Accountability Tuesdays – Week 39

Since I did a brain dump yesterday, I don’t really have anything to start off this post with. But, I do have a number of October-based mini-goals to share as part of my accountability this week, so let’s just get on with it, shall we?

Health and Body Image Goal

This past week was no better than the last several weeks of reported nothingness. If anything, it’s been worse because I’ve been having some pretty strong and continuous cravings for all the bad things ever made; chips and pop are a particularly strong one. In fact, the bad habits of the past couple of weeks have caught up to me and I’ve actually gained a couple of pounds. I’m not absolutely certain, but I think I might have officially broken my highest ever weight, and I’m not happy about it.

Cue October Mini-Goal Numbers 1 and 2:

#1. Focus on eating better, including eating some kind of (half-decent) breakfast each morning, abstaining from pop, drinking more water, and making healthier suppers.

#2. Do some kind of exercise every day. This is probably going to mostly be going down on my treadmill for a while because I’ve reached a point of being so out of shape that most forms of exercise make me gasp and feel like I’m going to throw up, which I believe is counter-productive.

I’ll try my damnedest to do each of these for 31 straight days and see if it makes some kind of difference for me.

Editing Goal

As mentioned yesterday, I’ve been at a bit of a standstill the past week as far as my zombie manuscript goes. Much of this can be attributed to being busy working on the daughter’s room and a variety of other things, but a good bit of it is good old fashioned “I don’t wanna!”ness.

I’m not a fan of editing. I pretty much hate it with a fiery passion. But it has to be done, and I would like to have it done before NaNo starts so I’ll be distraction free for starting something brand new.

Enter October Mini-Goal #3: Work on editing for at least one solid hour a day. Lock myself in a room where the hubby and bubby can’t get at me if I have to. Think about nothing but the story for that hour. Go longer if possible and/or if my head hasn’t exploded by the end of the hour.

1,000,000 Word Goal

This past week has been pretty shabby. It’s been the worst week in quite a while, actually. Since I didn’t really do any editing stuff at all, and since I’m not currently working on anything new while I’m trying to deal with all the editing, the only actual writing I did was blogging, which only came to a total of 3433 words. I’m terribly disappointed in this. Terribly disappointed.

Enter October Mini-Goal #4: I don’t want to dedicate too much time to writing new stuff because what I really want to be focusing on is finishing up my zombie manuscript, but I also don’t want to completely demolish my word count in the process. Thus, for the 31 days of October, I’m going to try and write one blog post every day. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to post a blog post every single day this month; my posting schedule will remain as is, but the posts I write on off-days will help me keep ahead of myself moving into NaNo month. See? Sometimes I can plan ahead!

And now that I’ve written these four mini-goals down, hopefully I’ll be able to hold to them. I want you all to yell at me if I don’t, okay? Okay. 🙂

Traitorous Brain

Have you ever felt as though your brain just up and left you, walked away and abandoned you to be a drooling, ignorant mass of thoughtlessness?

That’s how I feel today.

I woke up, first off, feeling as if every allergen in the known universe had crawled up my nose and made a camp. So I munched some cereal and hunkered down, stuffed and half-asleep, to play my Vita. I’ve been playing a game that requires a great deal of thought, and I was near the end where all the secrets are revealed and the big surprise-ending conclusion takes place. I wandered around the house, trying to comprehend the extraordinarily confusing game story line while also fielding questions, requests, and demands from the baby. I felt like my head was going to explode from a combination of physical ailment, mental confusion, and outside stimuli.

And then the game ended, I put down the Vita, and I looked at the clock.

12 noon.

12 noon on a Monday.

I’d forgotten to write a blog post. I’d forgotten that I was supposed to exercise today. I’d forgotten that I had planned to try and finish up my notebook transcriptions before the next Accountability Tuesday. And amongst other things I’d forgotten that I needed to run out and buy more milk for the baby, check the mail, pay some bills, and prepare the blog posts for the rest of the week. Also, I haven’t even LOOKED at the next week of The Artist’s Way yet.

Clearly my brain has gone on vacation. I’m currently in the process of trying to call her back, but she’s being a stubborn mass of mush, and even if I manage to convince her she might have a transatlantic flight to deal with first.

So until further notice, here’s a lazy kitty:

You Know What Opinions are Like, Don’t You?

A fellow blogger, one I happen to follow, has started up an interesting project. This blogger is known as Opinionated Man, and on his blog HarsH ReaLiTy he has come up with the idea for “Project O“. Basically, throughout the month of September he is going to be researching and discussing the concept of “opinions”, what they are, where they come from, what factors in our lives affect the ones we have. He plans to do this by way of information gathered from us, the bloggers, the readers, the people around the world connected together by the internet.

