeks of practice, I'll adjust. But today, Monday the 23rd, I'll just have to accept as more or less a complete write-off.

Tomorrow, Tuesday the 24th, isn't looking very good for writing, either. Besides having Tuesday All Star practice, I also have my final physical therapy appointment and I'm meeting the CPA about our taxes. Which means I have to get all our documentation in order between now and then. Argh.

And then Wednesday is volunteer reading and Bombshells practice. And Thursday is scrimmage. And we're moving in April.

Somehow, I'm going to make this all of this work out. It oughtn't to be that hard. Compared to some of our league skaters--some of whom are parents, some of whom are students, most of whom have full-time jobs outside the home--I've got it easy. I should be able to do this! All I have to do is figure out how.

Well. Good luck to me!

Alas, but the Friday Fictionette for March 20, 2015 will be be late. I don't have a particularly good excuse for it. It's giving me trouble, and I'm giving me trouble, and so it'll go up over the weekend. Also I think the cover notes post for last week's fictionette still has to go up. Argh. I hate getting behind on things. It tends to snowball.

And there's still this short story I'm supposed to be revising. To editorial request. Why is this not done yet whyyyyyyyyy.

While I'm making excuses and admitting temporary defeat, I ought to give y'all a heads-up that things are going to get a little crowded with me, schedule-wise. Our closing date for selling this house is coming up on April 1st (no joke, ha ha). Presumably our closing date for buying the new place will be shortly thereafter. Then we're moving between April 7 and April 12. And then John and I will be taking a little road trip to Bloomington, Indiana, for a roller derby tournament on the 18th and 19th. Whether I will actually skate in said tournament will be determined by whether I succeed at assessing and getting placed back on our B team. (Despite the kind words and encouraging expectations of my league mates, I am not taking this for granted; the universe likes to smack you if you get smug.) But at the very least, we've committed to going. So that's three nights reserved at the hotel bracketed by two days of driving each way.

These are all very exciting developments, but they are also somewhat pressurizing. I suspect by the end of April my mouth will have blossomed in ulcers, which is my body's typical reaction to periods of sustained stress. I suspect I will look back on March 2015 as "the halcyon days."

Anyway. I'll do a bonus weekend blog post when the fictionette goes up, so's you'll know.

Meanwhile, I'm going to skate my legs off. I'll attend Phase 2 practice at noon tomorrow, and before that I'll join some of the Derby Lite folks for trail skating in Boulder. Then on Sunday I'll attend Bombshells practice. Which is to say, I'll gear up, hopefully knock a few items off my assessment checklist, and participate in as much of team practice as I'm allowed to given that I'm not technically on the team yet this year.

And next week I will be a busy little bee. A busy little, productive little bee. A busy little pen-wielding, fast-typing bee making large amounts of literary honey.

OK, that metaphor got weird. Let's just say I'll be busy, right?

Updates!

On skating: Phase 2 happened. I hit people. They hit me back. I fell down once, but at no time did I reinjure my knee. I sure tired it out some good, though. It was starting to make grumpy noises at me by the time we did our five-minute sprint. But I still got 27 laps in 4:52, so I'm happy.

On content writing: My article about our upcoming St. Patrick's Day scrimmage got approved yesterday (huge thanks to Boom for giving me permission to use her photos; hers are the ones that actually look good), so I have indeed successfully posted my first content to AXS.com. However, AXS doesn't appear to believe in RSS feeds, at least not so far as I can tell. So until I have enough time and the necessary attention span to figure out how to write some sort of benevolent screen-scraper, I'm creating a feed by hand so that my AXS articles will show up in my Grand Unified Blog Post Feed.

On other sorts of writing: Life is just one damn thing after another, isn't it? Today's writing time got primarily eaten up by Audacity, the free audio editor. It's Wednesday, right? So I have to read an hour's worth of employment ads from around the Rocky Mountain region and upload the resulting recording to the Audio Information Network of Colorado by 2:48 PM at the very latest, right?

Except here's the thing: I just switched laptops.

John's series of programming jobs over the last ten years have not only supported my writing habit monetarily; they have also been beneficial from a hardware point of view. Which is to say, several of the jobs he's held have provided him with work laptops, and most of those employers did not ask for said laptops back when they parted ways. So there's been a sort of graveyard of neglected laptops on and off throughout the years, stacked under my desk, stowed in the closet. When my 15" Dell Inspiron outgrew its three-year warranty and began to sort of implode, I hopped off that sinking ship onto John's 14" Dell Inspiron, which he'd bought at the same time but used very little, having soon after that been assigned an Asus U56E by his job at the time.

