Bo-Bo Knows Mitt's Craaaaazy!

Did you hear the latest? It's rough, rough, news, so make sure your furries are not around, kay? Mitt left his mutt on the roof then drove for twelve hours! Twelve! The Bo-bos can't go for three without yuking on mom's back seat...and that's when she puts me INSIDE with my BED and a BLANKIE. Sometimes there's too much stuffs in there with me, but mostly it's all right because--did I mention this?--I'm  INSIDE with the Moms!

Moms don't like the Mitt because he doesn't like the poor and she says he acts like he's the obsessively driven CEO who's pissed to find his company at number 501 on Fortune's list, but the Bo-bos thinks the prezzie shouldn't be allowed to be mean to the furries. I mean that Obowwow guy's pretty cool with the furries. And he names them such beautiful names, too. But back to the Mitt. He's mean and he doesn't even know it! Have you seen this?


Mitt Romney Admits He Tied Family Dog To The Roof of His Car [Video]

Clearly, furries need to be allowed to vote. If only to prevent Mitt's being mean to his mutts.

Bo-Bo Knows I'm Toast

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah-bity-blah blah. 
"Blah?" 
"Blah," blah blah.
Blah blah blah blah-by blah--blah blah-dy blah blah! 

The novel and all those other Big Ideas (not the capital letters) I had for December? They're making about as much sense as this blog post.

Bo-Bo Knows Mama Has No Business Making Wagers

After the first week of operation wacky writing wager (the use of the word wacky has more to do with my addiction to alliteration than anything wrong with the wager itself) I'd like to report that Stephen and I are locked in an epic horse race, but what we're actually in is more of a snail's race. We've both got a trail of slime stretching behind us that we've made an empty peace with calling our works in progress, and as you might imagine, neither snail is exactly hearing the Chariots-o-fire theme song as we race INCH toward what seemed like such a skimpy goal when we made this wager oh so casually in the comment section of this blog not so long ago. 

You can read about Stephen's dark night of the soul (aka his wicked writing woes--more ws!) here in which he whines that he's only got 7 pages finished. Only. Oh boo-flippin'-hoo, Stephen. Poor you.

You know how many pages I got if you only count the stuff that's pretty and perfect and ready to go?

Zero. As in none, nada, and if I knew how to spell it, bupkis.

But what I do have is a 20-page long hand page first draft of the first version of my revised (read that totally gutted and absolutely new) opening scene. It detours and tangents in the way my first drafts always do (I can't be the only writer whose first instinct is to take her characters from Boston to Cambridge by way of Timbuktu), but somewhere in the detours my imaginings have wrought, there's a faint heartbeat that tells me this might work. Keep chipping away at it. And please ignore the tantrum that your inner child is currently throwing about why oh why this convolutedly crazy craft style of yours (note the cs!) remains your process.


Because you have a wager on. And right now you're losing. Except in the one way you're winning: before the wager, you were stuck, and now you have a pile of prose poo (ps!) with a beating heart. Which means this wacky wager you've made has shaken you out of your revision paralysis and put you safely on the revising path.

So, no, Stephen. No fist pumps and booyahs here. But in my own way, I do think I'm winning. Even if I end up buying you a drink and toasting your superior output, I've won.

Bo-Bo Knows It's On...

I threw down a gauntlet and it was...picked up? Matched? Accepted? Whatever it is that the person being thrown down in front of does when accepting a challenge (and let's just say it's pointing a finger in the air and wagging it with all the nuance of a silent movie, cause that makes me happy), my friend Stephen Dorneman over at Barking at My Shadow has done it, and the race is on:

First person to 30 pages by the end of the year gets a beer on the slower writer's dime. 

 Except Stephen says beer isn't special enough.

So if I win he'll buy me a Boston Cream Pie Martini (if you think those letters should be lower case, obviously, you've never sipped such heaven) over at the Omni Parker House, and if he wins, he picks. And if you could hear the sports announcer doing the play by play in my head, Stephen is the front runner.

This weekend he let me know he was already five pages in while I was still navigating the family loop that is the long Thanksgiving holiday in my house.

And today's no more auspicious. Because I didn't just tell him 30 pages. I said 30 pages of the new opening of my book. And so far the new opening has arrived still born. But not much because there's a martini at stake. And a little something called the future of my novel. Right. I'll just get right on that and, um, mmmmm chocolate-cocoa-lined rims....

