This is week 108 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 749): Father’s Day

My parents were supposed to come over for Father’s Day breakfast, and I overslept. I planned to make Belgian waffles, but #1GF! didn’t think we’d have enough food, so she ran out to pick up muffins and sausages. I showered in about ten seconds, and didn’t have one thing prepared by the time they got to the house.

My parents brought me a gift for Father’s Day. Considering that I’m not officially a father yet, and Father’s Day gifts are only supposed to travel from child to parent, I felt bad that they only Father’s Day gift to my father was breakfast.

We didn’t end up playing a game or anything because my father didn’t feel like it. It was Father’s Day, and he was the only official father in the group, so the call was his to make. We sat and talked around the table for a few hours, and I made a couple of sandwiches later that were eaten by under protest of not being hungry.

My parents went home, and #1GF! and I cleaned up. I’m not a clean cook by any stretch of the imagination, but a waffle iron always ends up being a damned mess no matter how neat I try to be. I sent #1GF! out of the kitchen because she mentioned that she was tired, but couldn’t figure out why. I explained to her that she was making a baby, and should be laying on the couch or something. She dismissed me, but headed for the den to do as she was told anyway.

It was so windy, rainy, and dark that if felt like winter. We watched movies and TV for the rest of the day to complete the feeling. I found the TV boring, but didn’t make a move to try something else because the weather seemed like a perfect excuse to do nothing. I doubt that we’ll have moments to sit around like this once the baby shows up, so I thought that we should take advantage while we could.

Monday (Day 750): LOR 107 All Day

The first waking thought of the day was what a good life I have. The second was that it was really awful that either #1GF! or I would inevitably die one day and leave the other behind. As I lay there in bed, I found this to be a pretty odd thing to wake up thinking about.

Once I got moving, I sat down and wrote LOR 107. I took a break for lunch, and ended up thinking about how one could produce an illusion of time travel through faster than light speeds. For example, say you were watching an event on earth with a telescope. If you could travel faster than the speed of light, you should technically be able to outrun the image of the what you saw, point your incredibly powerful telescope at the earth, and wait for the event to happen again when the image from the event caught up to you. I was feeling a little smart when I found an almost an identical idea in a book that I was reading. I wasn’t happy to find out that science fiction writers (and probably a lot of other folks) had thought of this idea years ago.

I wrote from 8:30 to 5:30, and was surprised at the number of post-production errors found by my editor once she arrived home.

Tuesday (Day 751): The Pure Excitement of Novel Writing

I read my mail, and then got started on the novel at about 9:30AM. I went through each chapter, adding words and correcting what I could. I made it all the way to the end, and went back to the beginning to start the process over. Most of it was a relatively tedious process of reading and editing, but I was surprised to laugh a couple of times at words that I had forgotten I had written. If I’m accidentally making myself laugh, that’s probably positive. Then again, not being able to remember some of the things you write isn’t a very good thing. By 6:45PM, I had added another 3,100 words.

At 7PM, I went to make #1GF! some dinner. I know. I have a way of making the life of the stay at home writer sound like pure excitement. It’s as if you’re thinking, “This guy must be the one that the movie Crank was based on. He must have more adrenaline flowing through his veins than a stamp collector, or a professional chess player. How can he live like that?” The answer, is pacing, my friends. Pacing.

Wednesday (Day 752): Novel Writing Before The Alien Arrives

I wrote the novel all morning, drank three cups of coffee, got jittery, had a sandwich, and didn’t finish writing until 7PM. In 11 hours, I only managed to get out 2500 words.

Mid day, I checked the mail and got a CD for my CD challenge from Will over at MCLA magazine. The package came with three of their latest issues, which was a pretty cool bonus for me as a one season lacrosse player in high school. Thanks, Will.

I backed up the novel in a couple of places at the end of the day because an entire novel is a lot of words to lose. When #1GF! got home, we had leftovers and sat down to watch Weeds.

“Look look!” said #1GF! as we were sitting on the couch.

I hit the pause button to watch a bump move across the top of her belly as if there was a tennis ball rolling under her skin.

