author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Talk about misplaced optimism. Productivity-wise, today was a bust. But in the larger scheme of things, today was pretty fantastic--you know why? 'Cause I am sitting at my own desk to type these words. In my own house. With my toes all warm and cozy in the brand-new carpet. With nary a bare wall stud or roof joist in sight.

Home home home home home! Yayyyy.

The cleaning crew were remarkably thorough. First they put all our furniture back where we wanted it, then they cleaned every surface to remove the light coating of plaster dust that had gotten just about everywhere. And when I say "every surface," I mean chairs, bookshelves, tables, kitchen appliances, every single bottle in our liquor collection, every box of tea. (Those of you who have seen my accumulation of tea may proceed to be thoroughly impressed.) They were here until at least 11:00.

Then at 3:30 we had a visit from the real estate agent who's going to help us sell this place and replace it with something more house-like, market and budget permitting. He gave us a list of things to do to get the place ready, which we hope to accomplish over the next three weeks or so. I am trying not to be daunted. Most of it's uncomplicated, if time-consuming: paint the last walls that need painting, clean a lot of tile grout, clean or restain a lot of wood cabinets, get the closet doors replaced, get that stupid pocket door fixed and/or replaced (the fool thing's latch has stuck and it won't open), clean up the balcony, get some stuff back out of storage so the house has some personality (but not too much, or potential buyers will find it less easy to project their own personalities on the space--real estate is weird).

Me, I just want books back in the house. All the books are in storage. Every single one. I WANT MY BOOKS. At least a few of them. Preferably ones I haven't reread for at least six months now.

John and I may have talked the real estate agent into coming to tomorrow's bout. We may have talked his ear off about roller derby for about half an hour or more. I may have queued up the archived stream of our All Stars bouting during Division 2 playoffs on WFTDA.tv, just to give him a visual aid to understanding the sport. I may have. Or I may not have. You can't make me admit to anything.

Anyway, I think I spent most of my free time today just recharging. Living in a hotel starts off like a luxury, like a vacation, but if it goes on too long, it's draining. It's a place that, in the end, isn't my place. Privacy isn't entirely guaranteed. Most of my stuff isn't there. The pillows are all wrong. And not knowing from day to day how long I'd be there, that became exhausting. I don't think I was aware of how exhausting it was until today, when I said goodbye to the cleaning crew and then promptly collapsed into the bed. (Our own bed. With our own sheets and pillows. In our own room.)

So this first day home has been more about resting than working. I guess, in the end, that's OK.

I can't really complain about our accommodations. The hotel bed is super cozy. The desk in the window is comfortable and wide and well wired up, and there are AC outlets everywhere you look. And they feed you a complimentary hot breakfast every morning. That's complimentary as in "for free, no extra charge, all you gotta do is get down here before 9:00 and not mind that we're running a TV at you nonstop" and hot as in "scrambled eggs, a potato side, a meat side, and one more thing that's kinda fancy, I dunno, today it was egg sausage cheese muffins, tomorrow it might be quiche lorraine. Oh, and there's a waffle maker."

But there's something weird about our refrigerator.

Since construction on our home was going to take the better part of two weeks, we reserved an extended stay suite. The bedroom is separate from the living room, and there's a functional kitchenette. In the kitchenette is a full-sized refrigerator. And I really don't want to complain--see, when we first checked in, the fridge turned out to make a terrible high-pitched whining noise constantly. I mentioned this to the front desk, and they had maintenance out lickety-split to replace our unit with a better one. The maintenance worker was surprised we even had that old unit in the room at all; it was apparently outdated, small, lacked an ice maker. The one he replaced it with was slightly larger, equipped with an ice maker, and pretty much silent. No whine, just the usual background hum of large appliances.

Or so we thought. Until late in the night, we thought we heard someone knocking on the door. Tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap, tap tap tap. But no one was there. Several hours later, we heard it again. It sounded so very like the way housekeeping knock on the door during the day, tap-tap-tap-tap with a key-card against the wood.

It's the ice maker. The ice maker is making knocking noises. We have no idea why. I shifted the bar to the OFF position, and still it happens every few hours or so. Tap-tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap.

Don't get me wrong--it's nowhere near as bad as the whine of the previous unit. I'm certainly not going to bug anyone about replacing it. Now that I know what it is, I can ignore it, or listen with amusement, depending on my mood. But it's just weird. It's like a prank punch-line. "Hey, is your refrigerator running? Better catch it!" "Hey, is that your refrigerator knocking? Well, let it in already!"

Other than that, things are fairly peachy.

