Huzzah! We've entered the "month of hope" and spring is just right around the corner.
We've had some pretty good temperatures lately (in other words: not below zero) and a lot of the snow has melted. The days have gotten noticeably longer. The camping reservation window has opened, and the UND Writers Conference is this month.
Writing update
February was an amazing month for writing!
I got some work done on my nonfiction project, but not as much as I would have liked. I actually accomplished more on some of the merch side of that project, rather than the writing project itself. Maybe more on that later. I don't know how much crossover I want with my brands, lol.
My biggest writing success was that I decided to try the Writer's Digest February Flash Fiction Challenge--and I wrote every single day in February!!!
I stayed flexible with it. Sometimes I wrote to the prompt, but if the prompt didn't speak to me, I sought out a different prompt. I ended up with 28 files, ranging from pieces that are just a base-synopsis for a story to full-blown stories that that are 75% drafted. It doesn't sound like a lot, but for how blocked my writing has been for the last few years, this is incredible!
Now I'm going to spend March picking a few of my favorites and finishing them. By April, I want to have at least one ready to submit for publication. That's going to be HUGE!
I can't say my writer's block is fixed; not yet anyway. But this is a very, very encouraging development.
Look out world. I'm back! (maybe, lol)
Reading Update
I finished reading The Mighty Red. I wasn't just reading it because I'm an Erdrich fan. I was reading it because I wanted to join a local book club, and one of the (surprisingly many) bookclubs in my area had selected it for their February read.
I actually didn't like this book as much as some of Erdrich's prior books. The characters weren't as interesting, it was hard to find a likeable character at all to root for, and the plot took odd turns.
For example, there is a horrible accident in the book. Some people survive, some people die. And one character suffers a very, VERY serious injury...and we never hear about them again until the very end of the book, where there are several "epilogue" type chapters that seem like they were tacked on to tie up loose ends. And to make a "finally happy ending" years later for a couple of the characters.
It feels like she wrote a lot of the book in scenes and chapters, then waited a decade or so and went back and tried to patch it together and make it work.
It was good, but it wasn't as good as I had hoped. A lot of Erdrich's earlier stuff (Love Medicine, The Bingo Palace, Tracks, etc. ) were incredible. So I just feel lukewarm about this one in comparison.
I enjoyed my first book club meeting enough that I went ahead and bought the next book they will be reading. It definitely doesn't sound like something I would normally read, so we will see how it goes. The book club meets at the end of March, so I need to get cracking on it.
But first, I have to finish the book I started after The Mighty Red. Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villians. It's nonfiction, and I picked it up because the author presented at the last PRIM&R conference (a conference related to my day job). I really enjoyed her presentation, her humor, and her absolute adoration of mice and rats.
And Pests has not disappointed so far. It's a great book, and I highly recommend it.
Classes Update
I dropped the internship I was taking at the university this semester. I should have known it wasn't going to work, but I really felt like I had to try. But it's hard to add another 150 hours into your work schedule. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it really is. We had hit the midway of the semester, and I had less than half the hours I should have accomplished by that point. So I would have to do the internship TWO OR THREE TIMES in order to get enough credits to satisfy the experience requirement for the major. Bleh!
It's a bummer on so many levels, not the least of which is that it meant I had to drop out of school. Like many people using the "one class per semester" employee benefit, I only take a single class. And dropping that class means dropping to zero credits, and that means you withdraw from school.
I filled out my "drop/withdraw" paperwork on a Monday. It was approved the next day. I waited a day, and then re-enrolled so I could still have my early registration appointment this month. By Friday, I was approved as an enrolled student again.
It seems kinds of silly. If I can re-enroll in the same week and not have an active class, why can't I just "press pause" after dropping my class in the first place?
I was a little surprised by how much my few days of "non-student" status bothered me. I've been classified as a student for the last seven years, not even counting the two previous times I was a student before I was an employee. So it felt really weird to lost that connection. I guess being a student is a bigger part of my self-identity than I realized.
