found trivia:

In 1964 General Mills introduced its magically delicious cereal Lucky Charms, with its animated character Lucky the Leprechaun the keeper/protector of “me Lucky Charms,” from the ubiquitous kids in constant pursuit of Lucky and his cereal and the original marshmallow charms (aka marbits): pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, and green clovers. Now GM is introducing ... you might want to sit down ... Chocolate Lucky Charms. Yes, there have been changes in the cereal over the 40 years but not quite so dramatic as to alter the color of the remaining milk in the bowl to such a degree. Like regular Lucky Charms, the Chocolate version contains eight charms: hearts, shooting stars, horseshoes, clovers, blue moons, pots of gold, rainbows and balloons.

Over the years GM has changed its line-up of charms and introduced special holiday related charms:
1975-addition of blue diamonds
1984-addition of purple horseshoes
1989-red balloons join the line-up
1991-red balloon and orange star are
dropped in exchange for the star/balloon
combination.
1992-the rainbow (pink, yellow, blue) is added
1994-yellow moons out,
Pot O' Gold (yellow & orange) in
1995-the overall color of the charms is
intensified; the moon returns, but this
time around the moon is blue; the star
alters from six point to five points
1996-green clovers are replaced by a light
green hat with a darker green clover

Source:

CYNTHIA TURNER'S
Cynopsis: Kids!
01/31/05

http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/scoreboard

So the other day in the grocery store I saw some displays for "the big game" so I started to wonder just when the superbowl is this year. I went to espn.com to figure it out and had a hard time. Lots of stories about the superbowl, but nothing with any specifics. So finally I clicked on "NFL scoreboard". It clarified the date of the game, but at least on my mac, it says New England is going to start out at -7 instead of 0. Is that so the other guys have a fighting chance?

Sharon Stone rocks. I hate watching these uber-celebrities throwing money at things like hummers and caviar. I have no problem with living well, but there are limits. So I love it on those rare occaisions when I heard that a celebrity has done something with a) their own money and b) their influence to encourage others to do the same.

It's so great to hear about good news on the news.

Books: My dialogue sucks. I guess I need to get out more and listen to real people talking. My characters in my chapter have been talking like tv characters. It's awful.

best bumper sticker seen today:

Vegetarian - Indian word for lousy hunter

best custom license plate seen today (they're out of control in this county):

DOULA4U

Books: Took chapter 3 to a writing group tonight. They're certainly good sports about the weirdness of my book. I used some slang that had them confused. Maybe I'll have to take it out - I don't know.

I survived another dental appointment. Not as much drilling this time, and I don't feel so much like I got hit in the face. Maybe if I go to the dentist religiously any fillings I get will only be but so bad. And maybe I can keep all my teeth till I die. That would be nice. And maybe no root canals. I hear that's possible.

Bear with me, this is as close to optimism as I can get when it comes to dentists.

Went skiing today. Loved it - even though the snow conditions were far from ideal. Skiing is just one of those activities for me that leaves a significant afterglow. I'm elated while I'm doing the activity and I continue to feel that sense of glee for hours afterward. I am skiing. I have skied. These are things to be joyful about.

I may post pictures later.

A friend came to visit for the weekend, so I'll be enjoying myself but not getting much done. We went to the museum this afternoon, then I cooked dinner and we visited into the evening. Yay social interaction.

Right, there was a presidential innauguration today. I barely noticed. Much bigger news in my world is that my 2-year-old niece fell and broken her leg. This morning, the lovely weather prompted her mother to take her out to the park to play, where she climbed up a ladder on a playset - missed the top run, and fell. She landed on her feet (thank goodness, not her head) but she fractured her right tibia. She's in a lot of pain. Poor kid. Her mother feels like a bad mother. Poor mother.

What's interesting to me, is that this is what I've cared about today, even though I understand there's been wall-to-wall news on the subject. So, seriously - who is it that cares about the innauguration? Hmm. I can't help but answer that question with, "People who have nothing else going on in their lives." I mean yes, Bush starts a new term. Sure, it's good to know that fact. But we pretty much knew how the election turned out already. This shouldn't be a red-letter day for anyone but... I don't know... Bush, his friends and family?

