Take a bite out of this...

I had an actual teeth checkup on monday.  Its the first real one (if you don't count the one a couple weeks ago that only checked two of my teeth) since third grade.  The dental assistant was pretty surprised by this and combine that with my poor personal oral hygiene, I was expecting all my teeth to be riddled with holes, falling apart and rotting away.

After sitting and waiting for a while dreading the worst, the dentist finally came back in and after poking at my teeth with something metal to make sure there was no pain, he simply stated my teeth were great except for some tartar build up.  So I get to go back in a month to have them thoroughly cleaned (I'm hoping the tartar isn't what is holding my teeth together).  I'm thinking, however, that my dentist is trying to milk my insurance by having me come back multiple times for short periods.

Well, I was thinking that I should probably be more diligent with my brushing.  I discussed the matter with DaNae and realized that I hate the flavor of toothpaste.  It leaves an after taste that lasts for hours and I've never liked it. So I thought that if they had cheeseburger flavored toothpaste I would probably brush like four or five times a day.  And then I saw this:

Bacon Toothpaste

and I thought, its not cheeseburger flavored but its the next best thing...I might have to splurge someday.

30k

I just reached 30 thousand words in one of stories.  Yep 30,000 words written.  I wish I had a dollar for each one of them. Maybe someday. 

I looked up novel lengths the other day and I was way off.  I was thinking 150,000 words, but it turns out that most publishers consider a book over 50,000 words to be a novel .  I'm 3/5's the way there.  Of course, I'm not quite half done with the story if you look at my initial outline.  Actually my outline isn't helping me much other than reminding me of the ideas I had for the story.  I originally had what was happening right now happen two chapters ago and then the story took a detour, it'll probably take some more. 

I'm actually feeling more and more hopeful about the whole thing.  I've been averaging over a thousand words a day.  and at this rate this book should be done by the end of march and then I'll have to decide to right the next one in the series or continue one of the stories I've already started, or start another one that has been burning a hole in my brain.

woot woot! 

follow up...

In case you missed it, I challenged myself:

http://extra-toe.blogspot.com/2011/01/who-you-calling-addicted.html

I officially have 11 days left and I'm sitting here at 11:30am watching a movie on netflix with my wife.  This has been the common theme of my life for the last week or more, well maybe not watching movies at 11:30am but I haven't been abstaining from the tech/media influences until 5pm.

At first I was down on myself, but I realized that the heart of my goal, was to quit doing one thing so I could have more time for something else.  I wanted to write more.  And well I've written more.  One of my stories that I started couples years ago, that has been brewing in my brain for over 7 years, sat around 20k words for two years now.  After this last week and the little bit I did the week before, its up to 30k words.  I tapped out 7k words last monday through friday.  Thats an average of 1k a day and if I did that everyweek I could have two full length novels done by years end.  So for the new month resolution I'm shooting for 1k a day.   Weekends and days homes are the hardest with distractions and chores, but I have made a small change already, and now I'm ready to make another small change that will hopefully make a big difference in the future.

I have another goal set for the beginning of March already, and hopefully the weather cooperates.

Creative differences...or a bill by any other name...

In my short life span I have managed to collect numerous nicknames.  I'm not sure if its because 'Bill' is mundane, or maybe I'm just mundane enough that people feel the need to spice something about me up.  Either way, I've been called billy (my least favorite), tacoBill, illBill, 34, Chuckles, billy whiteshoes, bill sixtoes, Orville, billiam, DB, and I'll leave out the 'bad names' out.  Well this week I've been called by 3 more.  Three in one week.  Well, two of them are actually the synonymous with each other and the other is actually my favorite in quite sometime.  All three are for the same reason...water!

For those who don't know, since they moved my lab to Manhattan, there is no deionized water in my lab to fill the water pans for the insects.  So I have to push a bunch of jugs across the parking lot to fill up in the main building and push them back to the lab once their full on a daily basis, to keep my bugs biting.