I thought this sounded particularly interesting, so when I saw that he released a template of questions for use in the project, I decided to write a blog post answering them. As per his requests, I will also be emailing my answers to him for use in the project, and I urge you to do so as well, should you decide to take part on your own blogs.

So without further ado, here we go:

Question 1: Please provide a window into who you are, some background information in a not too overwhelming profile here.

I’m a wife and mother, and an only child, but I grew up positively surrounded by cousins. I was a book-nerd kind of kid growing up, as well as a bit of a geek (I liked Star Wars, anime, video games, etc). I never had a lot of friends, but I loved the few I did have. I’ve wanted to be a fiction writer since the third grade, but somehow or other I became an instrumentation technician by trade. It’s a very male-dominated field but I’ve had surprisingly few issues in my seven years in the trade. These days I write whenever I can and aspire to become published sooner rather than later.

Question 2: If you haven’t already done so please provide your country of origin, whether you are male or female, an age would be nice, and where you currently live if that differs from the country of origin.

Country of origin and the country I’m currently living in are both Canada. I’m female and 29 years old.

Question 3: Recount the first time you remember having a differing opinion from someone significantly older than you. Do you remember what the topic was about? Did you voice your opinion or hold it to yourself?

The first time I can remember having a really strong opinion to the opposite of my elders was when I first started to realize that I thought religion was hooey. I was in the 7th or 8th grade, I believe, which is when Catholic kids complete their “Confirmation” ritual. It involves going to church every week for so many weeks and doing this and that and there’s a big ceremony at the end…and after a couple of weeks of church (I hadn’t really gone since I was little) I remember thinking, “This is ridiculous, I don’t believe a word of it, and so why am I trying to become a permanent member of this church?”

I did voice my opinion to my father, who more or less told me that I could believe whatever I wanted, but that it would probably be worth it to just complete the confirmation and be done with it since some of my family is very religious and it would likely have ended up in a huge fight. I took his advice and never went to church again after that ceremony.

Question 4: What levels of respect were practiced around you when you were a child? Was there bowing involved, handshakes, “yes Sirs and yes Ma’ams,” or some  other equivalent respectfulness in your culture’s tongue? Is an honorific given to someone older than you and do you often respect and practice that? How might the culture you were brought up in have affected the growth of your own opinions?

There weren’t a lot of honorifics in my childhood. Mostly we were just expected to watch our mouths (no profanity) and our tones (no smart-mouthing). I don’t know if it was a product of my upbringing, or if it’s a general feeling that I absorbed from my environment, but I grew up believing that age has nothing to do with respect, and that it doesn’t matter if you’re 100 years old and I’m five, you do not automatically get my respect if you haven’t earned it. There are, in my opinion, too many older people out there who feel that they should be respected by the sheer fact that they’ve survived for a while longer.

Question 5: How traveled are you and to what degree do you keep up with international news? You might also provide an educational background if you wish and if that education was gained from somewhere other than your current location. How available is the news and what goes on in the outside world to you in your country?

I’m not particularly traveled. I’ve only traveled within Canada, and not even all the way across (I’ve started in Nova Scotia and gone as far as Alberta). I obtained my education (Bachelor of Technology) in Nova Scotia. International news is available enough here (if not a little bit “tweeked” by the media), but I can honestly say that the degree to which I keep up with it is minimal at best. I glean my news stories from what others deem to be important (my husband might tell me about something, or my father might post a status update about it on Facebook). It’s not that I don’t care what’s happening in other areas of the world, but I’m the kind of person who can barely handle the events going on in her own life, never mind the lives of people I’ve never met.

Question 6: If you could share an opinion on a single international incident or topic that you either feel strongly about or that might not be known to the rest of the world what would it be? You have our attention.

As mentioned above, I don’t really keep up on the news or international incidents, but if there was one topic that I’d impress upon the world if I could, it would be the stigmas surrounding depression. These days it’s been proven that depression can stem from any number of factors, including physical (hormonal, for instance) ones that in no way reflect a person’s life or situation. I’ve seen people be berated for “pretending to be depressed” because the feeling is that someone can’t be depressed if they have what is considered to be a “good life”. Too many people think that depression is only allowed if the person has “real” reasons (got fired, wife left, someone close died) to be depressed, but there are scads of reasons for someone being depressed. I myself had a doctor check me out for chemical-imbalance depression because of a couple of other complaints I had brought to him, and the reaction I got from a few people close to me was very simply, “you’re not depressed”, as if it was an impossibility. I wasn’t, but that doesn’t give anyone the right to presume to know what’s going on in my mind and body, and true depression – whatever the cause – is a very dangerous thing to ignore and scoff away.

Question 7: What does the right to an opinion mean to you? Is it essential to freedom to have this right? How far would you go to protect that ability? The world is on fire with people of passion, how passionate are you about things you value?

