Joyously Prolific

Things are good.

Oh, they are far from perfect, of course -- but then life rarely is for anyone. Russ is scrambling for work, but we've gone through that before and it's not like we're suffering. The cats, because it is spring, are not only in the moods from hell, but have actually been fighting. It's the first spring with the four new ones in the house. I've seen it far worse with young cats and older cats, but I'm older and less tolerant of cats yowling and fur flying. And the amount of cat fur this group sheds is just incredible. (Sweep, sweep, sweep... and the dog doesn't help any!)

But, still... Life is pretty good tonight.

I'm reading that incredible set of books, Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia -- which after this will be referred to as GALE. It's 13 volumes, and I'm missing 6-9. I've found 7-9 on the Internet in this edition. It might take me a bit more work to find 6, but it's not like I'm going to finish all the others this week. (grin). I've seen that there is a new 17 volume set out, and it's running about $2000 complete and a bit over $100 for each one alone. Even the used books for this older set are running about $20 a piece. That's not too bad -- and I got an incredible deal on the nine I have since it was a sale with all hard bounds at $1 each.

I'm 100 pages into the first book and learning about unicellular animals. It's like reading about aliens. Fascinating stuff. I can see entire alien worlds coming into existence in a sort of detail that I've never managed before. My background has always been historical, and even that relatively light in most works.

The editing on Muse is going VERY well again. I completed two more chapters tonight. There is a chance that I may really, honestly have the book done by the end of this month. I'd be a very happy person. This has gone far too long, and yet every time I sit down to work with it I'm very happy with the results. I suspect that there's just too much else going on.

I have not started on my longer list of submission packages yet. I want to get ahead on a few other things first -- the 2YN class most of all. I did finish another short story last night, and if I get Muse done I'll feel like I'm much closer to my goals again. Oh, and there is Vision to do, of course. That's the work for this week. Whenever I have Vision hanging over me I just can't bring myself to start on some other big project, so the last couple weeks of every second month sort of gets bogged down in that work. Good thing that I generally like it, too.

I'm doing very much what I want to do in life. That's pretty amazing when you consider it. So many people never even figure out what they want to do, let alone do it. I wouldn't mind having more money, of course, but I learned a long time ago that I'm happy with just enough paper and a pen, as long as I'm with Russ and the kitty gang. Okay, these days it would have to be computer (grin) and an Internet connection isn't a bad idea. Keeps me busy and mostly out of trouble.

But the truth is if you can't be happy with yourself then no one else is going to make you happy either. It's always easier to hang all the emotional baggage on someone else and demand that the person make us happy, or blame them when things don't go right. I learned very early on that nothing is ever that one-sided, and in fact the problem was far more often on my side. Of course it still happens -- it's part of human nature to try and blame everything on anyone but ourselves, I think -- but I matured out of the worst of that phase.

Now I blame it all on the cats.