So the obvious nickname is Waterboy!  Yeah, a guy called me that a couple days ago and I was underwhelmed with his creativity.  He wasn't the first person here to call me that, but it has been sometime since anyone else has (I have been doing this for 7+months).  Then he wasn't satisfied with Waterboy, so he moved on to calling me Bobby Boucher.  Thank you sir for finding one of the dumbest fiction characters out there and refering me to him.  I appreciate that.  He did hold the door while I pushed my cart through it and I almost said "Thanks Drew Carrey!"  He did have a vague resemblance, but I wasn't sure if he would take it as a complement or not, and I didn't want to deal with it, so I walked on and said nothing.

Then today, as I pushed the cart down the hallway, another guy came up behind me and said "we should call you pipeline!"  After fuming for a couples days at the stupidity of the first guy I was actually intrigued but the name Pipeline.  It sounds like a super hero, or G. I. Joe character.  And well, that more than makes up for the whole Boucher debacle.  Maybe the name will spread through the center and I'll get a reputation.

Watch people, here comes Pipeline!!  hehe

Oh ba dee, oh ba da...

I didn't write all weekend.  And I missed it.  So last thursday I pecked out over 1200 words on one of my creations and it felt great.  Then friday came and I had the day off, so first my routine was thrown off, and then there was the pressure placed on me by my wife to get something done on the sun room.  So I didn't really get anything accomplished that day on any of my projects.  And then it was time to run to the doctors to get Charleigh's shots.  That took about an hour longer than expected, though with no issues whatsoever.  And then it was saturday...

Saturday went a lot better, with a buddy coming over and helping to put up insulation and helping brainstorm future steps.  Then the same buddy (Thanks Phil!) went with me to home depot to get the require materials to drywall the rest of the sun room on sunday.  We were done with the ceiling about 5 minutes before 5 which gave me 5 minutes to get the panel lift back to Ace Hardware.  That accomplished, along with a shower and shave and it was time for church.  And exhaustion. 

And no writing was done all weekend, and now its monday and all those creative juices are flowing so I'm going to jump back with both feet and see if I can blow thursday out of the water and make up for the weekend...

I said MUSTARD...

and I love it!  There are so many different varieties.  There are three bottles of it in my office fridge.  There's Dijon for the distinguished flavor.  There's spicy southwest for something to jazz up my lunch a bit.  And there's spicy brown, which is my office-mate's mustard so I don't use it.  Not to say its any less of a mustard, because I would definitely gobble it up if given the chance.  Even the less exotic yellow mustard is rather tasty on a hot dog.  I have actually never met a mustard I didn't like.  Honey mustard on homemade pretzels! mmmmm...heavenly!  It may not be at the top of my list of things I love, but it might just be in my top ten....sadly enough.

Hello, Caption Obvious...

This is what government service is like.  They give you some responsibility and then make you take 'training' every year to make sure you remember the rules for the responsibility. I can understand the thinking behind the monotony of it all, but sometimes their trainings are little more than read and take a quiz, which is honestly better than being called into an hour long meeting to just have them read a powerpoint presentation that you could read on your own faster. 

Well, my latest training was on how to use and not abuse a travel card (its just a credit card they issue you in your name so you don't have to accrue business travel charges on your personal cards).  It was a 7 page powerpoint presentation and in the whole thing there was only one page with any other than words.  And it was this slide, with clipart, that grabbed my attention.  The slide is titled "Using ATM, [etc]."  The clipart along with the title of the slide appears to me to be a woman standing at an ATM.  Well, whoever made this presentation was obviously not happy with people using their imaginations (it sometimes gets people in trouble in the government) and went onto to create an unnecessary caption for the obvious piece of clipart.  "Woman using an ATM."  Not only did they write the caption but they placed it in a word bubble above the image. Its just amazing, I can picture someone back in D.C. having just spent over an hour putting all this info together in a rather mundane presentation and then thinking, lets jazz it up with a picture!  And then once they put in the picture, they suddenly feared that the image might confuse people, so they decided that a caption would clear up any confusion, even though the fact that they used a word bubble makes me wonder if the ATM is just reporting out loud what is happening as it happens or the woman is narrating her own life in the third person...