First Cup of Coffee - August 31, 2018

I'm closing in on the ending of THE ARROWS OF THE HEART, so I talked about that, and referred back to previous discussions on work, play and happiness. Also experienced some unusual bird sightings and talked about financial independence and my friend Megan Mulry.

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Good morning everyone. It is August 31st, last day of August, and it is 8.43 in the morning. A little bit later start today, but uh we both slept in a little bit longer and David doesn't always sleep well. So if he's still sleeping, sometimes I'll just go back to sleep because if I get up, he'll get up. So uh it was kind of funny because Jackson came in and woke him up at Jackson, our main coon camp, for those who don't know. He came in at 4, 4.06, and uh put his claws in David's foot to wake him up to come make him breakfast. And I knew this because David yelled. So I got up and locked Jackson out of the bedroom. And David got up, and I thought, oh no, no, he's gonna be up. But uh he came back to bed and he pulled the door shut. But David's thing is he never pulls the door all the way so it latches. Uh, you know, it's what is this? Is this a guy thing? I don't know. You know, he'll say, I shut the door, and it's like, no, it actually has to latch. So at um, let's see, it was about 5 31, Jackson has figured out how to open the door. He just kind of launches himself at it, and so the door came flying open, and Jackson came triumphantly running in. My side of the bed is nearer to the door. And uh the hummingbird is out in my little water fountain. I haven't uh seen this as one of the males. He's actually out there bathing in the water fountain. That's so cute. Can you hear the chirping? That might be a little too faint to hear. But yeah, it's um maybe I'll take a picture of the fountain so you guys can see it. It's got sort of a shallow basin and the birds really like bathing in it. I've never seen one of the hummingbirds do that before. So anyway, Jackson apparently runs and launches himself at the door because it really does. You hear this thump and the door flies open. So, but David was so sound asleep he didn't even move, you know, thankfully. So I got up and locked Jackson out making sure that the door was latched. And I could hear him trying to open it, but ha ha ha, outwitted by the woman. So he uh then we ended up sleeping until almost seven. So I think that was was very good. So and I had a good run this morning, so it started out to be a good day. The uh book, Arrows of the Heart, is coming along very well. I'm at, I think, somewhere around 86,000 words, so that's pretty awesome. Uh I got up to uh the scene. I have been waiting this entire book to write. I never write out of order. I know a lot of people do. Um checking on the teapot here. Now you're hot enough. Um a lot of people write scenes out of order and then piece them together, and that's just uh one of those things I can't understand, just like I can't pre-plot. I write a story like I read a story, you know, beginning to end. And even though I can kind of guess at what may be coming down the line, uh it's for me, it's in the same way that I can guess what's coming down the line when reading a book. Very similar in some ways. Um, you know, like like you know that the heroine heroine will hook up at some point, hook up being a euph euphemism. Um I'm kind of looking for my vitamin tin, which I had in my hand a moment ago, but then I was chatting, and uh I'll have to find it later. Let's go on out to the Great Barber. Yeah, Great Barber today. Okay, hang on. So do I do? All right. I have the most favored Red Starbucks cup today. I don't know if I could even tell you why this is the most favored cup. It's um the 2015 holiday collection, does it say on here? Oh yeah, there it is. It's on the inside. 2015 Christmas cup. And I think, oh, the primrose is blooming. That's beautiful too. So many things to take pictures of. I will have to get a picture of that as well. It's bright yellow, very, very pretty and kind of um fabulous. Oh, wow. You know, I swept out the grape barber yesterday and it's now full of choya burrs again. Uh this battle shall not be lost. Really? Really, Packrat? Hmm. Okay, I'm gonna pick my way around him. Yep, had to go through the uh wind chime there. Apologies for that if that was loud.

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Ah.