Why is it so much easier to picture the martini than it is to dream up an opening for my book?

Bo-Bo Knows Dirty Limericks

Metered Angst

A Limerick by Catherine Elcik 

When tracking my writing it's hard to ignore

when my hours shrink back to less than half four.

I say that I'm fighting 

To prioritize writing

But then dole out my time like I can simply make more.

Bo-Bo Knows Beginnings

Thirteen hours and 8 minutes this week. Could I have pushed out two extra hours? Sure. But it would be make work for the sake of hours. Because Monday through Friday I spent rereading the opening, making notes about how to revise, and just generally getting myself to feeling like I knew where to start. By Saturday I needed to let it simmer for a couple of days before starting in on the actually redrafting. Simmering is work, too, but it's hard to quantify. So I don't. I just know that I had at least two hours of simmering and I leave it like that.

Also, a blog note: watching hours tally does not exactly make for the world's most riveting blog, so I'll just keep count in a little column at the right. I'll add the hours weekly, though I suspect I'm the only one who will care much.

Happy writing! 

Bo-Bo Knows Limbo

My inner librarian slave master is well pleased this week. Not because I punched in my time plus some--15 hours and 48 minutes this week!--but because those hours brought me to the end of the draft I've been struggling with since I finished the rough draft longer ago than I can admit without embarrassment (I only missed the three-year mark by 48 hours).

Does this mean if I hit my 15 hours work week again this week I'll finish the third draft? No? Well, what fun is that?

Tomorrow, I dive into the third draft. As a person who feels anxiety in the limbo between completing one chapter and breaking ground on the next, I'm expecting to experience some fear at the start a new draft; to counter the anxiety, I've earmarked Friday as a writing retreat with a fellow sufferer writer.

In "On Writing,' Stephen King offers a permission slip for wary writers:

"You can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will."

Change that 'if'' to a 'when,' and I think I've got myself a new mantra...

Bo-Bo Knows How to Earn a 'C' (and be right pleased about it)!

11 hours out of 15 this week. Thought of one way, that 73.3 percent. A 'C' grade.

Thought of another way 11 hours is 5 more than the 6 I managed in week one. That's an 83 percent increase, or a solid B!

Thought of in yet another way, 11 is 183 percent of 6 which is like and Attttt!

So while 11 is not 15, it's closer, and that's a good thing.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a job to do...

Bo-Bo Knows A Period of Orientation

Inauspicious. That's the word that springs to mind when I sat down this morning to see that I worked on my book for only 5 hours and 54 minutes of the 15 hours I just hired myself to put in every week.

The inner mean boss likes that word. Because inauspicious has just the right blend of pretentious haughtiness, don't you think?. It brings to mind the image of a nasty old lady, arms crossed, eyes staring at me over the world's ugliest reading glasses. Everything about the posture of this woman tells me I'm a failure. And when I calmly explain that work got crazy, that I took two days off to spend time with my husband, that I managed to do an hour a day on my busiest days to compensate, she just sniffs at me:

"And how many episodes of Dr. Who did we watch, hmmm?"

Fair point, I guess. Though I would argue that one of the episodes was "Love and Monsters,"  a fine example of bloody brilliant story telling.

But  although I'm no stranger to treating myself as a metaphorical whipping post (do better, do more, you suck you suck you totally suck!) I've decided thinking like that is just not helpful. Pas de tout! Which if I remember right means not at all, but even if it doesn't, so what? What are you gonna do, little librarian boss lady that lives in my brain? Stare at me to death?

Did I have the kind of first week I was hoping to have? No. I had just a little south of 40 percent of the week I was hoping to have. But it's a start I'm deciding to think of as "orientation." And it was useful time! I entered last week stuck on the epilogue. This week I got six pages in, realized it was totally wrong, berated myself for (yet again) not getting it right the first time, and then pulled out a fresh piece of paper and planned out a new take on the scene that (miracle of writing spoiler alert) works better! Yes, I wrote pages, scrapped them, and ended the week with "just" an outline of what to do this week. But that's kind of why the revision process is all about putting the time in and not the page count. I could have done more--perhaps I should have done more--but I've decided that as far as orientations go, it was a brilliant first week:

• Eased myself into a new habit? Check! 
• Created a plan of attack for moving forward? Check! 
• Generated excitement for the possibilities of the new ending? Check! Check! Check! 
• Ready to commit to finishing the epilogue this week? Well, no. Not check. 

