i'm on kind of an enforced break. what i've been doing is somewhat fanatic reading - reading of almost every indie work available, in return for people reading mine, which they've done dutifully, making my ratings pretty good for the new year. i look now at a ratings sheet in which i can tell that people are reading my work.

meanwhile all kinds of family things happening - sons coming and going, people busy with presents and food and getting ready for the new year, washing machine breaking, a little house deco going on, that kind of thing. it all wears me out and makes me want to sit down and just read more indie work.

we are down to three puppies now, one of them having died in the last month, and i'm a little torn about what to do. one possibility is to remember him by campaigning (in my own style) against lawn chemicals, since he died of cancer at a young age and there's virtually nothing else that could have been responsible. another would be to just let it go, let him rest in peace, assume that whatever it was, was part of the natural world and there was nothing we or the vet or anyone else could do about it. it was one of the major tragedies of the year, but it's not the first time dogs have died, since dogs generally don't last as long as we do and find it very hard to keep up with our dramatic environmental changes.

we've had a cloudy spell - a big pile of clouds just came upon us, and pretty much sat here, and didn't let the sun come through at all for several days. this is actually not bad for us - unheard of in new mexico of course so somewhat novel to us these days - and we get ready for the new year, probably going to bed early, probably not doing a whole lot tonight or tomorrow - but having this enormous cloud blocking out the sun the whole time.

and meanwhile our washer went out, which means out i go into the town to do the laundry at a laundromat, and that's an adventure, not really a great one but usually full of surprises. watching the hawkeyes on television was a feature of it today but the other day i also got to see the world cup. this is literally the only television i'll watch in the entire year. and i've got a kind of ban on my fanatic indie reading and want to concentrate on doing a few of the other things there are out there in life, most notably restarting my quilt, but also making quaker pamphlets and going for long walks out into the countryside. i can get to the woods from here in about a mile so why don't i do it - well, for one thing, because it's cold and very cloudy. but for another, because i'm always working the puppies, and have generally had plenty of exercise. exercise is not the problem.

one of the problems is in general a bottleneck on the writing. i am finishing three projects on the big computer, and trying to write a novel as well, but the novel is somewhat bottled up causing me to brood and try to work out the plot twists that aren't quite resolved yet. so basically what i have is three or four projects up on the table and a hesitance to even open the thing up. i started writing haiku about my ear condition - steadily more difficult - and i'm still writing haiku about 9-11 - but the haiku at times doesn't make it from the little scraps of paper in my shirt pocket, to the big computer itself because i don't open up the big computer. instead i stay on my little one where i can do compulsive indie-reading and marketing, and i can fly around from one e-mail account to the other, doing business, having fun, checking facebook, etc. the small one is so efficient and easy that it makes me avoid the big one, which of course has word and has almost all the creative works i'm struggling with.

so, as it goes, i stumble into the new year, wishing i could spend a few hours pulling family pictures off the web, but yet, just a little too lazy to pull it off. there are lots of things like that, on my to-do list, not getting done, and i'm thinking of just prohibiting compulsion until i get my act together.