SAVE THE DATE

‘s birthday party, in Worcester, MA — 24 July 2004, 6pm to midnight!

1 Ekman Street
Worcester, MA

@ The Village Arts Center.

Looking for a DJ for 10pm to midnight, otherwise we’ll be running shorter than planned (have to stop drumming at 10pm)

Minor entry fee: $3 to the DJ, $2 to the space, and some canned food items for FANS WITH CANS, a non-profit food-raising group, to be given to the local food pantry.

Yesterday was a bear of a day to work on the project. I wound up going down to the DMV about noon-ish, because sitting at my desk and working in the dark while there was sun outside did not work. Drove down, spent about an hour in line to learn that I didn’t have the right medical forms, and had to come home. Stopped on the way to test drive a Chevy Malibu maxx and a Mazda something-or-other. Liked both cars, but not available in my price range.

Oh, yeah. I’m buying a car. The thing that prompted me to go out and start looking was stopping at a traffic light and suddenly having my car pop into neutral. For ten minutes. My usual tricks of putting my automatic-transmission piece of crap into low gear or into park and then back into drive didn’t work. That happened… Monday? Since then I’ve looked at Dodges — nice vehicle, lousy salespeople; Fords — nice people, lousy vehicles; Chryslers — nice vehicles, nice people, out of my price range; and Mazdas — ok people, cool cars that don’t fit my specs, WAY out of my price range.

The essential difficulty is my height, and the length of my thighbone. Even with 70 pounds shaved from my frame, it’s nigh-impossible for me to fit behind the wheel of many cars. I’d get another Taurus if I still fit behind the wheel (as it is, I may have to go with a used Ford Focus, which is the only car that I fit in so far that is within my budget), but they modified the passenger compartment during the 1996-97 redesign, and now it’s no longer a comfortable car to sit in.

Today I’m going up to take a look at the Prius and other Toyotas. AFTER I get back from getting the DMV to renew my license. Somehow, looking at cars doesn’t really feel like a reward for getting through the DMV line successfully.

Anyway, after all that headache, I came home. I hadn’t hit my target wordcount for the day, so I didn’t go to poetry. I sat down about 5:30 pm and started writing. I wrote from then until 10:00, and produced 3300 words. A good day, finally. could hear it in my voice. At lunch time I was nasty and unpleasant, but a 3,000+ -word day will really turn your mood around.

Finally on this project, pieces are starting to click into place. The whole assignment is about 23,000 words, and I’ve got 10,000 done. Like a painting or a drawing, I’ve committed to the basic shape of the thing I’m working on. All the next few planned pieces are becoming a little easier as I know what fits where. Before I started, 23k words seemed like an awesome task. Halfway through, it’s looking managable.

And yes, I backed up regularly.

AND… as an added bonus — remember all those haiku I lost to the washing machine several months ago? Turns out it was a different book in my jeans pocket. I found one of those moleskine notebooks which contains most of January, February and March… so things are looking up.

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