This is a tough one because while I believe everyone has a right to their opinion, there are plenty of cases in which someone’s opinion is clearly wrong or psychotic. For instance, a kid who shot up his school because he was being bullied had the opinion that his tormenters deserved to die.

I do believe that everyone has a right to their opinion, but how you act on that opinion is the real trick.

I’m passionate about a great many things (the depression issue above, acts that I consider to be extremely poor parenting, the current employment insurance scandal going on in Canada, and so on), and this kind of passion inevitably leads to a battling of opinions. It can be very difficult, in these situations, to grit your teeth and accept that other people have different opinions. How does one find a happy medium in this sense when your opinion is that another person’s opinion is wrong? It’s a bit of a catch-22, isn’t it?

Question 8: Is it ever right for you to be allowed an opinion while someone else is denied that same right on the same topic?

In my opinion (haha, this is getting silly…) there are plenty of situations where I would deny someone their opinion. People are going to have an opinion whether you like it or not, because that’s the way that works, but I would deny someone their opinion if they had absolutely no knowledge or experience of the topic at hand. For instance, say I’m yelling at my daughter in the mall for doing something bad, and someone comes up to me and berates me for yelling at her because I’m “causing her psychological issues”. If that person has no kids of their own, has experienced no psychological issues as a result of the same kind of situation, and has never so much as opened a book on psychology, then what right do they have to impress their completely-pulled-out-of-my-ass opinion on me?

Question 9: The last question. upon completing this template and hopefully contemplating the issue what does this project mean to you? How can Project O potentially enlighten or help the world?

Mostly I’m interested to see some of the outcomes of these questions. Opinions are a tricky concept because they can come from so many different places, including but not limited to plain old base emotion. I hope that reading other peoples’ responses to these questions will help people to understand each other a bit, and maybe even help them learn a bit of tolerance.

Jobs I’ve Had (and Headaches I’ve Endured)

After stumbling across this post from lazylauramaisey I started thinking about all the jobs I’ve had over the years and I thought, hey…why not share?

Papergirl for the Cape Breton Post
This was the first job I ever had and believe it or not I think it was one the longest ones I ever had. If I’m remembering correctly, I started the route in the eighth grade and didn’t quit it until I went to college. Sometimes my mother would drive me because the route was a few streets away from where we lived, but a lot of the time I walked as well. It wasn’t a bad job for the most part, and at Christmas I got some pretty nice tips, but there was this one family I spent five years wanting to strangle. They were as rich as any family can be in Cape Breton, and it was like pulling a crocodile’s teeth trying to get my payment out of them. They would actually look out the window – right at me – and then not answer the door. My first “customers are idiots” experience.

Cashier at Zellers
For those who might not know, Zellers was a Canadian department store, much like Walmart. When I was in high school I got a job there for the Christmas season, working cash. I absolutely hated it for two main reasons. One, I was still pretty shy in high school and the job forced me to talk to people all day. Two, there weren’t enough support staff. A major flaw at Zellers was that sales were rarely properly programed into the registers, which resulted in a lot of customers loudly proclaiming, “That’s not the right price!” as I scanned. The thing is, people would do this all the time whether the item was on sale or not to try and cheat the system, and the only way to combat it was to call a “floor-walker” to go find the item in the store and prove what the actual price was. During the holidays calling a “floor-walker” was tantamount to insanity…it was so busy that chances were they would never get to you. So when my line-ups started getting super-long and all the customers started getting super-agitated I just stopped calling for help all together and overrode any price the customer’s told me was wrong. I probably cost Zellers a lot of money that holiday season, but in my defense, they should have hired more damn people.

“Waitress” at the Marine Atlantic Ferry Terminal
I put quotation marks around waitress because I didn’t really serve the food, but I did sometimes serve ice cream. It wasn’t a bad job, but I had an idiot boss who would rather us wash down the same tables fifty times than stand still and do nothing for five minutes when there were no customers. I offset my annoyance by constantly filching Rice Krispie Square treats.
Also, once, my boss demanded that I stay late, even though legally I couldn’t drive that late (I was still a new driver with a restricted license). It was my first run-in with opposing an employer. I told her that I’d happily stay late if she paid my fine when I got it. She ended up sending me home.

“IT Specialist” at the Coast Guard College
This was a work term for my university program, and I can honestly say I didn’t learn a damn thing. The job mostly consisted of things like replacing the batteries in the TV remotes in the residents’ rooms. The one challenge I had was when the speaker at a meeting was having issues getting his computer to work with the overhead projector…that was the first time I’d ever seen a Mac computer, but damn it, I got it working.

“IT Specialist” at Cape Breton University
Another work term, and twice as useless as the first. This is the university that I actually attended, and they created the job just to have something available because they were having absolutely no luck finding work terms for the students in my program. I had almost nothing to do for this entire term. I spent most of my time transposing a huge map via this huge electronic drafting board, which wasn’t part of my job…it was just to pass the time.

