The Small Things

Wow. It's been almost two months...and I said I wasn't going to neglect this blog...famous last words, as my grandmother says on all occasions.

Speaking of grandmothers, I had a funny adventure with mine at the end of last month (this being the grandma on my mom's side of the family). She lives about two hours away from us, so usually when we go to visit, we stay at her house for a day and a night. Well, she also has lots of land around her, and a few old abandoned houses across the road. My cousin and brothers and sister wanted to go exploring over there, and she said they could but warned them not to go inside because the houses are in bad shape and there had been rumors of someone staying over there. They went. Those of us still at the house went about our business. The kids didn't come back. Grandma started to freak out. Eventually the worry was too much for her, and she practically made me go with her in her rickety old golf cart to see if we could find them. She drove that darned thing way out into the sticks and shouted and called, and still they didn't come, and I was sure if there were any sinister people in the area they would find us, alone and defenseless in the woods, with a golf cart that would stop groaning along at any second...I began hearing things, imagining the mystery of our missing bodies... No sooner had we gone back to the house, she more worried than ever and I completely freaked out by this time, than the kids came trotting up the path, blissfully oblivious. I ran at them and pretended I was going to bash them with my cane for putting us through all that. Later that day, my aunt saw a man emerge from one of the houses and go walking across the fields. How creepy is that?

I am now president of the Greensboro Career Club for the Visually Impaired. Wow. Actually, I have been since its conception in December, but we didn't have our first meeting until this past Saturday. We had a smaller group than expected, and it could have been a tad more organized, but the meeting itself actually went off without a hitch. I'm very excited...and vastly relieved to be past all the nervousness and shock at finding myself president of anything at all. :) That aside, we have wonderful officers and wonderful members. More updates on that when we actually start doing stuff...I'm going to try not to think too hard about the fact that I've never in my wildest imaginings done anything like this before, and just go with it and put all my resources to the best use I can. Praying for help, knowledge, and quick wits and high spirits.

I still haven't heard anything from UNCG. Oh! My! Gosh! I don't know what I'm going to do if I don't get in there or Chapel Hill...I'll have to take classes at GTCC, and I do not want to be at home another year. I've already determined that I'm oing to start saving for a house or something ASAP, so that maybe after six years of school, I'll have enough for something cheap and small, just some place of my own. I actually don't want to live alone, but if I haven't found my prince charming in all the time I'm at college, I'm not hanging around in the nest waiting for him to find me. Major pro and major con of homeschooling. Pro: if you use the right resources, the academics outstrip any crap you'll get in public school. Tried that for two years and just about perished of boredom. I wonder more people who actually care to use the brain between their ears aren't totally smothered by the beurocracy. Con: lack of emotional breathing space. I've concluded that during adolescence, drama is capable of following one wherever one goes, and if it's not silly girls wailing over their pathetic and premature love lives, it's going to be family stuff, or other stuff capable of creeping through cracks in doors. Hmm, that's a slightly sinister image. That might become a poem.

Writing is going slower than I'd like, but still going well. I finally have a title: The Shining One. I'm just about to a huge turning point, which is exciting and slightly nerve-racking as well. I've found, though, that I'm not turning my back on writing what I know after all. Yes, this is quite different from my usual work, but rather than defying that age-old piece of advice, I've found new meaning in it. For instance, Renee is perhaps the first of my characters to ever have a realistic family life. Now that I'm over the initial shock of that, I like it, because I can identify with her more, and I think anyone else who reads this will be able to as well. I hope I'm not going overboard with Eric, the romantic interest. My two friends that are reading it both love him, but I'll have to get a guy friend to take a look - if any are that brave - when I'm done. :)

School has begun to slither along at a snail's pace, yet I feel that time is going by incredibly fast. It will be the end of the year before I know it...I hope I'll be ready.

This post is long and rambling, made up of lots of small things. But the small things in life are what keep us from being bored to tears with our lot on this earth...they're what make us human.