random ramblings

So, the kids have stopped staying in bed until seven a.m.  This morning, I was awakened by a pixie throwing a tantrum just minutes before.  Screaming.  Tantrum.  In the hall, just outside the master bedroom door.  The kids now get to deal with angry mommy for the morning.

She is, with the exception of continuing to hack and cough (and then need a drink of water or juice) every little bit, over her bout with pneumonia.  The fever is gone, and the lethargy vanished with it.  She isn't seeming as if she's having a hard time breathing at all, now.

And she's starting to agitate to start learning what the imp is.  I'm trying to distract her, because I'm pretty sure the preschool will be doing this with her come fall.  I don't want her bored in class when it's class time.

The imp is doing very well with learning to hold pencils and crayons right.  He seems to do better with letters with curving lines than he does ones with straight lines. Although, yesterday...yesterday, he drew a capital A on a blank piece of scrap paper, then added a few lines and turned it into a house. 

I found a nifty website that's doing wonders with helping him learn to form his letters.  Basically, it's a writing worksheet generator: choose a style, and choose whether it's sentences or paragraphs, and then type what you want the kids to do in a box to the side.  I'm thinking that, regardless of whether or not he's accepted to the private school's kindergarten, I'll keep working with him with these.  Last night, I created a worksheet with the entire alphabet, done in outline, and gave him a crayon.  And he had a lot of fun tracing letters, more or less correctly.

Now to teach him that there's an order in which he's supposed to work: left to right, top to bottom.

The other breakthrough the imp has had is that he's started picking up the pencils and/or crayons with his left hand automatically.  At first, I had to remind him of that every time--everyone else uses their right hands, so this is what he'd do--but now, it's becoming automatic. 

I'm also thinking I'll start him (and the pixie) on the Hooked on Phonics system I got, then gave up on, because it required base knowledge he had no interest in acquiring.

The dog decided to be a destructive little hairball, yesterday.  She somehow managed to get ahold of a plastic fork and a scotch tape dispenser, and demolished them both.  It took several minutes to find all of the plastic shards and pick them up to put them in the trash.

We've had about five days, now, of unseasonably cool weather.  We went from being in the eighties on Tuesday to the fifties on Wednesday, with quite a bit of rain thrown in.  We're still on the cooler side, and shouldn't warm up until Monday.

I tell you that to tell you this: the cats have gone downright batshit insane.  The cooler temps have the cats tearing through the house, tackling each other, and flinging themselves (and each other) into walls and the doors.  Shadow seems to have lost about a pound in constant play.  Cricket has increased her food intake accordingly, and it seems the food bowls are empty every time I turn around.

With everyone being sick to varying degrees (the imp isn't as sick as the pixie was, but he's been pretty miserable with a bad cough, runny/stuffy nose, and sounding like a little frog to boot with the squeaky, hoarse voice--and I'm just a little worse than he was because I've run a low grade fever the whole time, and he hasn't), I haven't gotten much done.  I finished "Bar Tabs," at least in first draft, and started a story for a contest that I'm not sure will fit.  But right now, that's all.  I haven't managed to keep up with housework at all, nor to finish anything else.

I'm still waiting on the cover art for Lizzy's Tale.  Since the cover artist is a friend, I was hoping to have her and her other half over for dinner...but the other half has asthma really bad, and I didn't want to expose him to a nasty respiratory illness that could land him in the hospital.  So, that is coming, but...yeah.  Not sure when that's coming out.  I have everything done except for the cover.

Sometime this week, I'll post a sample chapter of Pendragon Resurgent.  I'll be spending this week going through it from last line to first,* editing it, and then I'll work on formatting it for publication.  I'm hoping to put it out sometime the next week...so, this next weekend (5/23-25), I'll likely put The Last Pendragon up for free download. 

*If you read from first line to last, you're reading what you meant to write, not what you actually wrote.  If you read from last line to first, you're going to find the mistakes--misplaced words, fragmented sentences left from revision, choppy places where you added a scene or changed it without smoothing it out...typos, wrong words, and anything else you may have done.