“Floor Walker” at a different Zellers
This was the first job I got after my future husband and I moved in together, and I hated it so much worse than the first Zellers. I mostly wandered around replacing merchandise that people had moved, or straightening up clothes that people had unfolded, but those were the “good” parts. The bad parts were dealing with customers, who at this particular store seemed to be twice as idiotic as others I’d dealt with in the past. I remember this one particular lady brought in a flyer the day before the sales were to start, and absolutely demanded that we give her the sales prices that day because one of the graphics on the flyer said, “Come in and enjoy our great sales today!”

A-Little-Bit-of-Everything at a Nova Scotia Liquor Store
As far as customer service goes, this was one of the better ones. Everyone in the store did a bit of everything, so I’d be on cash one day and replacing stock another day, unloading new stock the day after that. But the best part was the drive-thru. Yes. I worked at a liquor store with a drive-thru. It was completely idiotic because legally the customer had to receive their liquor, pull forward, get out, and put the liquor in the trunk. It was just…foolish, honestly. But whatever. I enjoyed working the drive-thru. I particularly liked working it with this one other girl about my age. We would trade off on working the window/cash and actually running for the order. I enjoyed running for the order. It was also quite humorous because you can’t imagine how many customers we got who drove up to the drive-thru speaker with no idea as to what they actually wanted. I’ve gotten orders such as “uh…some kinda rum?” and “this thing in a blue bottle…I have no idea what kind of liquor it is”. I also had more than one traveler from another province beg me to let them take a picture of me handing their order out the drive-thru window. I don’t blame them. Leave it to Nova Scotia to have drive-thru liquor stores.

A-Little-Bit-of-Everything at Walmart
Yes, I did eventually end up at a Walmart, only because the liquor store just kinda…stopped scheduling me in. Anyway, I started in an actual store, doing more floor work, but what I was really hired for was a large group that was set to “build” the new Walmart that was going up. We put the shelving together and arranged it properly, pieced the cash register area together, put up all the signage, and eventually stocked all the shelves. It wasn’t a bad gig for brain-dead work that you could zone out during, but I hated it for one reason: the manager. Never have a met such a stone-cold witch. The best example I have against her is when she refused to let my young coworker have the afternoon off to go to her cousin’s funeral. Apparently “a cousin isn’t a close enough relative”. I was so disgusted that when I got the girl alone I told her to take off and I’d cover for her. She didn’t because she needed the job to pay for school and was scared she’d lose it, which just made me that much more disgusted. When I finally left that job it was all I could do to keep myself from slugging that manager in the face on my way out.

Customer Service Rep for Sirius Satellite Radio
…which is a nicer way of saying, “call center punching bag”. I activated people’s radios, took payments, resolved issues with accounts, and helped them troubleshoot issues with their radios. By way of explaining what this job was like, I beg everyone this: if you ever get a Sirius Satellite Radio, listen to the rep who is activating it for you. I lost track of the number of times I asked, “Does your radio have a clear view of the sky?” and received a “Yes!” only to find out later when the radio wouldn’t work that they were really in a parking garage or in the middle of their apartment building. It was all I could do not to scream bloody murder at some people.
Also, occasionally, the Sirius system would screw up and double- or triple-charge people. This made for some very interesting conversations. One man with a trucking company had purchased three radios with lifetime subscriptions (approximately $500 each) and been triple-charged, making his bill jump from $1500 to $4500. He was extremely calm and polite while I fixed the issue. Meanwhile a few years later I got a customer who had been double-charged his $15 monthly bill and he completely lost his mind. I actually hung up on him three times because he wouldn’t stop swearing and calling me every name under the sun. Pleasant!

Instrumentation Maintenance Tech at the Paper Mill
My first “career” job, which is what I trained at university for. This job taught me first and foremost that I knew nothing. I may have spent four years and a crap-ton of money becoming a technologist, but my first few months at that mill taught me that school means absolutely bupkiss without experience. I really had no idea what I was doing, and my older and much-more-experienced coworkers didn’t let me forget it. Within my first six months I burned myself on several steam pipes and once managed to spray myself with hot condensate. It’s really quite amazing that I have any skin left. Oh yes, and lots and lots of 120 volt shocks. You’d think I would have learned to wear my gloves, but…no.
Maintenance is an interesting beast. You learn a lot – because you have to – but it can be very stressful because you have to keep the plant running. When the plant is down it’s losing money every minute, and that’s directly correlated to how fast you can fix something. I didn’t really realize just how stressed out this job made me until long after I’d lost it (when the mill shut down and was sold).