To my eternal envy, that Asus acted like the gaming laptop that I'd spent extra money trying to ensure my Dell would be, but, as it turns out, wasn't. Since when were work laptops any good at gaming? And yet when we sat down to play Spiral Knights, he was always waiting in the elevator lobby, ready to play almost a full minute before my machine finished loading the next clockworks level. And, as it turns out, it handles Second Life with amazing smoothness.

Anyway, I got a good two, two and a half years out of his abandoned Dell Inspiron. And then it started to fall apart over the last few months. It began throwing more keys than that typewriter in Stephen King's Misery. (Dvorakly speaking, first the "o" started coming loose, then the "e", which are "s" and "d" in Qwerty, respectively. Then the right arrow, of all things.) The rubber strip contacting the tabletop began to stretch so that this loop of it hung out and caught on things; I eventually just ripped the dang thing off. The battery began to reach the end of its life. Its power cords broke, one after the other, and the replacement off eBay turned out to really mess with the functionality of the Alps touchpad--which was never that brilliant to begin with. (Seriously, Alps drivers need to learn a thing or two about effective touch-check. I'd have its sensitivity set so low, and its touch-check set so high, that I could barely use it at all--and yet it would still accidentally click on the position of the mouse cursor because the edge of my right palm pierced its airspace.)

Much of those things are fixable. A new keyboard, a new battery, a power cord from a different manufacturer--but would these be worth acquiring given that the thing was starting to run super hot, and that it sometimes crashed when I unplugged the external monitor, and it never could play a video all the way through without buffering, and it didn't have an HDMI jack--

And it gave me a Blue Screen of Death yesterday. First time I'd seen that since the 15" Dell Inspiron began to die.

So I grabbed the Asus from its spot near the TV--it had sort of turned into a dedicated but infrequently used HDMI media source--and began moving in.

(This, by the way, is my not-very-good-excuse for not getting to that AXS article until quite late at night. I was moving files from the 14" Dell to the Asus. Watching files cross the network can be mesmerizing.)

And then today it was time to do my reading. Now, generally I've used a copy of Studio Recorder with a non-profit license provided by AINC to its volunteers. But I really, really didn't want to go dig out the install CD from whatever box I'd stowed it away in at the back of the top of the closet. And Audacity is free, right? Any number of LibreVox readers use it! Why shouldn't I?

And Audacity is free. And it is powerful. Audacity is to Studio Recorder as GIMP is to Microsoft Paint. And the learning curve is just as steep.

Which means that by the time I finally got my recording finished and uploaded, I was sort of staring at spots on the wall and faintly laughing at them. ALL MY BRAIN. USED UP. CANNOT NO MORE.

Got by brain back just in time for derby! And then, you know, derby. I'm about to drop, y'all.

So now I have a date with my foam roller, and then I am due to plop into bed, where I will sleep very easily tonight.

Tomorrow, there shall be better writerly things to report. And also a roller derby scrimmage. You may have heard. Some skater from Boulder seems to have babbled about it on AXS.com. So.

Hark! A blog post! What's it about? Er... probably not writing, I'm afraid.

Well, for one thing, you don't want to hear me complain about how despite Conlorado's being over I can't seem to string two hours together for any one thing. Other things keep intervening. I'm hoping next week will look better than this one, honestly.

For another thing, the really exciting thing happening this week isn't to do with writing. My life is large, it contains multitudes of things one might do with a life, and as it turns out the really exciting thing was putting my skates back on for the first time in eight weeks.

Yeah. Got cleared to skate at my physical therapy appointment today.

As always, the therapist asked how I was feeling and how my knee was feeling. "Extremely well!" I burbled. The quad pain that scared me so much last week was gone the next day, and the cripplingly stiff calf muscles loosened up until I could do full-stride lunges without pain again. I attribute this to the foam rolling iterations. They hurt but they work. They're like... well. Have you read Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy? Magic in those books can work utter miracles, but working it requires the mage to suffer self-inflicted pain. That's the cost of magic in that world. Foam rolling is like a limited-scope miracle of that sort of magic.

So he had me do the usual warm-ups, and then the usual balancing acts, and then a lot of jumping. This is a situation where "He said 'jump,' I said 'how high?'" is the literal truth. How high? How long? How many times? I jumped on two legs and I hopped on one. I hopped in place, and forward, and in a zig-zagging sideways progression. I jumped from side to side, which felt like I was back at derby doing my Inside/Outside drills. Finally, I chugged a glass of water and he said, "I'm comfortable with you skating." And I, of course, said "Yippee!"