On the writing front:

The Patreon page is coming along, but as I hammer it out, I have second thoughts about what I'm going to be promising. Like, I watch myself type, "On each of the first four Fridays of the month, I'll..." and I think, am I insane? Why am I committing myself to another weekly obligation? I think it's just nerves, though. After all, the thing I'm thinking of doing is hardly unreasonable. I've been doing it anyway for months now anyway, just not where everyone could see.

The short story is not yet finished, but it is almost there. I don't need to go back and fiddle with the rest of the story any more. It's all in place. All the set-up is complete and right and as smooth as I can make it. Tomorrow, the ending is happening. At the very least, whatever shape the story is in by the time I have to go to derby, that's the shape in which it'll hit the slush. And I'm not feeling panicky about that, so I suppose it's acceptable.

And I've been keeping up fairly well with the CTC29 challenges--mainly because I already have time in four of the seven days of the week carved out for just such prompt-inspired timed writing. The last couple of days have been doozilicious, though. Yesterday, I read, "Write the first five pages of a story or novel such that they..." and I thought, That isn't a writing exercise. There is nothing "exercise" about it. That's a whole new story I'm supposed to start here. And then I thought, Yes. And? and I got to work on it. An engaging character in an interesting dilemma came out of it, as often happens. I hope I get the chance and the inspiration to go back and finish the story. If I don't, well, I have plenty of others to choose from, what with this daily timed writing exercise thing I'm doing.

Sometimes I worry about all the stories I start which I will never in my lifetime finish. I read The Neverending Story, y'all. I know what happens to people who don't finish all their stories. Generally the worry is followed swiftly by the thought, "That's silly. Having more story ideas than you'll ever need, that's not irresponsible. That's wealth." Nevertheless, the worry sits there at the back of my head, muttering, "Yeah, well, you just try telling AURYN that, see how well that excuse'll go over."

Apologies for the radio silence. It's been a month-end sort of week. There's been stuff. Hugo-nominated stuff to read and vote on, a friend moving to Boulder to help unpack, late night celebrations of said friend having arrived in Boulder and of getting successfully unpacked and moved in, needing to pack up our own stuff in advance of some heavy-duty kicking-us-out-of-the-house-for-a-week renovations, and, OK, well, the July Seal o' Piracy to earn on all the production oceans and Ice too because I'm a total nerd.

However, I have been working away like a beaver on the short story. I'm still having a stupid time with the ending, but I'm happy to report that one of the interim scenes got heavily overhauled to make room in it for things that should make the ending more possible to write. So there's that.

Also I have decided where I'm going to send it when it's done. Hint: The deadline is August 15. So this thing is getting done by then, OK?

(OK.)

Meanwhile, the end of July means the beginning of August. I have allowed some good writerly friends to talk me into doing this nonsense over here over the month of August, and now I'm rather looking forward to it. At the very least, I will not lack for Daily Idea writing prompts.

Speaking of the Daily Idea/freewriting portion of my routine, I'm researching the viability of a Project. At this point, it can only be described as subscription-based along some regular time line or other, possibly Patreon-enabled, and hopefully more feasible than my track record on dailiness thus far would indicate.

Well. That was very nearly-information free. There may be more information tomorrow. Stay tuned.

I do not know why I continue to think that I'm capable of working a full productive day on the day I get back from a trip. I really should know better.

Oh, I know the rationale behind the thought. It goes something like this: "I'll have had a full night's sleep in an actual bed by the time the train gets in, which will be before 8 AM if it's on time. There's no reason I can't just go home and get right to doing things!" What I don't know is why I persist in thinking that despite my experience of every homecoming on a westbound California Zephyr ever, whether the darn thing is on time or late (and today it was about three hours late), which involves getting home, seeing the bed, and crashing hard in the bed. All day long.

For that reason, nothing of use got done before roller derby practice. And nothing of use is getting done after practice for the usual reason, which is that I'm painfully tired.

So this blog post will be just a "hello, here I am, not dead, just going to go imitate dead for awhile." Other and more interesting things will occur tomorrow, or at least that's my hope.

Last night was one of those nights when everything and anything wakes me up. Minute motions from the other occupant of the bed; various outdoor occurrences, some involving cars; the apparent hallucination, if that's the right word, that shot me bolt upright, certain I was smelling a house fire; the bat that I watched fly back and forth outside the window, before it came to rest hanging upside down from the awning so it could screech its head off for several minutes straight; my own thoughts chattering away the way they do--

Blargh. I stayed in bed exceptionally late trying to make up for it all. Consequently, I got very little done today.

