that vision thang - February 16th, 2008

Goodness. Everyone seems incredible ill around me these days. Thankfully not the immediate family, but the extended, students at school, fellow teachers. You know its bad when a professional development day has been canceled in favor of a day off so we teachers can have an extra day of rest and get better (seriously, that was the announcement.) Actually, I've dodged the bullet so far, and it's making me nervous. I always get sick, very sick, when it goes around. And I'm on an immune-supressent for my RA/Fibro, so that's almost a guarantee that I will get sick. I feel like a prisoner waiting for her execution. I know its coming. I'm just not sure entirely when.

Also, the RA AND Fibro have decided to flare up and make me miserable today. The life of these diseases is incredibly disenheartening. Every time I think I've finally gone into remission, or am having a good streak, it hits and it hits hard. I have shown more movies and given more filler work this year in my room than I ever have before, and that includes the years my mother died, my stepfather was at the end stage of his cancer, and both years I was pregnant. I have never been so far behind in grading-- and its only the third week of the quarter! In addition, we would never have clean clothes if my husband didn't do the laundry (I do sort it and put it away, I haven't completely abdicated my household chores.) My house hasn't been properly scrubbed and such in months, though just quick cleaned (and that not in a few weeks.) Its just too much for to for me. I can manage one room, in about three times the time it used to take me, and the extra time is not just for kid interference.

My hands HURT today. My muscles feel like a suit of armor beneath my skin, and a layer of incredibly small, linked knots beneath that. The top layer of my skin feels as if its fallen asleep, but without the pins and needles- like its not quite mine, as if I've just borrowed it for a time. And no matter how warm the house is, my feet feel like they are in a bucket of ice water. It hurts to sit, to lay down, to move at all. This is one of the bad days, I think.

Current Mood: anxious

Well, I am running small errands today in an effort to keep moving and not sink into an "Ow! My whole body hurts!" rut. So, as I watch Elder clean up the tornado of toys she and Younger have deposited across my living room this morning and wait to get her dressed to run to my favorite thrift store, I decided to update again.

The Philadelphia Writer's Conference finally posted it's 2008 Schedule. I've been waiting for a couple of months. Last year when I went, at the persistent nudging of my Writing Buddy, half on a whim; I had no original fiction ready to show, none written actually, and only a few blogging months to my credit. It was more to see what it was about. I registered at the last minute, missing the deadline for manuscript submissions to the workshops anyway, and didn't read the conference tips, etc. I picked my sessions rather randomly, and what really made me decide was that the mystery workshop was being done by Gillian Roberts. She was great, and that was probably the best session I went to. Some really blew chunks, were almost painful to sit through. This year looks pretty cool.

The genre this year is romance, and as I have two stories I am working on for Aphrodite's Apples, well, it seems like a good workshop to go to. I plan to submit a short to every workshop I attend, to the Word Wall Contest, and see what happens. I am also signing up this year for an agent/editor meeting, something I completely skipped last year as a waste of time at that point. I will schedule a meeting this year; there are several genre people that are going to be there. I am just very excited this year. I feel less like a fraud attending it-- although, to be honest, many of the people there last year were retirees who were just thinking about writing their memoirs and not serious writers.

Well, she's done cleaning. On to the thrift store.

Current Mood: sore