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It's my grape barber. Mine. So um it's it's like the old holiday Starbucks cups used to be. I think that's one reason I like it, because it's red and then has the green mermaid symbol on it. And otherwise nothing else, and the red kind of shades up from a darker red at the bottom to a lighter red at the top, and that says 2015 and gold inside. So I've had it for almost three years now, and it looks just like the the paper holiday cups used to before they started mixing up the theme, and I like those, but I think there's something about the holiday cup that just makes me happy, you know, in the same way that uh having the the holiday Starbucks makes me happy. I I like that they only have those a few times a year. And no, I have not gone to get my pumpkin spice latte yet, Kimberly, if you are listening. Uh I was going to on the 28th, the first day that they were supposed to have them when we were driving back from Crested Butte. But you know, my stomach has been weird lately, and so I've been having the London fogs. Oh, and I haven't even had my first sip yet. Hang on. I've really been liking my London fogs, and it's so much easier on my stomach. But my stomach feels much better now. Um, now that we are done with the uh birthday revelry, and I am not drinking and eating quite so badly as I was. So soon, soon I will have the pumpkin spice latte. I also hesitate to go to go get it because it's so sugary, you know. It's such a I think it's like all of my carbohydrates for the day in just a grande. And so I try to save it for special occasions. But that's part of what I like about that. You can only get the pumpkin spice latte at certain times of the year, and then I love the the eggnog ones and the gingerbread ones, and that's part of the holiday indulgence, which I then spend the rest of the year making up for, which probably doesn't make sense, but I don't know. I think it comes back to some of those things like the uh like I was talking about on yesterday's podcast, you know, finding that paradise, finding that beauty, you know, finding something that's a treat. And I talked about that um oh on that last Friday, what day would that have been? It was the day before Bubonakan's. Oh, oh, I guess it was the 24th, the podcast on the 24th. I talked about the importance of play and uh you know and rewarding yourself, you know, and sometimes, you know, as much as I have tried to get away from the idea of food being a reward, sometimes it is, you know, and it's one of those things that's so ingrained in us, and you know, we could say, well, we need to change that about ourselves as a society, because when we're kids, you know, the special treat, you know, the special reward is often to like go get an ice cream or to have a uh you know, a cookie. Be good and you can have a cookie. And so we really build in this idea of that if you're for a special treat, you get to have a cookie or an ice cream or a slice of cake, you know, for your birthday. For my birthday, I got to have a real birthday cake. We had to go to some effort to find it, but my mom was determined, thank you, mom. And we got the actual like yellow cake with the white icing and sprinkles on it. It was so good. And I took some of it home and had it that night, and then after that I'm being good. Although I do still have my my Dutch chocolate that Corinne sent me carefully hoarded away that I am having a little bit of, and it'll probably last me until my next birthday. So, you know, these things are a treat because you don't have them that often, and I think that that's the key. You know, it's always that you know, everything in moderation, including moderation, which means that sometimes sometimes you can go ahead and have uh the Grande Pumpkin Spice full sugar latte. It doesn't come sugar free, or at least it hasn't. Maybe that's changed, but it's um yeah, it's for special occasions. So I'll have a special occasion. Maybe, maybe Monday when I finish this book, I'll go get one and have it as a as a party. Um I don't want to jinx it, but this book's going well enough that I might finish on Sunday. Uh I usually I talked about this on the 24th too with the the work in play. I'm pretty sure that was the day I did. You know, that I really try to be very careful not to go past my word count that I agree on. But if I am within a thousand words or so of finishing the book, um very often I will well, I don't know very often, but I will do that occasionally. Here's another hummingbird, different one. Oh, hummingbirds feeding off of the climbing hydrangea. That's unusual. I didn't think that produced all that much. Of course all the flowers are smelling very sweet right now. Partly because of all the rain. Um and they're probably really producing the nectar. Hi. Just flew up and looked at me. This is a different one than was bathing in the fountain out front. What I really want is one of those rock fountains that you can leave out all winter. And there's a place next to my yoga place that has them. They're very expensive. Uh but I noticed this June that they had all of them 50% off. And I'm wondering if maybe they'll do a 50% off this fall. Not that I can afford them anyway, but I'm very tempted to get one because uh the one that I have is ceramic. I'll I'll I'll do that picture today so you can see it. And you have to bring it in during the winter because it'll freeze. But you know, the birds still need water in the winter, and it would be nice to have one of those rock ones