Well. I did a rather ridiculous amount of futzing around on the Gimp file I use to solve my daily jigsaw sudoku. I set up a bunch of selection paths to make it quicker to remove candidate digits. This probably has more to do than the crappy sleepless night did with today's lack of productivity, in all honesty.

And I scrimmaged in BCB's very last scrimmage in our beloved Bomb Shelter #2. That's right - we are moving out of the practice warehouse on Weaver Park Road. New location is still TBD. In the meantime, we'll be practicing in a variety of places, including a few Thursday scrimmages in July at the Wagon Wheel in Brighton. But that's still to come. For tonight, it was three periods of fun mix-up roller derby with a 4th of July theme, followed by tearing up the track, packing up all the things, and moving stuff out or at least toward the door.

Tomorrow is the 4th of July. To commemorate the occasion, I am taking the day off. On purpose, I mean. As my actual plan. So. Have a happy weekend, everyone!

And yet more biking! This is getting to be a regular habit. It helps that today was Bike to Work Day. It was a warm ride from home to downtown, but I stopped frequently to sample the snacks and drinks offered at the various breakfast stations. Now if I can just avoid getting rained on while I bike home, I'll be in good shape... to go to roller derby tonight and really work out.

I tweaked the story a little more today (yes, after refreshing my memory concerning "The Red-Head Song"--Bobbie Mae might now be plausibly considered to be singing it to meter, if not on key). Mostly I'm just poking at it. A weekend away from it has not created sufficient distance across which to look at it with fresh eyes, alas, but at least I'm catching the odd clunky turn of phrase.

It's OK though. The heavy lifting happened in the previous weeks. All I really ask right now is that what I submit on Friday be a better manuscript than what I've got Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. I think that's reasonable.

I've begun expanding my day-to-day content writing options again. I mean, the ones that actually pay something vaguely reasonable. I have a lot of fun with Examiner, but "fun" is mostly all it is. I'd like to be able to make at least a little regular and reliable income, fiction sales being neither. So. Demand Media Studios, where in the past I've been able to earn between $15 and $30 for a 500-word article, is oddly devoid of titles in my approved channel at this moment, so there goes that idea. I'm investigating what it would take to apply for another. In the meantime, there's Textbroker, which doesn't pay a hell of a lot but is easy--most of its clients want blog posts written around random phrases they got off Quora.

If I exerted a little more effort I could probably find freelance assignments that pay better and might even be a credit to my byline, but I'm wary of putting too much focus in that direction. I'm very protective of my fiction-writing time right now. Getting to the point of actually finishing and submitting stories regularly, and staying there, has taken no small amount of effort. I'm not eager to make it harder on myself. (On that note--the space glue apocalypse story came back from its latest outing, bearing a form rejection letter. I shooed it out the door again.)

So... that's the state of the Niki, I guess. Um. How are you?

Observation #1: I rely a little too heavily on external pressures for maintaining day-to-day habits. Those external pressures work great--until they aren't there. When my husband gets up to take his 8:30 a.m. meeting-over-the-phone, I get up and do my morning pages. If my husband is not feeling well and takes a day off from work, when he turns off the alarm and goes back to sleep, so, apparently, do I.

Observation #1, addendum (a): I can do my morning pages in as little as 20 minutes, if hastily made lunch plans with a friend require it.

Observation #2: It is quite possible to achieve a 5-hour writing day and still not manage to touch the short story that so painfully requires work if one gets super-perfectionist with one's content writing. "But I need to put together a slideshow! Examiner is offering a slideshow incentive! And it can't just be screenshots from the game--that's boring--I need to mark it up with borders and circles and areas of artificial brightness and side-by-side compare/contrasts, and, oooh, an imaginative collage illustrating that humorous bit at the end!"

Observation #2, addendum (a): If the homebrew RSS is bootched, the Examiner articles stop re-broadcasting to Facebook and Twitter, which rather makes the "incentive for slideshows that receive X-amount of social media visits" moot.

Observation #2, addendum (b): It's kind of cheating to count time spent troubleshooting the bootched RSS toward the day's writing hours, isn't it?

Observation #3: Playing Puzzle Pirates while reading shows for AINC can be done! But how efficient it is depends on what kind of activities the pirate indulges in. If it's a long solo pillage from Marlowe to Nunataq, and the reading is in Spanish, well, 30 minutes of reading can take something like two hours.

Observation #3, addendum (a): It's past 11:00 PM? When did that happen? Crap-buckets! And I have to be up early tomorrow--

I slept poorly last night, and I'm going to blame it on the bat.

