On writing

After having taken Koba back to San Diego (more on that in another post) I re-arranged my guest room so that it's maximized for being a room for playing my harp and for writing.

Today, I'm happy to say, I brought out the notebook in which I kept the outlines of my sermons. The Jewish "lectionary" is based on reading through the Torah, portion by portion. Some usually Orthodox congregations have a one-year cycle and others do a three-year cycle. I just wrote about the portion, without regard to the section of the portion we were reading. I entered 1,000 words into Word and when I end with what I'd outlined, I'll start again with the first portion of Genesis, which is called Bereshit.

I've also gone to Ebay and ordered an Alphasmart Neo2. Including shipping, it was $62. Writing on the laptop is too many distractions. I mean, I can zip off to Wikipedia to get a location name or year of an event and boom! I'm down a rabbit hole. There's a more recent type of dedicated e-writer, but it's $575 and the company has a bad reputation for not sending the product. So the Alphasmart it is.

I lost the chapters of my novel when I got fed up with Scrivener and deleted it. Fortunately, I have my notes and some content still in my notebooks, when I was trying to write a first draft by hand. I'm going to be working through them with the Alphasmart. I have an ergonomic chair parked in front of the craft table in the guest room, and will start working there instead of at my kitchen table where cats can harass me and hijack my keyboard.

Offering a friend a lamecation

What was good about having Koba over here: she wasn't stuck indoors with her 88 year old mom, she was stuck inside with me. This means that we watched all the same movies and news shows while drinking copious amounts of booze. We cooked, making salmon with herb butter, Indian lentils and spinach, banana bread, and other things.

But it's also well over 100 degrees, and most attractions are closed anyway. We looked at the lemurs, meerkat pups, and baby elephant via the Reid Park Zoo website. I wish I could have offered more fun, but between the temperature and the closures, there wasn't much to be had.

Yesterday, I drove Koba back to San Diego, then turned around and went back. We drove from Tucson to Jacumba in sunshine, and there was a thick marine layer below us. It was like flying downward into clouds and rain. San Diego was dark as Tartarus, damp, and cool. I dropped K off, said hi to her mom and used the restroom, then returned to my old neighborhood to fill up the car.

I thought it would be interesting to drive through the alley behind my former condo to see how I felt when I did. They're painting over some of the murals I used to like, elaborating on others. There is a black Camaro parked in my space. Carol's car was there of course. I thought about how depressed I'd be if I still lived in that condo, so small and with darkness looming over the city.

I hit the gas and got out of San Diego and into the mountains and the sun as quickly as I could.