Because though I'm committed to getting my 15 hours in this week, who knows what that time will bring. The scene I'm working on now will likely thrive, but the scene after that? I'm done with the crystal ball sorcery of writing goals I can't control, like "finish a scene" or "write an epilogue" or (gulp) "finish this draft." Because after looking into my future (read that as glancing at my day planner),  I can be reasonably assured that I'll eke out 15 hours of work this week. If that brings me to the end of this revision,  fantastic. But if it doesn't, some  other week's hours will. Because progress, however slow, will lead to a finish line eventually. Isn't that the first commandment in the church of writing or something?

Plus, if I don't pull my shit together this week, my inner librarian will come at me with this  message:




And nobody wants to die at the hands of a  Dalek sucker thingy because--let's face it--death by Dalek is kind of lame.

Bo-Bo Knows Accountability Mondays

So a little more than a year ago, I ran a marathon. Let's ignore for a minute that I've gone totally soft since then and can't actually remember the last time I ran (today's as good a day to begin again as any, I say).

The important thing about this marathon is that I did it. Me. With a body that has almost always looks better suited to competitive eating than running did it for one simple reason: I found a training program set up like a to-do list that was like crack to my type-A step-by-step mentality. It helped that I loved my cause (Grubbies 4 eva, and all that) but having the heart to do something only gets you to the starting line. To cross the finish takes a clear understanding of the neuroses you have to co-opt for your cause.In my case, an addiction to crossing things off a to-do list in exactly the same way I'd cross off four training runs a week.

You know what you can't cross off a to-do list?

Finishing the (expletive deleted) novel, that's what!

I'm not talking about your daily email-so-and-so-and-pay-the-mortgage-and-call-that-client-and-go-get-groceries list but the larger to-do list in your brain. The finish-the-novel line item just sits there, taking up space, like a house guest that made you giddy the first year she stayed with you, but is still there years later, sitting around, like an un-cross-off-able lump.

I know the solution is breaking the novel down into drafts or chapters or pages or word counts. But then the to-do list monster rears its head, and the math seems painfully clear: if you write you'll cross off one thing, but if you send that email, pay the mortgage, call that client, and get your groceries, you'll not only cross off FOUR things, but you'll also eat.

You know.

At a table in a house that isn't heading into foreclosure. 

The thing is, the writer in me is sick of being shuttled to the bottom of my daily to-do list. So I'm doing the only thing that I know has worked in the past. No, not page counts. When you're working on revision, a full day's work might end in a negative page count. Page counts are evil for revision. You can't see it, but I'm holding my fingers up in a cross at the words "page counts" on the screen. 
Nope. I'm doing something a little more weighty. I'm taking on writing as a part-time job.

What's that you say? Hasn't writing been a part-time job for me for years? Well, you'd think. But have you ever known me to blow off a job--freelance or salaried or what have you--because I needed to go grocery shopping? Have you ever known me to blow a deadline when someone--besides me--was actually waiting for something? No. Because I'm a doormat when it comes to the promises I make. I need to work on that, I really do. But not before I co-opt that doormat attitude for the one project I'll tell anyone who listens is the nearest and dearest to my creative self.

So I'm signing a contract today:

I, Catherine Elcik, on Monday, October 17, 2011, agree to take on the position of part-time writer, defined herein as 15 hours a week for 50 weeks (a girl's gotta have a couple weeks vacation!) for a total of 750 hours in a year. Kay. Thanks. Bye. 

Some part of me looks at that number and thinks 15 hours seems like such a drop in the bucket compared to all the other things I do with my time (my full-time job, walking Bo-Bo, watching Dr. Who like a freshly converted addict...) But if having a tangible goal actually gets me to add drops into the bucket, I just might have something at year's end. If not a finished novel, perhaps a finish line in sight. The part of me that's wondering if I really want to publish this post at all knows that it's not only going to work, but it's what I need. Deep breath. Hit send. Write. Wish me luck!


Catherine Elcik is a writer in the Boston area. Watch for "Accountability Monday" updates here or on her Twitter feed (#accmon) every Monday.

Sweat Scholarships Ripe for the Picking

Since I crossed the finish line of the first annual Run for Grub about two months ago:

• my running regimen has been downgraded from militant to pleasant,
• I've reminded myself that music is more than just a collection of beats driving my feet, and
• that toenail I was so worried about losing? Totally lost.

