Archive for July, 2012

Jul 18

Building the Foundation

I’m on vacation. According to Merriam-Webster that means:

1. a respite or a time of respite from something : intermission
2. a : a scheduled period during which activity (as of a court or school) is suspended b : a period of exemption from work granted to an employee
3. : a period spent away from home or business in travel or recreation

For many of us today, it seems to mean working as usual in a different location without the comfort and convenience of our usual workspaces. So, I’m typing this on a laptop balanced on my crossed legs instead of my usual desktop with two 23-inch monitors and and a wireless keyboard. While the couch I’m sitting on may be more comfortable than my office chair, it also exposes me to more distractions. Overall, I still need to get my work done and the environment makes it more difficult.

Still, I only need to work a few hours a day and the remainder of my time is spent in a new location with family members I rarely get to see. So, I pay for my vacation time with the slightly less comfortable worktime. Trade offs are the order of our society. For every prize we must give up something, be it time, money or our comfort zone. To be safe, we must sacrifice a level of freedom. To have “stuff” we must pay with cash or with effort. To have friends, we must be a friend. Everything in life has a price of some sort.

To take a vacation, we must have the ability to pay for food, shelter, etc. for a period of time without actually earning money during that time. That means working at a job that will give us vacation pay, saving money to pay for our time off, finding a generous third party to pay for our travels, or having a way to earn money even on vacation.

Over the years, I’ve tried several methods but, currently, I am combining saving money with working while on vacation. As a writer, I can do my “job” where ever I happen to be. Of course, I’m not getting paid much for doing it, but every dollar counts.

Most of my writing, at present, is geared toward building a platform…a reputation, so to speak…to create a portfolio of articles or posts that can be used to demonstrate my writing ability. This is practice time. A period of honing my skills before submitting proposals to publishers. I expect to spend a year or so practicing my writing every day both publicly and privately before attempting to sell anything.

This will mean posting to each of our four blogs each week, engaging in guest posting, participating in flash fiction exercises (the public part) and working on the various aspects of two novels for at least an hour each day (the private part). When most people, myself included until lately, think of writing a book, they envision simply sitting at the computer and typing for hours on end, day after day, for a year or more. There is much more to it than that. To write convincingly about anything, you must experience it yourself or do lots of research to find out the details. To keep from doing months of major revisions, you need to have a basic plan and keep going back to it as you write.

I am currently working on the research and planning part. The writing is happening, but only in sections. So far, it has no coherence. I know the overall goal and sort of how it begins, but the middle part (the most important part) is still in flux. As I work on the plan, some of it will be tried out on my writing blog. Come on over and sample the results.

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Posted in Creativity, Updates

Jul 05

Use it or Lose it….

It’s a sad fact that the less you exercise, the less you feel like exercising.  As my mother got older, she, like her mother before her, had a lot of trouble with arthritis. Eventually, she gave up doing handicrafts such as sewing and crochet because her hands hurt too much.  As the degeneration spread, she stopped moving around any more than necessary and the less she moved, the weaker she got.

I started having joint problems when I was only in my mid-thirties.   I laughingly called it “traveling arthritis” because the pain was located in a different joint each winter.  The first episode involved a knee that ached all one winter.  Everytime I sat down, I covered my lap with an afghan, like an old granny, to keep that knee warm.  When the weather warmed up, the pain subsided only to flair again as temperatures dropped.

The next winter, the problem moved to my left shoulder and so on.  By the time I was 40, my hands hurt most of the time.  I was working in the data center of a trucking company.  This was in ancient computer times.  The system filled an L-shaped 300 square foot room.  The System 38 IBM hard drives were prone to overheating, so it was necessary to keep the room temperature below 70º F at all times.  The thermostat was set at 65° F year round.  I wore gloves with the fingertips cut out and my hands still ached terribly by the end of the day.

Around this time, I heard about a dietary supplement called Glucosamine.  I decided it to give it a try.  By the next winter my pain was nearly gone.  I’ve been taking it in various forms for more than 20 years now and I hardly ever have to deal with arthritis pain anymore.  The only exception is the knee I injured in 2004.

I stepped in a hole and twisted my left leg so severely that the top of the shin bone splintered vertically.  Needless to say, all the ligaments and tendons were badly damaged as well.  To repair it, the doctor attached a metal plate to the outside of the bone, just below the knee, with screws.  It took six months for me to be able to use the knee normally without some sort of support.

Presently, the knee sometimes pops, but it seldom hurts. The pain is lower, in the shin bones, it isn’t usually severe, but it does limit my exercise ability.  I still take my Glucosamine.  The problem is that a week without walking leaves my struggling to make my mile.  My left knee & shin ache, my right hip has spells of sciatica that is made worse by strain.  My wind gets short as well, then the heat sucks up my energy and I just don’t want to struggle with it all.  Until I remember my mother sitting in her rocker, in pain every day and never getting better.

So, on the days when it is too hot to walk outdoors, I try to remember to get up from my chair and run through my Yoga workout a couple of times during the day.  It may not burn enough calories to help me lose my excess pounds, but it does keep my joints from freezing up.

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Posted in Exercise, Health

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