Commissioning Technician on the Kearl Lake Project
My first (and so far only) job out West turned out to be an excellent one. I had a good contract, good coworkers, good (for the most part) bosses, and good work. Sometimes it was hard work – particularly in the middle of winter when you’re outside in minus 40 degrees Celsius – but it was interesting work with very little stress. Since we were still building the plant there was no big scary rush to get things going like right goddamn now!!! I also got to experience the job both from the field and from the control room, which I think taught me a lot. All in all I can’t complain about this one. It was a good job with good people and I made a lot of money to pay off lots of debts and bills. Yes, after ten other jobs, I finally hit one that didn’t make me want to murder the world.

Writer!Okay, so it can’t really be considered a job until you’ve been paid for it, but it sounds better to say that I’m currently working as a writer than to say that I’m currently unemployed. 😛

My eighth grade English teacher told us once that by the time we were thirty-five we would have had up to ten different “jobs” and possibly one or two different “careers”. I didn’t believe him at the time, but there you have it: I’ve had 11 different jobs, only two of them part of my career as a technologist, and one unpaid “job” as a writer. Amazing. Has anyone else had a varied string of jobs like mine? Please share!

Accountability Tuesdays – Week 29

Before I get on with the accountability today, I want to mention a couple of things.

First, a huge hug to the new followers I’ve been getting on this blog and on Twitter. I’m not sure exactly what I’ve been doing lately that suddenly has people sneaking in out of the shadows toward my sites, but I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Welcome, thanks for coming, and I hope you stick around! 🙂

Second, on a whim I recently tried Googling myself, and I was quite amused to find that the first three results were actually me. I rather don’t need my 9gag profile popping up on Google, but I was happy to see that the second result was this blog and the third was my 750Words.com account. It’s a good sign when your real persona pops up on Google, right?

Third: a call out for info and/or advice. I’ve Googled this problem many times but I can never seem to find anything that quite matches my issue. I’ve been having trouble sleeping again (it seems to happen for several weeks at a time, a few times a year), and the issue as far as I can describe it is that I spend an inordinate amount of time in dream sleep (REM sleep), meaning that my rest isn’t, well…restful. I’m waking up feeling like hell even when I sleep 9 or more hours, and it’s very wearing. I’ve consulted my doctor before and his only suggestion was to try antidepressants, which I thought was a little silly and insulting since I’m pretty damn confident that I’m not depressed. So since I can’t seem to find any information on my own, I thought I’d ask here on the off-chance someone may know something or suffer from similar. Help?

Okay, on to the accountability.

Health and Body Image Goal

If I’m totally honest, I’ve plummeted miserably on this one. I’ve been doing no form of exercise and have been eating rather terribly. It doesn’t help that I’m experiencing sleep issues, as mentioned above. I keep trying to convince myself to get up a little early in the mornings (before it’s scorching hot out) and do my zombie runs, but I haven’t been able to manage it because I’m so damn tired. I need some motivation, terribly, and that’s a fact.

Editing Goal

It’s been a surprisingly busy week so I haven’t managed to sit down at my laptop for very long periods of time, but I’m still (slowly) plugging away at my supernatural romance. Really, really looking forward to finishing so I can submit it to a publisher and move on to my zombie apocalypse.

1,000,000 Word Goal

It hasn’t been a great week, but I did manage to get a few words in. Between blogging and a return to 750Words, I managed to get in 4802 words this week. I’m hoping to ramp it up this week through a series of ideas I’ve compiled, one of which is to use 750Words.com in the mornings to empty my brain of the dreams I’m plagued with every night. It might be a pro-bono situation…I get extra words, and maybe writing down the dreams will make them go the hell away. Starting this Sunday, as well, I plan to start reading The Artist’s Way and work my way through the 12-week process, so look forward to that.

29 weeks down, 23 to go. Here’s hoping the remaining 23 start to look up a little!

Things I Know About Kids: Being a Parent

I thought I’d switch things up a bit, so this post will technically be more “Things I Know About Being a Parent”. I was inspired by this blog post, in which the author talks about all the reasons you are not a terrible parent. For my part, I thought I’d share a few truths I’ve learned over the past two and a half years (my baby girl is two and a half! Holy crap!).

– In those first few months of every new parent’s life there will be moments when you break down and feel like you’re going to die. It’s a mixture of forced fatigue and a radically changed lifestyle. I myself burst into hysterical sobs a few times when I was all alone with the baby and couldn’t get her to stop crying. Don’t worry. It feels like you are absolutely going to lose your mind, but it does get better.

– Kangaroo care sounds silly and made-up, but it is remarkably soothing for both baby and parent, and I strongly endorse it. The idea is to strip the baby down to just a diaper and lay them on your bare chest (with a blanket over both of you if necessary). It has all these great physiological benefits for the baby, but it is also responsible for some of the most relaxing moments I had in those early months.

