The Origin Story of Island Turtle

Sure, you might have become a little more familiar with Island Turtle. You know he's a turtle, and that he's on an island. And that he wears sunglasses. But perhaps you would like to know more. Perhaps you are interested in finding out where Island Turtle came from, why he is where he is, and how he came to be known as the one and only Island Turtle.

Island Turtle has been around for many years now and it shouldn't be surprising to know that he showed up in my younger years. I remember meeting him for the first time, and being very excited to learn more about this turtle who happened to be on an unnamed island.

I asked him where he came from and he after a pause, he began to tell me his long and interesting tale. And now, today, I pass on that tale to you. As I recall, this is how it goes:

A long time ago, many years ago, there was an island.

And there was a turtle on this island.

The end.

Island Turtle makes everyone happy except when he doesn't

My manager was not happy the day she met Island Turtle. I was working in the bakeshop of the Jewel near my college at this point in my life and typically worked evening shifts after classes.

"What is this Island Turtle?" my manager demanded as I walked into work for the evening. "I get to work this morning and see that the shelves are practically empty, that's there is very little back up, and yet there was time yesterday to draw some turtle on an island?"

Yikes. I wanted to say that it actually only takes me about thirty seconds to sketch Island Turtle, but I had a feeling that answer wouldn't help my case.

Island Turtle is cool on cardboard.

I went instead with the better choice of apologizing. My manager, who happens to be one of the most patient and understanding people I've had the chance to work for, shrugged and told me it was fine as long as I didn't do it again.

So I worked extra hard during my shift and before she left for the evening, cautiously brought up Island Turtle again.

"Basically, he's awesome," I told her as she looked at me with a raised eyebrow. "I'm serious. Island Turtle is just sort of there - he's on an island, but it's ok - he's just there to relax."

She looked at the drawing again and shook her head. "He's either the biggest turtle I've seen or on the most pathetic island imaginable."

I assured her that it was a little bit of both.

During the time I worked in the bakeshop there, my coworkers slowly became familiar with Island Turtle. He had a tendency to show up on our whiteboard for motivation, although it wasn't unheard of for him to show up on another cardboard box. In fact, when I stopped working there because I was moving down to Florida, I even made clay keepsake Island Turtles for all of my bakeshop coworkers.

They were even all kind enough to act impressed when presented with their wonderful gifts.

Introducing... Island Turtle!

Who is... Island Turtle?

He's a turtle. On an island.

Island turtle is kind of like my mascot. He's just out there, chilling on his island. He's totally relaxed. He goes with the flow. When I'm feeling stressed or bummed out, Island Turtle is there, looking at me through his shades. Reminding me that I, too, can experience the relaxation he does - I don't even need to be on an island to do so!

I really like Island Turtle and I hope you do too, because the rest of the week is going to be Island Turtle stories! I'm so relaxed already.

In which I lose and find my cell phone

When I woke up this morning, I was feeling somewhat sick. You might know the feeling: not really sick - just a bit more groggy; maybe your stomach hurts a little or something. It didn't get better after oatmeal for breakfast, or after playing WoW for a bit so I decided to lie down and watch TV in my room. I grabbed my cell phone and headed to the bedroom.

I shut the door to the room and grabbed some comfy pants to change into. Sophie and Sherlock jumped up on the bed and made themselves comfortable on either side of my pillows. Just as I was about to turn on the TV, I heard a knock at our front door and the dogs started going crazy.

I was a little annoyed, because I had been winding down and had been almost positive I could take a nap. Not any more though. Sleeping during the day when I'm feeling only a little sick is not an easy task. I don't know about you, but if I can fall asleep during the day that typically means that I'm more sick than I care to admit.

Anyhow, having gotten up to go answer the door and subsequently send a guy away who was trying to rake our lawn or clean off our roof, whatever we needed him to do! - I no longer felt like going to sleep. I went back to my desk and read the internet for a bit. Then I thought about maybe texting Smiley, who had been at work all morning.

I reached for my cell phone on the desk and it wasn't there. Oh right, I remembered, I had brought it to the bedroom. It was probably on the TV stand or the shelves. Maybe on the window sill. As I went back into the room and looked at each of these places in turn, the cell phone did not turn up. Weird. I knew I had gone straight from one room to another but just in case, I started checking our extra room, the kitchen and the dining room.