Not, mind you, on the mug of strong tea I had at 9:30 because "It's too early for me to be this sleepy." Not on a session of Puzzle Pirates that went until 1:30 AM because I couldn't resist just one more battle on my way back to port from the site of the looted shipwreck. Neither of these would have been a problem once I finally turned off the lights, lay down, and actually tried to sleep. (Trying to sleep is a thing. It involves actively directing my mind in useful, sleep-promoting places, rather than lying there resentful about the way it races here and there.)

But when a bat gets into your bedroom, well, that'll do it every time.

We still have gigantic holes in our ceiling from shortly after September's storm. Bureaucratic movements towards interior repairs have been detected, but it wouldn't do to get too excited yet. Meantime, it's becoming clear that the roof is not as critter-tight as one might hope. Several days in a row the other week, we were getting bees in the house, despite the windows being closed. They'd show up on the living room window, either crawling around on the inside of the screens or lying dead in the panel track. Our suspicion was, they were getting into the roof and then exiting the roof space via the hole in our living room ceiling. This was no great feat of deduction. It was like seeing rain and suspecting it came from the sky.

That the bat came in from the roof was even more obvious. We could hear it vocalizing from the bedroom ceiling.

Have you ever heard a bat vocalize at close range? It's not a sound you're likely to forget in a hurry. One afternoon a few years ago, we came across a bat clinging to the rim of a step in the apartment stairwell. It obviously wasn't feeling at its most chipper, given that it just hung there stoically as we carefully stepped over it to get to our door. I donned some gloves and gently coaxed that poor, tired, confused thing into our largest plastic leftovers container--the big rectangular one I use for soup--and then I coaxed it back out onto a support strut in the open air parking structure, where it could safely rest until it decided to fly away. It wasn't until it was safely installed in its new location that it took a close look at me (I was taking a very close look at it) and decided it didn't like what it saw. It uttered a series of high-pitched, loud, piercing shrieks that caused me to recoil like a snake just struck at me.

That was when I realized that what I took for "these weird birds that chirp in the middle of the night during the summer" were in fact not birds at all. I've been told that this vocalization is social in nature, rather than having anything to do with their echolocation hat-trick.

Anyway, that sound started going off at 2:30 AM and I sat straight up in bed. "Sounds like a bat in distress," I said, and went to the window. From that vantage point it was clear that the sound was coming from above me, not from outside. "It's a bat in our ceiling." And lo, the elbow bend of a bat's wing briefly jutted into view.

We tried to coax it out--naively, I thought I could get it into that soup container again and take it outside--but it was having none of it. It scrambled back into the tight space between insulation and ceiling until we had no hope of seeing it, much less reaching it.

There didn't seem to be anything we could do. We tried to go back to bed. But that bat kept making noise. It chirped a little more, and then it just--scrabbled. Now, knowing that the scrabbling noise coming from the ceiling is a bat moving around is kind of comforting. It's a lot better than wondering if it's a cockroach, for instance. (Not really a Colorado problem. More of a Louisiana problem.) But it is impossible to get to sleep if part of your brain is constantly listening for it.

But I almost managed it. Right up until the bat was flying circles around our bedroom.

Bats are really, really quiet. It's the most uncanny thing. When a songbird gets into the house, it makes a hell of a lot of noise, not only with its voice but with the very motion of its wings on the air. Feathers are noisy. Furry leather, not so much. It was so contrary to my expectations as to give me the weird impression that I was watching something flying in the far distance, despite knowing it was in the same room with me. Which of course made it all the more startling when the bat's desperate attempts to find a way out brought it suddenly close to my face.

There was no question of trying to get it into a plastic container. This wasn't a tired daylight bat. This was a healthy nighttime bat. It wasn't going to stop for anything. So I opened all the window screens, knelt on the living room floor, and waited. It was kind of awesome in a close encounters kind of way--I could feel the breeze from its wings on my face!--but it was also kind of sad in a trapped bird kind of way. Unlike a bird, it knew exactly where the windows were. But, like a bird, it didn't seem to realize that Here Be Out. It swooped right up to the open windows again and again only to swoop away once more. Every once in a while it alighted on a piece of wall or ceiling to rest for a second. Then it was off again, flying in clueless circles.

Finally it disappeared, not through a window but up into the hole in the living room ceiling. It found the space where the insulation had been removed from the roof awning that jutted out some four feet beyond the window, and it vanished back there completely. I heard a little more scrabbling, and then nothing. It was probably 3:30 AM by then.

I have no idea whether it escaped out whatever hole the bees have been getting into, or if it's still up there. I suppose I'll find out if it starts flying around the house again tonight.