Sure, I think people should be interested in civic duty, but maybe all this fierce hatred in politics these days comes from people trying to use politics to fill empty lives. Personally, I can sure do a lot more about making a 2-year-old happy than about fixing Iraq. I wish the politicos the best, but I'm not going to obsess over their problems. I like having a republic. I help elect the people who will make the decisions. I don't have to make them all myself.

Books: Another three sentences down. This is how it goes.

Books: I usually take it as a good sign when the feedback Sarah gives me for one of my chapters begins with profanity. This would be chapter 3 - my only concern is that it took that long to get a response like that out of her. Oh well. I guess everything requires setup of one kind or another. My second reader hasn't chimed in yet with her opinion. Something tells me she won't react in quite the same way as Sarah. The sentiment may be the same, but I suspect it will be expressed without a blue streak.

Went for a lovely drive today. It's been a long time since I lived in this area, and my memories of some of the small towns around here needed updating. Partially because I'm thinking about buying land and building - partially because I just like being aware of my surroundings.

The only excitement was that three deer flirted with death on the bumper of my car. Fortunately, we all escaped unscathed. We only got lost twice, and my Dad was kind enough to go ask directions once when we were in the middle of nowhere and found a farm house.

Books: Sent chapter three to some readers. Working on the third page of chapter four. Things are looking bad for our hero.

Some fun quotes I found today:

Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.
-- Will Cuppy

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
-- Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.
-- Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919)

You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down.
-- Mary Pickford (1893 - 1979)

And finally, one relating to Gone Dark (that novel I'm still trying to get published).

The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary


By the way, I've had a crush on Ambrose Bierce since I was about thirteen.

Surreal experience of the day: I sat down to watch West Wing this evening, which I don't always do anymore. I used to plan my Wednesday around West Wing, but then Sorkin sort of wandered off and then they fired him and now I only watch when it's convenient because nothing else is on the networks at that hour. (Yeah, they recently started putting Alias opposite West Wing, but that show lost me before West Wing did and now it's just too much work to get back into it.)

So anyway, I'm watching West Wing and they're discussing the value of polling etc. and my phone rings - usually I don't pick up calls from numbers my caller ID doesn't know, but this time I have a client with a draft on their desk, so I did.

"We're not selling anything," she says quickly, "we're doing a poll for CBS news." At least I think she said CBS news - that was even more surreal than the bit about a poll. And it struck me that hey - I'm a freelance writer now. I don't have to bow out of these things because I'm employed by a media company.

So I answered their silly little poll. Of course you couldn't choose an answer that wasn't on their list, and their list was VERY black and white. "Who do you think would lead the country in the right direction - Bush or the Democrats in Washington?" My answer? Neither one. But I had to chose one, or not have my opinion counted at all.

I'm not really too worried about it. I know the important questions were burried deep in the middle and that particular question was probably just intended to try to put me in the "Democrat" or "Republican" slot. When I said my party affiliation was "Independant" the next question was "Do you consider yourself more Republican or more Democrat?" What is this? Light pink or baby blue? No - I'm neither one, thank you very much.

It really threw her when I said I voted in the last presidential election, but didn't vote for either Bush or Kerry. So probably they'll throw out my results as a statistical anomaly. Also, I think she was disapointed that my Hispanic-sounding last name doesn't mean I'm Hispanic. She asked me specifically if that was my race. When I said no, all the others were lumped together. That's either a reflection on my last name or the fact that pollsters think Hispanics need prompting to identify themselves as other than white.

At the end of the poll she asked if it would be willing to speak to a reporter, in case they wanted to interview me about my answers. I said sure. I also told her I'm a journalist, just to be fair. Sure in journalism school we all go around interviewing each other for our assignments, but I doubt it's really necessary.

Also, I don't think I qualify as having opinions of "average" America (wherever that is) so I'm not waiting by the phone.