So I accompanied John to scrimmage tonight. That had been my plan already; I wanted to make myself available as an extra non-skating official, like last week. But I augmented the plan by bringing my skates and skating laps during warm-ups and half-time.

It felt great.

Oh, sure, my left leg was noticeably quicker to tire than my right. But all my moves were there, and they didn't hurt. I skated forward and backward, clockwise and widdershins, crossovers and sculling. I performed tomahawk stops and hockey stops. I got up and down on my kneepads helping one of the refs re-tape parts of the track. And I got to know the slightly wobbly character of the barn floor. Skating! I still know how to do it!

So I'll be attending a couple of Phase 1 practices to make sure I'm good to go, then I'll do Phase 2 until the coaches have time to assess me for minimum skills and team placement. And then everything will be back to normal. Derby will go back to eating my life right up, bones and all. And soon we'll move house, and I won't have to carry my skate bag up 24 steps after practice.

Now I'll post this, and I'll go do my magic foam roller ritual, and I'll probably say some very unprintable things while I do. My left IT band is already grumbling at me after all the unexpected work, so I expect tonight's foam roller session will be particularly eventful.

OK, this is as late as I ever want to get with a Friday Fictionette. Just posted the one for February 27 a moment ago--"A Bridge Just Far Enough"--and have plans to release the February Fictionette Freebie tomorrow morning. I honestly can't decide which one of the four to release. I'll stand a better chance making up my mind in the morning.

The edition for Week One of March will not be late. It's fluffy and fun and I've already gotten halfway through cleaning it up and rounding it off. Also, it will not be interfered with by the week from House Buying/Selling Hell.

I shouldn't complain. That week from Hell ended very nicely--with us accepting an offer for our condo unit that's significantly above list price and almost 150% what we paid for it in 2000, from a buyer who isn't much fussed about things like inspections and appraisals. They're like, "Whatever, it looks nice, shut up and gimme," and we're like, "Awesome, yes please, thank you" and the seller of the place we're trying to move into is no doubt, "Yay, contingency met, I can get out of here." I mean, I haven't talked to any of them personally, but that's probably the gist of it.

But it did take us through the week and into the weekend to slow down to a reasonable pace, where we weren't constantly cleaning the house, getting out of the house, inspecting the new house, and talking about the house on the phone. The timeline from here on out is much more relaxed, and hopefully will be until that frenetic period of time between April 7 and April 12 when we will scramble to move all our stuff from Place 1 to Place 2.

Which means this week I actually get to complete the story revision. I am phrasing it that way in order to jump start my looking-forward-to-things engine. Because what I'm actually feeling is, "Er. No more excuses. That means I have to do it this week. OR ELSE I'M A TOTAL FAILURE." That is not a healthy way to think about one's vocation. So I'm telling myself "Yay! I get to play with my story!" and I'm saying it a lot and I'm smiling. Which is that thing we call fake it 'til you make it.

Roll on, the week of faking it effectively!

Last week I declared this week to be the week of Finishing The Short Story Rewrite, Dammit. Let's see how that's going, shall we?

Monday we spent frantically cleaning the house and putting things in storage, because...

Tuesday was the day the realtor took pictures of our home so it could be listed. There was a lot of frantic cleaning that morning before the photo appointment. But that didn't mean our job was over. We also had to review and sign a bunch of documents, and do some more cleaning and tidying, which continued into...

Wednesday (today). We pretty much have to do everything we didn't get done in time for photos. This includes a not insignificant amount of grout-cleaning and re-caulking. Also a bunch of errand-running with the intent to Get Stuff Out Of the House. Stuff went to storage, stuff to do with stain/varnish/paint-thinner/mineral spirits went to the Hazardous waste facility, stuff to be donated went into the mail, and our old single-band wi-fi gateway got returned to Comcast because it had been replaced by a dual-band wif-fi gateway. (The Comcast stop was actually the simplest of the bunch.)

By the way, you know why today's mini-snowpocalypse hit at precisely the time it did? That was precisely 5 minutes after I headed out on those errands in a T-shirt and jeans. No jacket, no scarf, no hat. Because today I "checked the weather" by looking out the window and saying, "Eh, looks decent enough," rather than actually checking the weather forecast. And the sky demons have a wicked sense of humor.

Today has also involved a lot of time on the phone with our mortgage lender, where she explained things to us very slowly and in words of one syllable because that's what it takes to get some of this scary loan stuff through our heads. We don't know the jargon, we don't know the theory, we just want the experts to hold our hands and make it all happen and just tell us what to do so it gets done right.

Anyway, the reason for continuing the frantic clean-up and errands-running is to get the place ready for...