Or maybe I won't. Maybe I'll sleep right through it. Like I said, bats are super quiet when they're not shrieking at the top of their lungs. And I am going to be super tired, guaranteed.

Tape! The adhesive kind, not the analog recording medium. It was all over my weekend. That is, if "weekend" means "Saturday through Tuesday," which it does because I say so. I had an unusual amount of significant correspondence with adhesive tape this weekend.

Yes, these are the things I think about when I think, "What shall I blog about tonight?" What shall I blog about tonight? Oh, I know--how about that moment last night when I was all, "Hey, this is funny, I'm doing the same thing now I was doing Saturday and Sunday, only on a much smaller scale. Tape has, briefly, taken over my life."

Look, it goes with having the writer-brain. Writer-brain is constantly going, "Ooh, lookit! Lookit this, too! Lookit that!" Only it doesn't just notice stuff that legitimately has a story in it. It notices everything. Which is not entirely a problem, understand; it's much less of a problem than being in the habit of rejecting potential ideas and then wondering why you can't think of anything to write about. But sometimes there really isn't a story there. You just have to say, "That's nice, writer-brain. Yes, that is a very interesting connection. What a good job you did noticing it." Then you pat it on the head, *pat pat pat,* and you hand it a cookie, and you hope the next time it goes "Ooh, lookit!" it'll be something you can actually write about.

Anyway, Saturday we hosted a roller derby bout. And our home bout venue, the Boulder County Fairgrounds Exhibit Hall, is not a roller derby venue until we make it one. It doesn't have a track marked out. It doesn't even have a safe skating surface. So every time we host a bout, we bring our skating surface with us (it's these blue tiles that fit together like a sort of ornery Lego). Then we clean it, and then we mark the track on it. This involves "At least 385' of rope, rope light or boundary-making material" and enough tape to stick it to the floor in two concentric ovals, more or less. (More is here. Less, you already got.) The best tape is wide, brightly colored, stretchy, and resists getting shredded when you skate over it. It smells like spray paint when you tug it off the roll. And it needs to come up off the floor easily, hopefully all in one piece rather than splintering, because you're going to have to rip it all up when the bout is over so you can reassemble it in your practice location the next day.

So that's what I did for about two hours each of Saturday and Sunday, as part of a hefty team of fellow skaters and officials from our league. It's a lot of work, but it goes quickly with many hands on the job. And the reward is, you get to skate on it when you're done.

Now, Tuesday night involved painting. We came back to finish the job we started last week in the Nexus, by painting the crown molding gold. And that involved more tape. Blue masking tape, to be precise. It was not as difficult as last week's masking job with its fiddly tight spaces (we already did the door jambs years ago, thank goodness), but it still had its challenges. For the bottom edge of the molding, we used a special roll of whose actual blue tape was fairly narrow but that had about three feet of plastic film attached. That stuff is fantastic for peace of mind while you're painting, but I find it a little nerve-wracking to place because I have to do the whole job with one unbroken piece. I get worried that I'll drop the roll, or that the tape will drift off the desired line and I won't be able to correct it without, I dunno, wrinkling it or something. We did the top edge with a wider blue tape that was just blue tape, so I could use my preferred method of ripping off pieces four to six inches long and placing them in a long overlap. So that was OK, but where I was placing them was on popcorn ceiling. Awkward.

Annnnd just to make it a trifecta, yesterday I had to rip open an envelope I'd already sealed to flip over the "return bottom portion with your payment" so that the address would actually show through the window. Roller derby tape, blue masking tape, and now scotch tape. Whee.

Anyway, it was while I was placing the blue tape with film attached that writer-brain sat up and went, "Hey! So, this is kind of like what you did Saturday and Sunday! Only smaller. Isn't that neat?"

Yes, writer-brain. That's very neat. Have a cookie.

"No, but, there's totally a story in that. The main character, they're sort of like a janitor, see? Only instead of a janitor's huge ring of keys, they have every kind of adhesive tape imaginable hanging off their tool belt and stored in the closet. And sometimes they have to use the tape in weird and unorthodox ways. To save the day, see?"

That's... very imaginative. Why don't you go outside and play?

(Although I just might throw tomorrow's freewriting session at it and see what happens.)

But today I have Good Reasons. Most of them have to do with bout preparation. Y'know--the cleaning of the bearings and the scrubbing of the wheels and the sewing of new velcro onto the wristguard straps 'cause the original velcro teeth got wonky? And the watching of the opposing team's most recent bout, and the taking of copious, verbose notes that I'm pretty sure I will never reread? So that's OK.

And now John and I am listening to Matt Braunger records and giggling.

Could be worse.