that could stay out all the time. But that's that's kind of a frivolous a frivolous need. Or not even a need, a frivolous desire. And not that important. I was having a long conversation with Megan Mulrie last night. Um she and I met for wine at uh Arable, just up the street, uh, where we sat outside, and it was very pretty. She hadn't been there before, but uh because she is now possibly house house hunting out in mine part of the Santa Greater Santa Fe area, um, which would be awesome if she moved out here. She was a little bit more interested in checking things out. Uh Megan is the author of the Unruly Royals series, and she was in the Devil's Doorbell anthology with me. And um she moved here from Key West a few years ago and has been living in town, but she's been renting and now she's looking to buy. Her mother has offered her about, well, a good chunk of money, I won't say how much, too, as a down payment. So that otherwise Megan is buying the house in her own name. Uh, which is kind of a big thing for her because she was married for twenty years and uh you know, it's nice for her to have you know, now she is completely debt free, enviably so. Uh I used to be debt free, now I'm not. I would like to be again someday. But um yeah, now she is completely debt free and she's gonna take on this mortgage, so it's a big step, but it's gonna be all hers. Uh she does have a a boyfriend and she's in love and that's fantastic. But she is um yeah, doing it on her own, and that's there's a a real freedom in that, I think, that she knows she has a uh a job now. She well she's you know, writing is a job, I shouldn't say it that way, but she uh has a salary. She works for radius books in town, which makes um photography books, really beautiful photography books. And she, you know, is you know, careful with her with her output and so it's very funny. We have these lizards that crawl on the stucco walls because they can grip it. And there was a big lizard crawling across the wall and the male hummingbird just went over there to uh I think he was challenging it. He flew right up to it and was chirping at it. I hadn't seen that before. Today is a day for a lot of firsts. I think he was just making sure it was gonna stay in its place. Those male hummingbirds are are very aggressive and territorial. And it's funny because they're so tiny and so pretty, but boy, they can be fierce. It's a good lesson for all of us, right? You know, you can be pretty and tiny and keep to yourself most of the time, but also fierce. Speaking of, there's a little hummingbird squabble in the tree there. So it's gonna be a busy weekend of working. I don't know if I'll podcast tomorrow or not. You know, I haven't been on the weekends. Um but since it's a working day, and I might just do it so that I like podcast on working days. I do like sitting here and talking to you guys. I have my beverage, my first beverage of the day. And it's like a little bit of downtime to gather myself before I plunge into the work. Boy, it's just amazing how much the grapevine is chewed up from all that hail. There's just practically no leaves over the top, but in other years it's been a deeply shaded canopy. If we don't get a snowy winter, which I'm really hoping we will, I'm going to have to make a point of weekly watering, I think. This grapevine might not make it through another dry winter. Yeah, I wish I could tell you more about the book, but because it's the ending of the book, I don't want to spoiler anyone. But um it's very cool for me at this stage of the book because it writes fast. Um Mary Robinette Cole saw said something that I thought was very interesting where she said uh that basically the first three acts of or the first two acts of the book, uh, the first 75% is all asking questions, and the last 25% is answering them. And I thought, well, that's an interesting way to think of it, because in many ways that's why the last 25% writes pretty fast. Occasionally it writes slow if I don't know what those answers are and I have to figure them out. But with this book I've unusually so known pretty much more or less what the ending was going to be like. Um and I've certainly known it since I hit about the 75% mark. So it's sort of been easy to write fast and cruising along, and if I wake up in the middle of the night, I'm thinking about scenes from it and having ideas for things to put in. Um so that's uh it's uh really nice to work that way. It's always nice when the subconscious is just turning away in my sleep and writing the story for me, so then all I have to do is like type it. That's the very best way to write. That's when you can type it. Um the half moon is hanging in the sky. It's still a little bit dim, so that the moon still shows really well. It's hanging between the frame of the grape leaves. I will take a picture of that too. It will just take a few days for you guys to see all of these photos. But that's good for the days when there are not that interesting things to take pictures of. So yeah, I'm actually know exactly where I'm picking things up this morning, so that's exciting, and uh I get to have are interesting arguments between my hero and heroin, which is always fun to write. Especially these two. Sarah and Karan make a very interesting couple. Alright. So I think that does it. Um thank you all for sharing my first cup of London fog of the day with me. It's always a pleasure. And I hope that you all have a wonderful Friday and enjoy your last day of August, and I will see you in September. Bye bye.