Still no cell phone.

Luckily, my roommate was awake at this point. I asked her if she could call my phone, as mine seemed to be lost in the void space I call home.

"Sure Dani," says my roommate, and goes to grab her phone. I wait while she ruffles through her bag. A few seconds go by and she starts searching deeper into the bag, looking inside the little inner zipped pocket. "Hm."

"The void claims another victim?"

So now my roommate starts retracing her steps and because she appears to be luckier than me, she finds her phone in her work clothes pocket. The phone battery is dead though, so she has to grab her charger and plug it in first.

I stand nearby, ready to listen for my cell phone ringing. I'm almost positive that I've turned up the volume on the phone and I try not to imagine what a pain it will be to find if I didn't.

"Ok, it's ringing," she says.

There is a silent, tense moment while I wait to see whether I left my phone in the computer room or in the bedroom and then my sweatshirt pocket starts vibrating.

Yeah. I seriously contemplated running to the bedroom and pretending like I found it on the floor, but it was too late.

My roommate might still be laughing.

The worst way to bring home a Christmas tree

So, my husband isn't too big into celebrating holidays. He doesn't care for fireworks, has no interest in a parade and absolutely, positively hates Christmas trees. Last year, our Christmas tree was a little blue tinsel tabletop deal. I was ok with it, because we were going visit my family for the actual holiday. However, this year, we're unable to make the trip up, so I got to thinking that it would be nice to have a Christmas tree.

Smiley's take: A Christmas tree is one of the stupidest ideas ever. It's like two drunks were outside, being drunk and one of them goes 'dude. Let's take a tree from outside and put it INSIDE.' And then the other guy says 'yeah. And then let's put candles on them. It'll be awesome! An open flame on a slowly drying out tree? What could go wrong?'

Me: Whew. That was exhausting to listen to. Also I've never heard of a modern string of lights burning down a house.

After some back and forth, he finally agreed that I could get a tree this morning while I was at work. I was so excited and I literally spent my breaks and my lunch hour researching the trees avaliable in our town, the decorations and so on and so forth. I made a few spreadsheets.

By the time I on my way home from work, I was so pumped. I called my husband as I drove, asking him if he'd mind driving the truck and bringing me to the hardware store so I could buy a tree. He begrudgingly said ok.

As we were getting ready to leave, our roommate, his sister, came home and I invited her to come with. We all smushed into our small truck and left the house. I was picturing a magical tree hunting trip during which time my husband would have a small bit of fun and perhaps come away from the experience hating Christmas trees a little less.

Boy, was I wrong.

About halfway to the store, the alternator in the truck seemed to give up and the battery died as we were turning a corner. As the truck slowly sputtered to a stop, the three of us sat in silence for a full minute.

"Great," said Smiley. "Just what I want. To be stuck on the side of the road on my way to getting a stupid Christmas tree. Typical."

"I didn't make the truck die," I pointed out. "In fact, given the track record of the truck not dying and also bringing us from point a to point b reliably ever since you redid the clutch and other bits, I didn't expect it one bit."

"And you invited our roommate to come with us and now she's sitting her with us instead of us being able to call her."

"Yes, that's unfortunate," I agreed.

Luckily, our roommate was able to call her friend to come give us a jump. She and Smiley pushed the truck back into a parking lot while I steered and promptly hit the curb. (It was not my intention to hit the curb).

It was getting late, and Smiley had to go to his Dresden Files RP game soon, so we decided not to chance it by going to the store and back. He drove the truck home. I sat, deflated, in the passenger seat. I had wanted so badly for the trip to the store to be uneventful and therefore not give my husband any validation to his hatred of the trees.

I can see now that this is not how it is meant to be.

My lovely sister in law then accompanied me as we took the Sebring to the store and picked out a tree. Smiley, if you're reading this, we only had to look at two trees before we made our choice! As I type, the tree is set up in our living room so that the branches can spread out some before I decorate. I am still pretty excited, but with a certain amount of trepidation. If our truck is willing to stop just to put up a roadblock to a happy Christmas, what will be next?

I'd better not think about that! I'm going decorate my tree. Whee!

Year Two of NaNoWriMo winning!

"Oh, what's that?" you ask? That's just me showing off my official proof of NaNoWriMo victory. If you still don't believe me, I think this link will work: My Novel Stats. We'll see.