Thursday when there will be something like eight or ten potential buyers walking through and examining the place. The earliest showing will be at 8:00 and the latest will end at 5:45. Pretty much we have to get out of Dodge for the day. Not that we can just settle down and do our work somewhere; we're spending the morning at the place we're under a contingency contract to buy, getting the visual inspection done.

By the way, that's the one-story, ground floor unit about a half mile to the north of us that's 250 square feet larger than our current home. The two-story one with the postage-stamp backyard (really a front patio) really did feel significantly smaller than our current one, and we didn't like the condition the bedrooms were in. Nor were we excited about the South Boulder neighborhood, once we got down there. It didn't really feel close to anything or anyone we wanted to be close to. So we went back to Plan A, which was to enter a contingency agreement to buy the place I enthused about previously.

And assuming that all goes well,

Friday we will be getting together with the realtor to review any offers made. (One has already been made. Sight unseen, pending tomorrow's walk-through. At a few thousand above the listing price. Wow.) And with any luck by the end of Friday we'll have accepted an offer, and all the quantum waveforms will collapse into certainty, and we can relax.

Which makes this week the week of Selling The House and Buying A New One, For Reals.

Maybe next week can be the week of Finishing the Short Story Rewrite, Dammit.

Anyway. Back to the grout-cleaning with me...

Well. It wasn't up Saturday, and it wasn't up Sunday. But it's up now: "Ink That Casts a Shadow," the Friday Fictionette for (nominally) February 20. It's totally pretentious and meta and a story whose protagonist is an author that's totally not me, totally, promise. I sure can sell these things, can't I?

In other news of lateness, we'd put off taking the listing photos until tomorrow, because we weren't sure we'd get that lovely low winter sunlight brightening up the place today. Turns out we would have, but we desperately needed the extra day to clean the house. John deserves all the kudos; he's been doggedly cleaning the bathroom walls, floor, baseboard, tile grout, and more. The place gleams. I cleaned and tidied in the office and the bedroom, streamlining them down to a sort of "minimalist cozy" aesthetic. I cleaned the mantlepiece and the hearth, then laid a new fire in the grate.

I removed almost everything from the refrigerator door. "Nothing says you're about to move out," said John, "like cleaning off the fridge." Years of greeting cards, drawings, newsletters, business cards, and magnets came down and were categorized into things to keep, things to give away, and things to dispose of.

And tomorrow morning there's still the windows to clean, everything to vacuum, a trip or two to storage, under-bed bins to buy, all before one o' clock. Panic!

Did I mention the closet doors are done? The closet doors are done. All done. All four of them: Done, done, done, done.

[We pause while the author goes hop-skippity-boing like Daffy Duck on that gold hoard.]

And then after all that, it'll be a normal working Tuesday--the first workday of a week for which I have very high expectations. No pressure or anything. I suspect, knowing me, that I will collapse for a bit between the photos and the writing, and thus end up writing quite late. Which is fine. But it's best not to be surprised by these things.

Alas, this week's Friday Fictionette will arrive on Saturday. Today has just been one of those days, full of unforeseen things hijacking my plans. And now it is almost eleven o' clock, and the idea of doing a rush job on the PDF is simply painful.

Also, my brain just coughed up the best possibility for an ending, such as these things have endings. I want to let it percolate overnight to see what kind of prose it turns into.

Meanwhile...

• A bit of hopping has been added to my physical therapy routine--you know the one where they have you lunge, but your back foot is on a raised block, and then you hop on your forward foot? Right. My next appointment is on March 5, at which point I will very possibly, hopefully, if all goes well, be cleared to skate. Setting my sights on a Phase One practice that Saturday!
• The potential buyer from Thursday won't, but that was only the first showing, so, oh well and onward. Tomorrow we head to a south Boulder condo unit that's smaller but has a two-story layout separating bedrooms upstairs from common areas downstairs, no one living above or below, and a backyard. A postage stamp of a backyard, I'm sure, but still. The property we looked at Wednesday remains an option, too. There are so many options. Wheels continue turning and I am seriously visualizing myself Not At This Address Anymore.
• The very last closet door panel is fully stained and will get finished with three coats of polycrylic per side over the weekend. I am so glad to be finally done with this project. Then there will be a flurry of house cleaning and moving things to storage so that the realtor can take pictures on Mondays for listing the place.
• And next week will be the week of Finishing The Short Story Rewrite, Dammit. Yes, small goals, I know, but--this is ridiculous. I'm tired of it not being done. So, small goals, yes, but one small goal every few hours rather than every few days, yes?

February. The month of Getting Things Done Finally Dammit.