“Whoa.” I said to #1GF!. “Now that is freaky.”

“You should feel it on the inside.”

Unless we had been watching Alien, television paled in comparison.

Soon after, my home brew DVR crashed again. It has started crashing a lot lately, and may be on its way out. It’s a number of years old, and it looks like either the main drive or the memory is starting to go. Throwing money at a machine that is chugging along on 387 megabytes of RAM seems like a waste.

We finished the Weeds disc, and I lay in bed thinking about 3D because of a presentation that I saw called Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote. I thought about it so much that it ended up keeping me awake long after the lights went out.

It was good that I was awake because my lovely, pregnant #1GF! started snoring in a way that I can only describe as two part motion of a piston as filtered through an early 90’s industrial song. I couldn’t help but laugh every time it happened, and ended up waking the poor girl up before I could add a beat and sell it to Sony Entertainment.

I tried to describe the sound to #1GF! by imitating it, but she eventually told me to stop my comedically loud snoring variations that I punctuated with, “No, no, wait that’s not it.” I never did recapture the sound, and will probably never have an industrial hit song as a result. The fact that this pregnancy gave me the opportunity, is one of the potential miracles that they don’t tell you about in child class.

Thursday (Day 753): The Devil Is In The Details

I tried to recreate some of the ideas that I had the night before without using a Wiimote, but they didn’t quite work. As cool as 3D is, I gave up on it fairly quickly because I didn’t have the time to make it a priority.

I burned another copy of the Ultimate Boot CD and went to work on checking the failing DVR. I didn’t end up using the disc because it was immediately apparent that there was a disk issue. I started a drive check and wandered away to let it do its thing.

I wondered why I was working on the PC at all. I should probably either replace it or give it up all together, but fixing problems can be more compulsion than logic among tech people. It’s as if no unconscious bucket of bolts is going to resist a tech person’s will to repair it. The DVR is old and long overdue for retirement, yet I’m tying its hands to the oars and trying to force it to row on.

Because of the technical sidetracks, I didn’t start writing until 11AM. I only had 667 words written by the time I broke for lunch.

After days of rain, the sun came out for the first time. I took in the barrels and felt the sun on my shoulders. The air was humid and warm, and filled with the smell of wet grass. It was nice to be out of my office for a few minutes. Like a true Yankee, I turned that minute of relaxation into something else by looking around at all the leaves in the yard and deciding that I would probably need to rake this week.

I went back to my tiny office and started working on the novel again. And this is where trying to write a book gets weird: I got stuck for at least twenty minutes looking up women’s shoes. I know. It’s weird.

I had a character that I have been piecing together, and she had to change from her work clothes into casual clothes. I don’t know anything about men’s clothes, never mind women’s clothes, so I couldn’t just pull an outfit out of my head that would be in character for this woman to wear. I thought that I could sort of fudge an outfit, but when I got to what shoes she was putting on, I had no clue. So, I had to spend some time looking up women’s shoes to figure out what the character would wear.

When I explained all this to #1GF!, she laughed and asked why it was important. Even though a shoe, shirt, or even the type of car a person drives is relatively inconsequential to a story, I think that they are important to creating the characters. When the details don’t make sense, then they stick out and have the potential to pull the reader out of the story, or create logistical complications later. What if the character had to run at some point in the story. Putting her in flip flops would create a very different scene than if she were in sneakers or heels.

The same thing happened the day before when I was trying to figure out what the interior of a certain model of car would look like. Is the interior of a car important if it’s used for one scene? Probably not. Most readers won’t know that the floor mats of a particular year of car never came in grey as you wrote, but that detail can be important to the author.

Even if I never mention the color of the floor mats, the model of shoe, or the price that a character paid for a particular brand of sunglasses in the text, I think it’s good for me to know those details to help create a better mental picture of the character or scene in my head. If those details don’t exist in my mind, a scene might become more difficult to describe to the reader. We’ll see if any of this matters when the novel’s finished, or whether it’s all in my head.