– The people and the media around you will try to tell you all kinds of things about the “best” way to feed your child. You absolutely must breast feed, and it should be exclusively the breast because bottles are bad for their teeth, and you should only give them fresh, homemade baby food, and feed on a schedule, not on demand, because you have to put that little mooch in their place right away!
The truth? The “best” way to feed your child is whatever way works best for you and your family. Some women can’t breast feed, not every family has the time or resources to make baby food from scratch, and not every child will react the same to the same options. As long as your child is happy, healthy, and growing, don’t let anyone make you feel bad for not doing things the “best” way.

– Parents have to be the bad guy sometimes. It sucks, and no one likes to do it, but it has to be done. You know why? Because kids who get their way all the time become adults who expect to get their way all the time. Think about that. When was the last time you met a spoiled, entitled ass of an adult whom you didn’t want to smack the face off? Now, do you really want to be the parent of that person?

– Alternatively, pick your battles with kids, because parents should be disciplinarians, not dictators.

– Kids learn a lot from their parents. They learn to walk and talk, to recognize letters and numbers, to eat on their own and dress themselves, and a thousand other wonderful things. Do you know what else they learn from their parents? Bad habits, bad attitudes, racism, gender stereotypes, how to talk behind people’s backs, how to judge people by their looks, and a thousand other horrible things. Kids aren’t born with these things; they get them from us. Always keep that in mind.

– Your kids will drive you absolutely out of your mind. There will be times when everything they say or do makes you want to scream. This does not make you a bad parent or a bad person. It makes you human. If an adult treated you the way your kids treat you, no one would blame you for punching them square in the nose, so don’t beat yourself up for occasionally thinking your kid is a teeth-grindingly annoying little twerp.

– In a world in which every gadget comes standard with a high-quality digital camera and a thousand photos can be stored on a memory card the size of a fingernail, it’s easy to get caught up in preserving memories. The problem with this is that sometimes in focusing on preserving the memory, we fail to experience it. Take a few photos here and there, but don’t watch your child grow up through your smartphone screen. Put the cameras and gadgets away and get down on your hands and knees with your kid for a while. Trust me, they’d rather have your attention than thousands of pictures of themselves.

– Lastly, kids aren’t perfect, and neither are parents so don’t be too hard on them and don’t be too hard on yourself. The world these days throws a lot of information at you about the way things should be and the ways you can screw up, but it really just comes down to this:

Love your kids, play with them, praise them when they’re good, discipline them with they’re bad. Then love them some more. Do your best and encourage them to do theirs, and hopefully one day you’ll be able to look back and be proud of all you’ve taught each other.

I Write Like…

I’ve been surprisingly busy over the past 48 hours, getting settled into camp, adjusting to some new duties at work, scribbling out as many words as I can during my off-time, and working in a decent exercise. As a result I didn’t have time to pluck out a blog post for today, but since I hate missing days I decided to share (again) something I once shared about a year ago during a blog challenge.

I Write Like is a very amusing little site that “analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers”. I don’t know how accurate it is, but if nothing else it is quite amusing. I’ve input pieces of everything from my zombie apocalypse novel, to my supernatural romance, to my fan fictions, and have gotten a number of different authors ranging from Stephen King to Mark Twain. This time I input this blog post and got Cory Doctorow, whom I’ve never read, but he seems to have quite a few good reviews so I’ll take it as a compliment.

Anyway, give it a try and see who you get! And please share!

I’m Not a Therapist…but I Play One on the Internet

I’ve been debating with myself over whether or not to write this post for a while, because it’s bound to cause a debate or two and I’m not the debating type. In the end, however, I decided to go ahead and do it because my hope is that I’ll shine a light of realization on someone’s head and set them on a better path. So here we go.

A while back, when my blog was still new and I had just started my current job, I wrote a post called A Day at Kearl Lake. To this day my blog gets plenty of hits from people Googling information on the Kearl Lake oil sands project, and occasionally I’ll get a comment or a personal message from someone asking questions about the site, the camp, or what-have-you. I happily oblige to answer these questions because I’m just that nice a person. *cue winning smile*

Of all these people who have contacted me as a result of this particular post, there have been three separate women who have contacted me with questions about the Wapasu Creek Lodge work camp. All three of these conversations went something like this:

Them: “Do men and women stay in the same camp?”
Me: “Yup.”
Them: “Can men and women get into each others’ rooms?”
Me: “Uh, well it’s not really allowed, but theoretically, yes…”
Them: “See, because my boyfriend/husband works out there now and he’s staying at that camp and I don’t really trust him not to cheat on me.”

The first time I had this conversation it was fairly interesting. The second time it was surprising. The third time I immediately thought of the idea for this post. The fact that three separate women called on me with this same problem amazes me to no end.

