Sailbourne

It is the beginning of a new year, the beginning of a new decade (as some reckon it), and a shade over five months since I posted anything here.  I wasn’t going to make a New Year’s resolution (having been pretty dismal about such things over the years), but a couple of days into January, as I was working my way through the mountain of paid bills and other paper-based minutiae of life, I realized that the last time I had done such filing was the prior November.

Not November 2009, a little over a month before.  November 2008, thirteen months before.  And to be totally honest, it isn’t the first time such a thing has happened.  Not by a long shot.  Clearly, it was far past time for me to do something about this.

There are so many things that have drawn my interest and effort over the years, so many things I want to do and try.  But it is far past time for me to admit to myself that right now, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to even come close to doing everything I would like to do.  And there are things in life that I need to do which take time as well.

Since I don’t have a robotic duplicate I can send out into the world to do stuff for me, and since I don’t anticipate getting a TARDIS any time soon, this means I’m going to have to set priorities, make choices, and (most importantly) stick to them.  And so the first part of my New Year plan is to pay more attention to the basic work of taking care of myself and my family, and make sure that we have the resources, the energy, the good health, and the time to accomplish what really matters to each of us.

(Granted, in the case of the cats, that’s largely eating, sleeping, and chattering at the birds and critters outside the window, but if they’re not healthy, they’re not going to be able to enjoy even those things.  So the point stands, even if it does mean getting carted off to The Evil Doctor now and then.)

My biggest priority for this year, beyond keeping on top of the everyday work of caring for myself and my family, is supporting and promoting Ollin Productions — especially “Afterhell,” but also “Dicebag Theater” and at least one other big project which will hopefully go into production this year.  Continuing support of Dreams Landing, my jewelry crafting efforts as the House of Sailbourne, and maintaining the online sim games I’m a part of are also important things for me.  And I want to organize a renewal of vows and celebration of Joe’s and my 20th wedding anniversary.

I’m realizing that these things, plus the day job that allows everything else to happen, add up to a quite full plate.  There are some things I’m going to have to let go of, at least for a while.  The first one, which I’ve already started on, is to cut way back on my Facebook games and applications.  Facebook is a great tool for connecting with friends and family, and the applications and games available on it are fun, but stack up a few of them and it becomes an almost frightening time sink.  There are only a few Facebook games and applications I’ll be maintaining from now on, and as the year progresses, it may happen that I have to cut back on those.  I apologize to anyone who is inconvenienced by this; I know most of the FB games depend on having as many friends as possible also playing.

Another item that is going on the shelf, for a while at least, is the It Was 20 Years Ago Today podcast.  I’m not abandoning it, but the podcast will go on hiatus for a time.  Exactly how long, I don’t yet know.  It will be back though.

A final note.  I plan to update this blog regularly this year, at least once a week.  I plan to use it to keep on track with my efforts both to take care of myself and my family, and to keep on top of the many tasks that will be priorities in this coming year.  I might even use it just for fun now and then — I’m sure the memes won’t go away, even if I resist the urge to play them all!

It seems like 2008 was a really wild and crazy year for just about everyone we know — no less for Joe and I.  Before the memories fade too far into the distance, I thought I’d do a brief summary.  Then I can stash all the grief where it belongs — the past.

Q1 (Jan-March) — Black Cat, Giallo Hotel

It all started looking like Lilith had a cold — her nose was runny.  We gave it a week — the normal time for a virus to run its course — and took her to the vet.  It wasn’t a cold.  After some tests, it seemed likely that she had nasal lymphoma.  There was only one way to be certain it was cancer — take her to a specialist for a rhinoscopy.  We had the money for that.  We paid it, Lilith had the surgery, and we got good news and bad news.  Bad news: it was definitely lymphoma, it wasn’t really curable, and we didn’t have the money for things like chemotherapy.  Good news:  the rhinoscopy left Lilith feeling much better, almost as if she wasn’t sick at all.  We had some more time with her.  No telling how much.

At the same time, Joe was working like crazy on the last episodes of the latest, biggest, meanest Afterhell story:  “Bloodbath at the Giallo Hotel.”  The final installments went out over the podcast feed, and Joe compiled the story in time to send it off for the Mark Time/Ogle Awards.

Q2 (April – June) — Farewell, and a Mention

After six weeks of good health, Lilith took a bad turn for the worse in early April.  We and the vets did what we could, but there wasn’t much left.  At the end of April, we had her euthanized.  It broke our hearts.  After almost exactly ten years with us, she was gone.  Lilith had adopted Joe back in 1998, and he was always her person.  He has begun to tell her story in his own blog.

Not long after we said goodbye to Lilith, we got surprising news from the folks at the Mark Time/Ogle Awards.  Afterhell Volume 3: Bloodbath at the Giallo Hotel had earned an Honorable Mention Ogle award.

And at about the same time we realized that Kyouju wasn’t well.  More vet visits, more bad news and good news.  Bad news:  he had a hyperactive thyroid, not uncommon in older cats but relatively rare in a nine-year-old.  The treatment: radioactive iodine, involving a four-day vet hospital stay and four weeks of isolation and minimal contact with us.  The good news:  He was completely cured.  Even before we could let him out of his cage, he was putting the pounds he had lost back on.  Joe’s written about this in detail, too.

I’ll cover the second half of the year soon.

At the 2006 World Horror Convention last May, Joe and I had the great pleasure of meeting Larry Santoro, a writer and producer from Chicago. He was kind enough to hang out with us on the first evening of the con despite nearly falling over from lack of sleep, and to even give us a shout-out in his blog when he got home. I also had the opportunity to listen to him read from his forthcoming book.

Larry keeps a blog as well, and his most recent entry, At Home in Bluffton: Custodians of Chaos, is well worth checking out. It’s in large part an excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut’s upcoming memoirs, and well expresses the dismay heading toward despair that Larry and many of us are feeling at the way our country has gone.

Here’s a question: is it really a rollercoaster if the big drop is right at the beginning, before any climbing up?

That’s the way this day, our first full day at the World Horror Convention in San Francisco, has gone. Before we left our hotel room to head for the dealer’s room and a full day of talking up Afterhell, the Willamette Radio Workshop, and Dry Smoke and Whispers, I decided to check my mail.  I was promptly smacked between the eyes:

Somehow, so far, I’ve managed to keep myself from emailing this woman back and burning her right down to the ground.  But it is so tempting.  The secretary and treasurer of the Society have emailed the list responding to her, addressing her problem in a very restrained and tactful way.  That helps a bit.  But damn, it still hurts.

The convention started slow, but picked up a bit.  We’ve frequently had to explain what it was we had on the table, but definitely got some interest from people we talked to.  We have now sold items from all of the audiotheater folks we’re representing.  I even sold a piece of jewelry to the wife of one of the guests of honor!

Afterward we met our good friend drtheta for a great dinner in Japantown.  He’s coming back to the convention for the day tomorrow too.

Today you get a hat-trick … I have been posting these in the order in which they appear in my quotation collection page, part of my personal homepages. But the three which appear today are all appropriate to the feeling of the day for me, because …

Afterhell Volume 2 is done!
The disc is being duplicated now and copies go out starting tomorrow!

“All’s well that ends with a good meal.”
– Arnold Lobel

“It’s all malarky; even the wonderful part is malarky.”
– Robert Stack (1919-2003) on Hollywood

“Fall seven times, stand up eight.”
– Japanese proverb