Books: Today I went to the dentist. I really really really dislike going to the dentist. My dentist has a sense of humor. As he got me set up to drill for two fillings he said, "sit back and enjoy the sound effects." So to try to keep my mind off the rising panic attack, I tried to think of them as sound effects for a movie. A movie I might actually want to watch. So now I have a new scene for a supplemental "short story" I've worked on now and then for the novel I finished last year. It stars one of the characters when they were much, much younger than they are in the book. And really, the scene could be adapted for use in a later book instead of the short-story, hmm...

Obviously, I survived the dental appointment, but now I have a lot more sympathy for this particular character - well, her whole race. And if I ever make a movie that involves these scenes I'm going to insist on some audio being recorded in a dentist office with those horrible, horrible drills.

Yeah, took a few sickdays away from my blog. I just see no need to send more pain and suffering out into the universe. I'll keep it to myself, thanks. Maybe the universe will do the same for me. It's a karma thing.

Anyway....

Books: Haven't had much more time to work on my chapters. Been working on a user manual instead. Turned in the second draft today. Hope it meets or exceeds expectations. I haven't decided if writing user manuals helps or hurts my fiction. It definitely takes time away, but it pays the bills and possibly(?) helps me write in a more clear, straightforward way when I do have time to spend on fiction. Here's being optimistic, anyway. (Did you know writing things down about your life makes them more likely to occur? Even if you never read it again, somehow your brain gets the message that this thing is important. Curious, how powerful writing can be - and what blogging must be doing to all these blogger's lives. How's that for a tangent?)

Went to the dentist today. I know, big deal. But really - I hate going to the dentist. I'm not the most nervous, or the most unfortunate in my teeth, but the sound of metal instruments scraping teeth is like fingernails on a chalkboard. (Is that even an appropriate analogy anymore? Schools use "whiteboards" now, don't they? Not "blackboards"?)

Anyway, I survived. It's been at least ten years since I saw a dentist. But you know, if you never see one they never tell you something is wrong. The people in the office thought that was really funny.

The result? I have one place that definitely needs a filling and several "areas of interest." I'm told I got off lucky thanks to really good genes. Thanks mom and dad! Hopefully I'll survive the drilling next week.

Books: Chapter three ended itself in a way I hadn't expected. It's short. Very short. I hope it doesn't throw my outline into confusion.

I can't believe it's Wednesday already this week. I guess it's only January 5th, but it already feels like 2005 is slipping away from me. What did I get done the last two days? I remember feeling incredibly busy, but I don't remember what I actually did. I hope it made me some money.

Speaking of money, my friend Sarah talked on her blog today about how slow it seems that checks arrive for freelancers. I can only wholeheartedly agree with her. Though personally I think the US Postal Service is in on the racket. Apparently they're still using the pony express to move mail from Dallas TX to Montana. So far I've had two checks sent from there, and both times it's taken ten days from the time it hit the mailbox in TX to the day it arrived in mine.

It only takes two days to get from Chicago to Montana. What's the big obstacle between here and Texas? I know it's hard to carry that much water for the horses across the desert, but really.

Books: Oh dear. Sometimes I'm an incredibly bad writer. I just rewrote a paragraph because the main subject wasn't mentioned until the last paragraph. Then I realized I had used the word "back" to mean two different things (backside and back-and-forth) in (hah) back-to-back sentences. So I fixed that. Then I realized I had also used the word "look" to mean two different things (see vs. seem) in those same adjacent sentences. Evidently my vocabulary is severely limited.

(That's a long, awkward description of my bad writing. A simple example would have been faster - but I'm sorry, they're fixed now and I couldn't reconstruct the attrocity if I tried.)

Books: I don't like writing fight scenes. My instinct is to write, "There was a moment of struggle, then she found herself tied up with duct tape etc." But what I'm told is that people like to see the exciting stuff happen, not just be told that it did happen. Silly people.

My first real action scene in this novel happens in chapter three. It has me trepidatious.

Time for friends and loved ones to go check out my "pictures" page. You can learn more about how to hunt down Christmas Trees in the wild, see what a thoroughly Despain Christmas is like, and discover what it was I was talking about a few posts ago where I said I was working on stuff I couldn't talk about yet (hint: it has more to do with holidays than writing).

Warning: the captions are long and boring. Feel free to just look at the pictures and make up your own captions as you go along.