The week in Review

Tuesday

This was a big writing day for me. I finished typing up a story called Burning Embers, which is one I found in my files that I wrote back in 2003. It takes place during the final months of living at the Homestead with Josie, before I moved out on my own, and tells the story of a party we went to when we were starting to seek out other people, and I was just starting to view myself as a gay man. I always liked the first line of the story: "We are driving down Interstate 95 in a borrowed convertible and a lease on love that had long since expired."

At the time I thought it was too honest and might hurt Josie's feelings, so I hid it away and hadn't read it in quite some time. In re-reading it I think it captured perfectly how sad I felt at the time. Definitely worth adding to the collection.

Wednesday

We spent most of the day at Shiplap, working on the Christmas arch. The Christmas rush is already here, which I think is ridiculous...let's enjoy Halloween for a while! But Brit has a holiday event next week, so... arch it we must.

To get there, we first had to remove all the foliage from the spring, which took a few hours to do.

However, I definitely think the final product is worth it. What do you think?

I always enjoy our days spent working in the store. Corb is very particular about how things are arranged, as he should be as the designer, so I tend to be grunt work and idea support, but I don't mind that one bit. One of the things I did forget to do was to bring my laptop so if I have down time I can write, and I did start getting a bit grouchy around three, but he put me to work hanging ornaments and that helped him and helped me feel productive. After we were done we grabbed a quick bite of lunch (the late time may have also contributed to my grouchiness).

Thursday

Our weeks tend to form a pattern these days, and it is one that makes me happy. It's so much more fulfilling than the day-to-day Public Relations crises that used to fill my days just six months ago.

Monday and Wednesday are typically workdays for the business, while Thursdays are more focused on the house or driving out to buy merchandise for the stores. Today was definitely focused on the outside of the house, as we finally were able to finish up closing the pool for the winter (well, most of it). The big thing was to put the tarp over the pool, which was a major undertaking.

And after that, I finished pulling together five local grant applications for the Eldredge Players, as the deadline for submission was today. Much of the work I had completed the day before, after getting home from Shiplap.

Ashes also informed us that she has secured her licensed mental health counselor license. That is awesome news and such hard work! After all we went through for so long, it is so nice to see her thriving and doing good in this world. I am very, very proud of what she has achieved.

Friday

Corb works at Shiplap on Fridays, so I had much of the day to myself, and much of the time was spent typing up another story for Queer Birds that I had been handwriting all week. This one is called "Losin' It," and I use the trope of the eighties teen sex comedy to tell the story of how I lost my virginity and also as a result severed an important friendship for nearly three decades. I am feeling very good about how I've laid it out.

With that story, I only have one more short story to pull together, called "Pandora's Box," which I am giving a lot of thought to. It takes place when Josie and I were first dating and details her locating my journal and reading it for the first time...and learning some things she probably wish she hadn't. It's a key story, but I want to be really careful with how I construct it and am debating how much I really want to say. That will be a challenge for next week.

I will post last night's martini post separately, but when Corb went home from work, we went out to dinner and then went to see Sense and Sensibility. Steven was an extra in the movie and said we might see him in the outdoor scenes, but we tried and really couldn't really see him anywhere. The movie is lit in quite a moody fashion, to approximate the look of an oil painting, I think. Good movie though, and I did enjoy searching for him as we watched it. It's kind of like a game of Where's Waldo.

Saturday

Finished up all of the outdoor work to winterize the home, which puts us ahead of schedule. Then I organized two weeks of comic books and sat down to type up this entry. Hello to my new LJ friends, if you are reading this! Tomorrow, we head out to more antique stores with Corb's mother.