I wasn't expecting to finish today; in fact if you look down, you'll see me fretting about just being halfway done about ten days ago. I'll admit that a huge part of my motivation to finish came from trying to beat one of my friends over the finish line. This morning we wrote a total of 18,000 words. She won first.

So now what?

Well, the other day I was reading an article on Slate.com and came across the following NaNo-related story. Somewhere in the thread of comments, some people were complaining that there is no point to NaNo. The basic argument goes something along the lines of  a) "What's the point of writing 50,000 words of probable crap?" and b) "There are enough bad novels in the world!"

Luckily for you, I have some answers to those questions.

The first is - what's the point? There are quite a few points, so I'm going to stick to what works for me:

1). I love being creative and writing, so doing NaNo is akin to any other sort of hobby or project that I could do instead.
2). It's inspiring to see the rudimentary full first draft of a novel with a start and finish, even if there is some murder in the middle. Even if my goal isn't to be published, I have accomplished something; this goes back to reason one.
3). To paraphrase the NaNo site: Sometimes it is just better to get down an idea, even if some of it sucks. Or maybe a lot of it.

The second one is a lot easier to answer. Just because someone writes crap during November doesn't mean it will be published. This month allows thousands of new and veteran writers to practice writing. Isn't there some sort of saying about monkeys, time and typewriters that ends with the full works of Shakespeare? What I'm getting at is, maybe a good novel or two will come out of this. (Not that I'm calling NaNo participants monkeys. Nor insinuating that they can only use typewriters).

So sure, like anything in life (I'll just throw out pictionary as an example here), NaNo is not for everyone.

Life After NaNo

Well, November isn't over yet, so if you're still writing, go write. Come back and read this when you're done!

Personally, the first thing I did after finishing writing was vacuum and then give the puppies their baths and half haircuts. (Sherlock will only sit down for one half of a haircut at a time). Then I did something scary and sent my mom a copy of my very, very rough draft of a vampire novel.

Even knowing that, as my mom, she's contractually obligated to say at least vaguely nice things about it, I'm still nervous. But I'm also excited, because she'll be the first person to really look it over with fresh eyes and confirm to me if the plot holes I noticed are the same ones she notices. Or if the boring character I created maybe has some redeeming qualities.

Or it will be so bad that she'll burn it secretly and tell me later that she's "so proud of me for doing what I love!"

Happy Belated Thanksgiving!

While some have already been up for hours today, shopping the sales and door-busters of Black Friday, I have been sleeping and then photoshopping pictures of my dogs to put in this post. Well, you can guess which activities I think are more fun!

I wanted to take a moment to touch on everything I was thankful for and then realized that this post would take me into the New Years if I did that. There are just so many things to be thankful about. Sure, life isn't perfect, but I suspect that the downs help to make the ups so much better. And no, I'm not condoning drug use. These are natural highs, baby!

On my Google + page (Yes, you should use Google +; it's pretty awesome), I spoke about those who work on Thanksgiving, and really it can be extended to any holiday. While many people get to take time off and relax, there are those who cannot do that and who make our lives better because of that. I mentioned doctors and nurses, because illness does not have a holiday schedule (and honestly, rarely uses its day off). I make a caveat for the 4th of July and any holiday whereby they see an increase in people doing stupid stuff with fireworks.

Likewise, there are those in our military, whether here in America or overseas, who cannot just take the day off and go be with their family. I don't want to get political about it; I'll just say I don't always agree with the wars that the government has declared - but I'll always support the men and women of the troops. It is because of their sacrifices that we can continue to celebrate our freedom.

Finally, from my own time working in a grocery store, there are the people who have to work on Thanksgiving to ensure a happy Thanksgiving for everyone else. I cannot count how many rolls I would bake in the day before and day of Thanksgiving, or how many pumpkin pies would be packaged. There are those who are in shows, or who work at movie theatres or restaurants. I'm not saying to feel guilty if you forgot the rolls or don't want to cook (although, come on - even if you're the worst cook ever, won't true family just laugh it off when your oven explodes with turkey?); I'm just saying be thankful that you have these opportunities.

Personally, now I'm off to go buy deeply discounted Thanksgiving decorations that I can use next year. If I remember where I store them.