#1GF! came home with another truckload of stuff from a baby shower that they had for her at work. I helped haul it into the house and dropped it in the living room. We sat on the couch, and I wrote down who gave what for the thank you notes while #1GF! took the gifts out of their bags. We had leftovers for dinner because I was still on a writing kick and hadn’t bothered to cook anything.

By the time we finished dinner, it was already 9PM. I was at 49,000 words and desperately wanted to break 50,000. #1GF! watched TV, and I went back to my office to write. I opened the scene I was working on, but couldn’t bring myself to edit it. I stared at the screen wondering whether it was a good idea to wind up my brain if it meant that I might end up writing all night.

I closed out the book and opened my feed reader to catch up on some RSS feeds. I read a lot of them, hoping for a little entertainment to distract me from the thousand words I needed to write. “Won’t someone just say one interesting fucking thing? Entertain me for chrissakes,” I said to the screen softly after reading a ton of feeds without so much as cracking a smile. I closed the feed reader and thought about going back and starting the novel again. I stared at the background with my hand on the mouse, wondering what to click.

“I’m not doing this,” I said as if resisting a slave driving boss. Then, I realized that I didn’t have to. I shut down the PC and went and read a book to help my brain settle down a little before bed. Of course, I reread the same page several times because plot issues in my novel would pop into my head every few paragraphs until I made mental notes to rewrite and correct them in the morning.

Friday (Day 754): Robot Vs. Mower

I put away some of the baby stuff that was still in the living room from #1GF!’s work shower, but didn’t get that far because I thought that #1GF! might have ideas on what should be going where. I had the radio on, and because Michael Jackson had died, I couldn’t go two stations without hitting a Micheal Jackson song. Not one was a hit from when he had a wide nose and a future.

I settled on a rock station that was sure to have no MJ, and cleaned the bathroom. I’m not going to get into how fun it was, if only to keep the words on this page from bonding together and shooting out of the screen, bombarding you, poor reader, with more fun than you can handle. I’ll spare you and move on.

Yea, I kept the excitement train rolling by baking cookies. As if that weren’t exciting enough, I added more brown sugar than white sugar to see if I could boost the chewiness. The cookies looked like they should be rocks, but were pretty soft, so maybe it worked. And then, to continue my imitation of a domestic partner in the 1950’s, I talked to a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman, played bridge, and used phrased like, “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

Once all of the inside the house chores were completed, I moved on to the outside the house chores. I headed down to the basement to tune up the mower. My mower runs on human power, so a tune up simply meant making sure that the edges of the rotary blades were touching the cutter blade as they passed by.

I took the mower out and set it in the middle of the basement floor. The robot looked on quizzically. I could hear his eye whirring in and out of focus as he tried to locate the power source for the mower with infrared.

“It’s a mower, robot.”

The robot flashed a battery symbol on his eye to let me know that it didn’t have a charge.

“There is no battery.”

The robot played a sound of a lawnmower starting and then stalling. I can only guess that he recorded it from one of the neighbors while sitting by his window, but I can’t imagine why.

“No, this is a reel mower.”

I knew right when it came out of my mouth, I shouldn’t have used the word “reel”. The robot would transfer any mowers he had seen into his “imaginary” databank, and would then want to come over and see what a “real” mower looked like. Among other things, my bargain bin robot does not have the circuitry necessary to decypher homophones.

As I predicted, the robot wheeled himself over to the front of the mower and looked at it and then at me. Like most of the neighbors, he was having a hard time understanding why I would use a tool in place of a machine for cutting the grass.

Against my better judgment, I showed the robot how it works. “You push it and the blades cut the grass. Like this.” I gave the mower a gentle push forward, and the blades spun with a shiick shick shick shick.

I don’t know if it was the sound or the rotating blades moving toward him, but the robot gunned himself backward into the basement wall, and tried to make a ninety degree turn before fully recovering his balance. He toppled over with a tonk, and his wheels spun full force, caching nothing but air. He played a recording of a dog barking, I think to deter the mower from attacking, on the off chance that it the powerless mower was afraid of dogs.

I stepped around the mower to set the robot right. His wheels were still running full speed, so when they caught the ground, he toppled over again. His tub thumped as he hit the ground.