Dropping the internship also means I have to face the facts and drop the communication major. I've been fiddling around with trying to figure out a way to fulfill the "experience" requirement for the major for far too long...even back when I worked at the animal facility!
I was a communication major with an information systems minor. Now I am a social science major with a ... yep! You guessed it: computer science minor, rofl!
I talked to my advisor, and she said completing the minor will not preclude me from becoming a computer science major later. This way, I can test the waters and see how it goes.
Worst case scenario: I have a hard time with it and have to be satisfied with the minor in computer science.
Best case scenario: it goes great and I pursue a computer science degree.
Er, or maybe it's vice versa. 😉
My other classes are going well. I'm still studying Spanish, Java programming, and doing the full-stack engineer course at Codecademy.
I'm also taking some classes on meditation (because the world right now is SO YIKES!). So far, it doesn't seem to help much, but I'm still early in that learning journey.
Website Update
No update here. I haven't had time to work on porting over the old website. With the all the other things going on, I'm guessing I won't get any new website development (or bringing the legacy pages forward to this host) until at least April or May.
This month's playlist.
The ten songs I'm listening to on repeat.
Review: Recent Purchase Fail
I decided to try one of those electronic ultrasonic dog training devices. It worked….sort of.
We have corgis, so we have a barking problem. Now that Booboo is gone, Bruce is the worst about it. And I need him to stop so he doesn't teach his sister bad habits.
Murphy doesn't bark often, but he does bark when he sees traffic or hears something weird (like when they plow the roads). So, when I'm working at home, he usually elects to sit on the stairs rather than hang out in my office with the rest of us. Unfortunately, we live in a multi-level (modified split), which means his spot on the stairs means he can see everything that happens outside. He generally only barks once or twice, which isn't a big deal. But his barking will set Bruce off. And Bruce is just like Booboo: his barker gets stuck. He will bark for an hour, if not corrected.
So I decided to try one of those training devices that makes a sound only dogs can hear.
The very first time I used it, I saw results. Bruce immediately stopped barking.
However, Murphy barked worse, nose in the air, seeming to yell, "What the hell is that noise???"
Worse still, Penny immediately ran under my legs and cowered. And for the next five or six times that the boys barked, even though I didn't use the device, Penny immediately ran to me as if in anticipation of the device being activated.
Great. It did it's job. It stopped Bruce from barking. But it seemed to traumatize the other two dogs.
That's when I realized I really, REALLY don't like the idea of this tool. What the hell does it sound like to them? A train derailing? The screams of a dying animal? Nails on a chalkboard? I have no idea, because I can't hear it.
And what about Hamilton? Can he hear it? I know mice can hear and vocalize in different frequencies, so I have to assume hamsters can, too.
What the heck kind of torture device did I just activate in my home?!
Nope, nope. . . all the nopes. I tossed it out.
And I know, it's kind of silly. We can't know what the things that I can hear sound like to the dogs and Hamilton, so something that's an acceptable noise to me might still not be acceptable to them.
Bruce goes bananas when he hears hubby's ringtone (Sandstorm), and does a high, howling whine that I've ONLY ever heard him do for that song. So it's pretty clear that the song isn't as enjoyable for him as it is for us!
But I could clearly see that the device was having a bad effect on Murphy and Penny. So it had to go.
So my recommendation is to proceed with caution if you have a multi-dog household, which is what many of the product reviews also mentioned. Some people complained it had no effect whatsoever on their dog. Others said it worked. Some had experiences like mine.
I'm going to stick to barking control measures that I can at least have a sense of what is happening with them.
So we are back to square one. I'll have to start using the collar on Bruce again. It's a manually-activated one, so I don't have to worry about him receiving a correction if someone else barks. And since he's so tweaky, it doesn't take long for him to react to the tone since he HATES the vibration.
Life with corgis, I suppose.
That's it for this month. Until next month, Stay Spooky, my friends!
~~Here be monsters . . . and corgis.~~