What HASN'T been lost is the four Grub Street scholarships I ran this race to fund in the first place (make some noise for the generosity of all our sponsors, please!)

If you're looking to join a family of writers in Boston.

If the writing project nearest and dearest to you could use a gentle kick in the pants.

If your writerly spirit is willing but your bank account is weak, the Run for Grub Scholarship may be for you:

WHAT: Run for Grub is a set of four scholarships covering the cost of a 10- or 6-week Grub Street workshop of your choice.

ELIGIBILITY: You must either be taking your first multi-week workshop at Grub Street OR taking your first multi-week workshop in a genre that is new to you (i.e. you are a fiction writer taking screenwriting for the first time, or a poet taking a memoir class, etc).

APPLICATION: Send runforgrub@grubstreet.org a one-page, single-spaced letter in 12-point font. The letter should detail how you'd benefit from taking a Grub Street class and include your bio and your familiarity with writing workshops (at Grub or other schools).

DEADLINE: Applications must be received by October 15th, 2010 at 5pm EST.

A letter, people! Just a letter! You could have this whole application wrapped up faster than it takes to fill out one of those silly Facebook questionnaires. And really. If I can run 26.2 miles, you can certainly write one stinking page.

We'll even let you keep all your toenails.

For complete scholarship information, visit the Run for Grub Scholarships page on the Grub Street Web site.

Bo-Bo Knows Marathon Hiatus

I'm taking the next 16 weeks to blog about my training for the marathon I'm running as a benefit for Grub Street Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA.

I'll return to Bo-Bo Knows in August, but in the mean time, check out the Bo-related post at Run for Grub!

Bo-Bo Knows He's Top Dog

File this one under surreal.

Earlier this week, I got an email from Dogster in response to my December blog post about losing Bo. The email started like so:

Hi Catherine,

I was just browsing through your blog, and wanted to send my condolences for your lost of Bo-Bo.

I too have lost a dog once, and it was horrible, but a very rewarding experience : )

Any-who, I work for Dogster.com, the top pet community destination on the Internet. We have a breed page with over 2800 greyhound members...

The letter goes on to explain why my linking to Dogster.com is a good idea. And I'm not saying it's not. I want to be clear here: I have no problem with dog sites--love them. But I do have a problem with this letter. Two, in fact:

1. It would appear this gentleman hasn't actually read more than a line of my blog. Because that particular post wasn't about losing Bo--bite your dog-wagging tongue, Mr. Dogster!--but about how my husband and I, through a Herculean overhaul of out diet and exercise plans, have literally shed the equivalent of a Bo's worth of ugly fat.
2. If my post HAD been about Bo going to that meaty cornucopia in the sky, and this was an actual, live condolence email, in what universe would a smile emoticon have any place in that note? Not to mention changing topic to his request with a flippant "any-who." Seriously?? He might as well have written:

Hey, I know you just lost the only thing that ever loved you more unconditionally than your mother, but ANY-WHO could you do me a solid and link to my Web site? You know. Between sobs.

And then today. Same sweet, but misguided, guy sends a second email. Today he's writing to tell me that I've won an "award of recognition for being an awesome resource for dog owners/lovers!" Well, that's sweet. And yes, my blog may touch on things greyhound occasionally, but in recent memory, I've also spent a month groaning about boot camp with Jillian Michaels and promising to blog my way through Walden before losing the plot somewhere amid the holiday hustle. In other words, my blog's about me, and enjoying my dog just happens to be one of my favorite things about being me, so he comes up from time to time.

So given that I've done nothing to earn this award, I clearly can't actually accept it for myself, but I will accept it for Bo. Because since retirement, the only other prize he's received was a first-place ribbon for softest fur at the Greyhound Expo a few years back, and I have to tell you--that thing screamed consolation prize (he was simply too dainty to be anything resembling a threat in the hot-dog-eating contest).

So congrats, Bo! Dogster.com recommends you for reasons that have nothing to do with me or the content on my blog, I'm sure. Though I have to warn you, they might strip your award when they see how I've chosen to present it to the world. Except they won't. See it, I mean. Because they're not actually reading my blog. We've been over this.

Find more dog info here!

Bo-Bo Knows We've Lost Bo

Mike and I lost Bo this morning. Not all at once, of course. It's been a long and brutal farewell. But it's finally official. Bo's gone, gone, gone.