“Robot, stop.”

With a whir, the robot’s wheels spun down and stopped. I picked him up again, and as soon as all four wheels were on the ground, he quickly wheeled himself behind a pile of boxes.

“It’s a tool robot. It’s not even sentient.” I thought the robot might like the implication that the small set of circuits he had on board were superior to that of the mower. He peeked out from behind the boxes and his eye flashed a yellow exclamation point, followed by a red question mark.

“No. It can’t hurt you as long as you don’t go near it. Don’t get near it is all.”

The robot’s eye turned green.

“You never noticed the mower before? It’s been right here next to the rakes.”

The robot’s eye whirred as he focused on the rakes, which he seemed to be noticing for the first time. His eye flashed red. Then green.

“Did you or didn’t you?” I asked.

The robot paused and flashed red.

“Just stay away from the mower and you’ll be fine.”

As I brushed some old grass off the mower’s axle, The robot retracted behind the boxes.

“Are you going to stay back there all day? It’s supposed to rain later and I’d like you to watch the window.” I knew it was a useless question because if given fifteen seconds of silence or two minutes of stress, the robot was sure to be in sleep mode already.

I tuned up the mower, not being entirely sure if it was better than when I started, and went out to clean up the yard. I had to rake up all the leaves that the nor’easter threw on the lawn before I could mow, so I grabbed one of the rakes and started in. That’s one of the drawbacks of a human powered mower: they don’t mulch your leaves for you.

I raked the yard, thinking that it was unnatural to have to rake in the spring, fall, and summer. Twice a year is bad enough. Once the raking was done, I mowed the lawn, and took everything back inside. The robot was still behind the boxes, so I wheeled him back to his window. He was still in power save, so he didn’t even notice.

I returned a bunch of phone calls and took a shower, and it was already 3:30PM. I still had the matter of that 1000 words that needed to be added to my novel to get me to my goal. I wrote down what I did for the day in LOR, checked my mail, and only got 625 words out before I was out of time. I was still just short of 50,000. It felt like losing a close race, being given a second chance, and losing by a nose.

A couple of friends came over to see the house and go out to dinner, and they brought along what I consider to be one of the best onesies we’ve gotten. It has a picture of Mr. T on the front. I pity the baby who don’t have a MR. T onesie. Ungh.

Saturday (Day 755): I Pity The Youths

#1GF! and I made pasta salad in the morning, and then went to a birthday party at her family’s house. Except for the radio being hijacked by a country channel, everything went smoothly. Well, almost everything. One of the hit gifts was a bubble machine, which had to be fully taken apart and put back together to get working.

It took two adults fifteen minutes to get that toy blowing bubbles, but once it was operational, it was pointed directly at various people by one of the kids. Within seconds, it was like Lawrence Welk on crack, as the bubbles flew out of the machine and into various people’s faces. For a toy, that thing really made a lot of bubbles.

In the mid afternoon, we drove an hour to my cousin’s house for his annual family cookout. The weather had been threatening rain all day, and on the way, there was a freak thunderstorm, complete with hail and strings of cars pulling over to the side of the road. Some cars were pulling under bridges and up the cement embankments like the wanted to be high enough that they could drive right when the ark floated through. The rain was heavy, but it didn’t seem like it was end of the world heavy and cause for people to freak out and call their families to say one last goodbye.

Once we got off the highway, the sun was already shining, and we got behind a tractor that looked like it was being driven by a stereotypical farmer. I know he was wearing a worn 1940’s style fedora and looked as if both he and the hat had been hung on a line in bad weather for a number of years. I don’t know if he had overalls on, but in my memory, he does. He also is called “Paw” by his son, who only goes by the name, “Boy” (which the man always seems to pronounce as boweh. We saw a couple of other full sized farm tractors driving along the way, and felt like we weren’t in Kansas anymore.

The cookout felt like the family cookouts from when I was a kid, except that there were a lot less old Italian looking dudes, and I was now the one telling kids how big they had gotten while they looked on like “Wait, who are you again?”