First, I want to share what I’ve told these women, in case anyone else out there is wondering. Wapasu Lodge is a co-ed camp. There are two specific wings that are for women only, but as there are more women at Kearl Lake than can fit in those two wings, there are lots of women in the other wings. These women are always put in pairs because at Wapasu you share a bathroom with your neighbor and it’s against the rules for a man and a woman to share a bathroom. Mistakes are occasionally made when someone has a unisex name (I myself have had this happen several times), but the staff always fixes it immediately as long as it is brought to their attention.

No, men can not get into the women’s wing (it is strictly prohibited). Yes, theoretically, a woman in a co-ed wing could let a man into her room or vice versa. No, this is not allowed (room sharing is against the rules), and could result in expulsion from the camp, which usually also results in the loss of your job since you have to be able to stay on camp to work there. Additionally, the walls in Wapasu are thin at best, meaning that if you’re having sex in there chances are that everyone on your floor knows about it. So yes, it is possible for your significant other to cheat on you while staying at Wapasu. It’s not going to be easy, and it could plausibly lose you your job, but it is possible.

Now that we’ve got that bit out of the way, let’s get to the real point of this post.
(Everything that is about to be said can obviously also apply to men who fear their woman will cheat, but to avoid a bunch of him/her/he/she nonsense, we’ll just focus on women concerned about their men.)

When I was contacted by the first woman I tried my best to reassure her while still telling her the truth about the situation at Wapasu. When the second and third women contacted me I tried to extend the same courtesy, but personally I was getting concerned, and this is why… If you “don’t trust” your significant other to not cheat on you, it’s going to be because of one of three reasons:

1. You know him to be a cheater because he’s cheated on you before.
2. You’re scared he might be a cheater because you were cheated on before by another man and as a result you find it hard to trust another.
3. You’ve never been cheated on before by this man or any other, but you assume that a man given free range of women while miles away from you for weeks at a time will inevitably cheat.

I’ve thought about it long and hard, and these are the only three explainations I can come up with, so now that we’ve established those, let’s discuss them as kindly and rationally as possible.

If you fall into category 2, bless your heart, I’m sure you’re going through a lot. I’ve never personally experienced being cheated on, but I’m sure it must be beyond awful. I couldn’t fathom the pain something like that would cause – especially if you’d been together a long time and/or if kids are involved – and I imagine it’s a very difficult thing to get over. You don’t want to open yourself up to get that hurt again, and I absolutely get that. But I also know that you have to make an effort to move on. You can’t judge one man by the actions of another, and you can’t establish a new, healthy relationship in that manner. If you need help to learn how to trust again, please seek it out, because a relationship means nothing without trust and if your man is perfectly innocent he deserves to have your trust as much as you deserve to feel it.

If you fall into category 3, I feel very, very sorry for you because that is no way to live. You have serious trust issues, and no base to support them with. Yes, there are cheaters out there, but every man is not automatically guilty just because he happens to have a certain set of chromosomes. As with category 2, trust is everything in a relationship. If you can’t trust a man simply because he is a man, or because you happen to know that cheaters exist in this world, you need to work out some things on your own before attempting a serious, manogamous relationship. Again, if you need help working things out, please seek it. This is extremely important. You will never be happy if you are constantly worried about being cheated on, and you’ll never have a healthy relationship if you can’t learn how to trust others.

For all those who fall into category 1, I have a serious question: why are you still with him? I’m not judging, I’m just asking. If the reason that you don’t trust him not to cheat on you is that he’s done it before, why are you still with him? Is it for the children? Terrible reason; studies show that living with two parents who harbour animosity toward each other is worse for kids than dealing with their parents being separated. Is it because you still love him? Well sure, love is hard to just get over, and it’s rough, but having feelings for someone is no reason to let them get away with anything they want at your expense. Is it because you’re scared that if you leave him you’ll never find anyone else? Worst reason of all…we are all capable fo finding new love and being happy, and you should never sell yourself short like that.

Look, I’m not telling all women who were cheated on that they absolutely have to dump their man’s ass right this moment. I’m definitely not saying that guys who cheat don’t deserve a second chance because sometimes they actually do. Sometimes mistakes are made and the guy feels horrible and spends the rest of his life trying to make up for his wrong. All I’m saying is that if this is the situation you’ve found yourself in, you should take a good, long, hard look at exactly why you’ve chose to stay with the man who cheated on you. Take a hard look and establish whether your reasons are actually good, genuinely rational reasons…or if they’re excuses. Because here’s the thing…if you feel the need to contact a complete stranger to help you confirm or deny your suspicions, there’s obviously something wrong, and I seriously cannot express this enough: you need to be able to trust your significant other in order to have a happy, healthy relationship.