As of this morning's post Thanksgiving weigh-in, my husband and I have lost the equivalent of the heft of our sometimes sulky greyhound, Bo. Today Mike and I officially passed the 75-pound mark. Next stop? 100. Then 125 after that.

Any of our skinny friends out there weigh a buck and a quarter? I find it oddly inspiring to think of the weight left to be lost as a person person instead of a disembodied number.

Bo-Bo Knows The Necessaries (Walden, 267-281)

The bare necessities of life are way barer than we think they are.

All we really need, Thoreau says, are food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. Maybe a few tools and books, but then again maybe not. Anything beyond these basics—even just too much of these basics—is a luxury, and luxuries get in the way of a simple, independent living. If you're happy, fine, he says. But if you're unhappy—if you think that life is hard, hard, hard—then stripping away the distractions might turn the tide of of your discontent.

The Thoreau chestnuts gleaned from today's excerpt:

• LIVE IN THE NOW by standing "on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment" (pp 272).
  

• BEAR WITNESS to the unsung miracles that are impossible to ignore and yet taken for granted by that mass of discontented men—why stay in bed when there are sunrises to be breathed in?
  

• CONSIDER THE TRUE REWARDS. "For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward" ( p 273).

Any writers out there hearing that last one loud and clear? He goes on to tell the story of an Indian—Thoreau's word, not mine—who decided to make his living weaving baskets only to discover to his shock that the villagers had zippo interest in buying. The solution seems like a dismal choice: either squander energy convincing the world that we've just made what they never knew they always wanted or—can I get a collective shudder from the writer's out there?—make the goods we think will please others.

"I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth anyone's while to buy them," Thoreau says. "Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them."

For those of us who hobble together professional life support for our creative body of work, our progress on that work is the antidote to the sacrifices we make so we don't have to suffer traditional 9-to-5 jobs. But what if we could cut a little deeper and need that professional life support a little less? What if we could all pare back to the simple necessaries of life and log our own hours in the woods of our own design?

The call to Walden, then, isn't about reporting to a cabin on a pond at the outskirts of Concord, but about reporting to the call we hear to our own endeavors—a call to create each our own private Waldens in the lives we're living now. Lately, there have been a rash of books published about experiential living— the guy lived a year following every Biblical rule it was possible to follow; the gal who outran her demons by globetrotting for a year. I totally get the impulse to be better, to be disciplined, to strike out on an adventure. But I'm not convinced that being better or disciplined or adventurous can't start where we are now with a simple, simple shift in our thinking.

But maybe that's just as naive as thinking the answer is in taking to the woods as a hermit for a couple years.

Bo-Bo Knows Hosers (Walden, 258-267)

Jobs are for hosers.

That's the clear takeaway in the opening pages to the "Economy" section of Henry David Thoreau's Walden. After introducing the concept of his experiment and inviting readers to take away the principles that suit them best, Thoreau points his authorial finger at his readers and warns that they're killing themselves in pursuit of society's bullshit expectations of the shape of well-lived lives:

"[You're] making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day" (p. 262).

"The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation" (p 263).

"It appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living, because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose slear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof" (p. 264).

But all this striving, striving, striving is nothing but a collective nightmare that Thoreau's desperately trying to wake us up to escape. The messages in this opening, then, are clear: Draw your own conclusions, and direct the course of your life through deliberate choices:

"What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate" (p 263).

"We are made to exaggerate he importance of what work we do; and yethos much is not done by us! ... So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one center" (p. 267).

Bo-Bo Knows Suburban Walden

So I've never actually read Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" from start to finish. Excerpts in high school, sure. Different excerpts in college, OK. But mostly I'm guilty of

1. falling for the seduction of the merchandising that's sprung up around Thoreau's soundbites (don't the mass of men own magnets rah-rah-rahing them to advance confidently in the direction of their dreams?¹) and
   
   
   
2. constructing an opinion of the man and his plan based on an idyllic portrait cobbled together from my dip-in-and-out acquaintance.

In spite of my spotty Thoreau scholarship, lately I've been thinking that the world wouldn't be such a bad place if people took a page from Thoreau and lived more deliberately. I'm not saying that we should all trek out to the nearest pond and set up camp for the next two years and two months. Just that if we adopted even a handful of Thoreau's tips for living, we might all have a little more peace. Maybe even a collective utopia built upon the sum of a million suburban Waldens created not by dropping out of society but by living the lives we intend within the fabric of our existing day to day whirlywoo. ²

Big thoughts given that I've never read the book from cover to cover. Ever. So I will. This month. Right here. Scholarship be damned. Each day I'll read a chunk of pages and figure out what they're saying to me.