During a random conversation, I mentioned the Mr. T onesie we got the day before, and the kids shrugged because they have no clue who Mr. T is. Sure they might know the mohawked master of disaster from his World of Warcraft, 1800Collect, or even the Mr. T FlavorWave oven ads (sad, but true), but the new generation never got to experience the cartoon having, 1983 custom GMC van driving, Rocky Balboa beating, pain predicting, album making, milk drinking magic of Mr. T. I feel sorry for the kids. No, no. I don’t just feel sorry for them. I pity the fools. Ungh.

My cousins and I talked about “The Eye of the Tiger” 45 RPM that my sister scratched when I was a kid, and they reminded me that we all went to see Rocky III together at the movies back in 1982. We got to hear not only “The Eye of The Tiger” in the only way that it should be heard, but we also witnessed the birth of the phrase “I pity the fool.”

Oh, what you thought “I pity the fool” became a Mr. T catch phrase out of thin air? Back in 1982, a mere 27 years ago, Clubber Lang as played by Mr. T said, “No, I don’t hate Balboa, but I pity the fool. And I will destroy any man who tries to take what I got.” And all of us saw that shit when a theater was still the best option for movies. I pity those times. Ungh.

There were hay rides rolling around the neighborhood for the kids, and one of my cousin’s sons was deciding on whether to go. He looked like he wanted to go, so I turned the situation into a panic because I figured he’d have a better time on a hay ride than he would standing around with a bunch of old people who know who Mr. T is.

“I can’t go because I’m too big.” I told him. “They won’t let me. You have to go and tell me how it is. You have to! Hurry up! Go! GO!” A few people added to the din of encouragement, but it looked like it needed a kick over the edge. I dug deep and added, “Do it for Johnny, man. Do it for Johnny!” as dramatically as I could. The kid ran off and jumped into a tractor, never knowing that he was being encouraged by a quote from a movie from 1983. If I had only somehow worked “Sweep the leg,” in to the conversation somehow, I would have had the first half of the 80’s covered.

The tractor rolled by towing a ton of kids, and it popped a wheelie in the street as it passed. We all cheered, but looking back, it didn’t seem good to have a bunch of kids riding behind a wheelie popping tractor. Then again, not letting the 80’s stay dead is never a good idea either, and I was walking that path. I guess we all have to live dangerously sometimes.

As I stood there watching the horseshoe tournament, Ozzy came on the stereo. I looked around for someone to share a steaming, hot cup of awesome with, but was denied. I stood enjoying my heavy metal roots and wondered when someone would complain and change it. Although it was a mixed age crowd, no one seemed to notice the Randy Rhoads solo meedling out of an upstairs window.

That’s when I realized that the song that I was enjoying was close to thirty years old. Even the more senior people at the party had probably heard it enough times over the years that they probably could’ve hummed a few bars of it whether they liked it or not. Thirty year old metal is no cause for alarm, which was good, but a little sad.

When you feel like the music might need to be watered down to avoid freaking out the older people, and no older people are freaking out, maybe the music has already been watered down, and you just don’t know it, yet. Or worse, you have become one of the old people. I pulled my shawl around my shoulders and eyed the other people suspiciously who didn’t know Mr. T and refused to be offended by metal songs that were old enough to be packaged up and sent to the oldies station. I tried not to show it, but I could’ve really used a nice butterscotch hard candy to help calm me down from the fury that was ZZZZZZZZZZZ.

We didn’t stay long enough to see the fireworks because #1GF! was putting on her strong face to hide the fact that she was swelling up like a marshmallow in a microwave. We left at around 7PM for the long ride home. Even though there wasn’t it was all fun and games, it felt like we hadn’t stopped moving in two days.

What I Learned

• Ozzy is no longer a problem to play at parties.
• Babies are an absolute freakshow when they start moving under the skin.
• Sometimes you have to research mundane things to write a book.
• Adding more brown sugar at the expense of white sugar in a chocolate chip cookie seems to make them a little chewier, but not as sweet.
• I can tune up a reel mower.
• I can fix a bubble machine.
• No one knows Mr. T because he was popular twenty-five years ago.

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