For the record, ladies (and gents), I am always happy to lend an ear when one is needed, even to complete strangers. I’m just that kind of person, and it makes me feel good if I can help someone out. That’s the real reason I wrote this post: because I really hope it helps someone. And if that someone, or some other someone, wants to contact me to talk about a bad situation, that’s just fine. I just hope that what I’ve written here today impacts someone because with the amount of traffic that finds its way to A Day on Kearl Lake on a regular basis, I expect these sorts of issues to keep cropping up.

Accountability Tuesdays: Week 18

Man, the couches at Wapasu Lodge camp feel so cushy on the day you fly home. Why do you think that is?

So here I am again, plucking out an accountability post as I wait to travel. There have been worse ways to spend a day, let me tell you, and since this one results in my returning home to my baby girl and husband, I’m as happy as a pig.

(No feces necessary. Pigs just seem to be rather happy creatures overall.)

Health and Body Image Goal
I have to admit, I’ve waned on this one, but there is an up side. Starting about Wednesday I started shying away from the Body Revolution videos for two reasons. One, its really hard to get up in the morning to do them, especially when your camp neighbors ensure that you’re not asleep at night until a good two hours after you wanted to be. And two, I was finding that combined with the diet (or as close as I could get to the diet with what’s available at camp) I was feeling too god damn weak to do the exercises! I’m sorry Jillian, but my body seems to require significantly more calories than you think it does.

So anyway, I ditched the diet for the more enjoyable method of eating what I want while keeping a keen eye on my calorie and fat intake, and since the weather made a turn for the better, I traded Jillian for the Zombies! Run! app. I plan to continue Body Revolution at home (and possibly next shift if my neighbors are a little less ragingly inconsiderate), but for the past few days I’ve just been enjoying getting some fresh air and running from imaginary zombies. Win-win.

Editing Goal
This is another one that has waned, but mainly because I’ve run out of printed copy to edit. My manuscript is several hundred pages long, so I only printed out the first few chapters, and I think I’ve done all with them that I can. Next shift I’ll bring up the USB stick with my soft copy on it and print out some more. Until then, c’est la vie.

1,000,000 Word Goal
I wasn’t expecting this past week to add up to much because with layoffs happening all around me I’ve been about ten times busier at work than usual. Combine that with the nosy neighbors/loss of sleep issue and the fact that I’ve hit a roadblock on my work-in-progress, and I figured I wasn’t going to have anything to report. Imagine my surprise when I counted up all the blog posts I’ve been writing in advance this past week and found that they totaled 6769 words. Not too shabby, huh? I won’t complain, for sure, because I’ll be lucky to get that total over the next twoweeks.

Which is to say I plan to be terribly busy playing My Little Pony with my daughter. So long coworker suckers!

Hook, Line, and Sinker

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

72. Developing a compelling hook

I’m quite certain that a great deal of literature has been written on this subject, but unfortunately I have not read any of it. All I can really give is my opinion, based on the fact that I’ve been an avid reader since I was about 8 years old.

To me, the trick to developing a compelling hook is to be both realistic and unrealistic at the same time. Sure that doesn’t make sense, but hear me out. First, you have to be somewhat realistic with your characters and settings, because even when your reader is looking for fantasy, sci-fi, horror, or any of the other crazy options there are, they want to feel some kind of connection to the story. If your character is a gorgeous creature who was born with a silver spoon in their mouth and is absolutely perfect in every way your reader is going to have a hard time giving a rat’s behind about them. In fact, they’re more likely to hate them and not want to read about them anymore. But if you give your character some flaws that the reader can relate to (they were teased mercilessly as a child; they have an alcohol problem; they’re embarrassingly clumsy; etc etc etc) the reader is more likely to connect with them and want to follow them through the story. George R.R. Martin’s writing is a great example of this. In his A Song of Ice and Fire series you can easily find yourself rooting for multiple characters on different sides of the battles, because even the most evil characters have certain traits or beliefs that force you to relate with them. Sure, they’re still creeps, but you can’t help feeling that they could almost be your friend in a different situation, which makes you want to find out what happens to them.

Moving on, once you’ve established this sense of realism, you have to move on to being unrealistic in your story. See, the thing is that (for the most part) reality is pretty boring. The world is a pretty amazing place, yes, but the everyday world is, well…every day. People don’t read fiction because they want to read about the same things that they see every day in their own lives; they read fiction to put themselves into another world, a place that’s strange and different and lets them escape from the mundane. To continue using Martin as my example, his world first seems like a perfectly realistic medieval land, but suddenly you find out that it’s also full of magic and dark creatures. You’re relating to the characters and the world they live in, but you’re also surrounded by the odd and unusual, the kinds of things you secretly wish were real.

This doesn’t exactly help develop a “hook”, but I think that these are two important things to keep in mind when attempting to do so because any plot idea you do come up with will be a lot more enjoyable to read if these two ideas are kept in mind.

Or maybe I’m wrong. If so, feel free to debate it with me!