I'm guessing Thoreau would approve. At the end of the second paragraph of the book, he writes of his hope that his readers "will accept such portions as apply to them." I read that as the author himself clearing the world for a buffet-style approach to "Walden."

If you want to join me in my little Suburban Walden project, I'll be reading from "The Portable Thoreau" pictured above. So read along. Comment. Please. Because if nobody joins the conversation, it'll be me yammering on about what I think, what I feel, what I, I, I...

Forgive me.

"I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well."³

SUBURBAN WALDEN ENTRIES

Bo-Bo Knows Hosers (Walden, 258-267)

Bo-Bo Knows The Necessaries (Walden, 268-281)



¹ This is a mangling of two quotes we'll get to in time, I promise.

² Or maybe I'm just enjoying an extra helping of delusions to complement my annual late-fall re-evaluation of the state of my union.

³ Page 252.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Losing Scratch Tickets

I buy a scratch ticket maybe once every three years, so you know it was a bad day when, exhausted, I convinced myself that the answer to all my problems lay behind a silver film I could scratch away with a quarter. Surely, the fates would be kind to the woman who believed—even for a second— that the urge to buy a ticket was a clear sign that freedom could be bought for the price of a garishly colored dream.

Alas, no.

But I've decided this is a good thing. Because as Emily Dickinson once said in her halting nineteenth century way: "success is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed." Never mind how much that line reads like the sour grapes of a hermit woman who spent her life pushing society away. Because really, where's the sport in scratching your way to a brighter tomorrow? Had I won that million-dollar prize, I'd have been elated, sure. But what would that have taught me? A winning card might bring me a fortune, but my loser card gives me a chance to become the kind of scrappy person who doesn't need a stinking scratch ticket.

So screw you, Massachusetts State Lottery! Screw you, mom in Stoneham who scratched off a $10 million prize at Fast Freddies in Wakefield last week. Money? That's nothing. The real prize is the epiphany that comes from banging your head against the grind until a new solution presents itself. You know. Teach man a fish and all that happy horse shit.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Old Wisdom

Long before Nike slapped their just-do-it slogan on billboards and buses, some of the world's best thinkers were teaching that true happiness lies in yanking our thumbs out of our asses and taking action. Loosely translated, of course.

Today I'm grateful for the philosophical cheerleading squad that reminds me that there's no substitute for sweat. Hopefully my favorite quotes will inspire you as much as they do me:

"An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea."
- Buddha

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
- Aristotle

"Advance confidently in the direction of your dreams and you will have success unimagined in common hours."
- Henry David Thoreau

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
- Henry David Thoreau

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."
- Goethe¹

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Just do it" sounds so vulgar by comparison, doesn't it?

¹ OK, technically nobody said this exactly as it's written, but it gets attributed to Goethe on quote magnets, so that's good enough for me!

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Vicarious Vacation Bliss

Just when I think I'm getting the hang of this gratitude thing, I go and bury my thankfulness beneath the rubble of some seriously ungrateful griping. Today it was about feeling worn down to the nubs but somehow not quite full-on sick.¹ About how green it makes me that, as of 7 p.m., my husband's officially on vacation until November 30. About the shitstorm I have to get through before I can take my (much shorter) Thanksgiving break with him next week.

But in the aisles of our local Stop & Shop tonight², the radio launched into the Chaka Khan version of "I'm Every Woman" and Mike busted into an impromptu dance down the length of the natural food aisle: Get-out-of-jail-free giddiness? Legs jerking like they're in a conga line? Fists drumming the air like he just don't care? Impassioned falsetto sing-a-long? Check, check, check, and check.

It's hard to stay grumpy when someone's bliss has bubbled over into dancing-in-the-supermarket abandon. And while vicarious bliss isn't quite as sweet as actual bliss, it's something to hold onto on a swamptastic day. I may have spent most of today feeling ungrateful and grumpy, but I'm choosing to end the day grateful that my husband's vacation high spreads faster than the swine flu among runny-nosed toddlers. It's all in me, baby. It's all in me!

¹I absolutely credit this to my dramatically improved nutrition of late.

²We've found that if you can stand shopping amongst weirdos, closing time on Friday is the easiest time to navigate the grocery store.