Kat Dancing

Tagged by Gord (Squee! Nobody ever picks me for these things! ...oh, wait, did I say that out loud?)

Where were you ten years ago?

Ten years ago, I was fourteen. I was just developing Girl Things on my chest, to my immense consternation: the whole thing failed to impress me with anything but their uncomfortableness, and for several years I would wander around wearing flattening sports bras and loose t-shirts, being proud when people mistook me for a boy. I was on the swim team, bringing in a steady stream of second and third-place ribbons - I was a mediocre competition swimmer at best, though I'm a good overall swimmer now thanks to those years. Jerry Garcia had just died, and my father and I were both in mourning.

I had run across Ursula LeGuin's The Language of the Night earlier in the year, and as a result was beginning to write fiction in a serious way. This resulted in two halfway-decent short stories and then a long string of self-conciously pompous adolescent crap, but it was the first step on the road, and deserves mention.

Where were you five years ago?

Five years ago I was nineteen. I had just finished well and truly getting over my first boyfriend dumping me, and was just beginning to prepare myself for the planned year abroad in New Zealand. Come to think of it, August was a very weird month for me that year, in that it was the month where boys starting Noticing me. They hadn't before - I'd practically had to drag my first boyfriend into bed - but in August I apparently started sending out girl vibes. I was not at all prepared for this. It resulted in a very, very embarrassing (but ultimately harmless) episode with a drunk redneck who'd made a logical jump that I hadn't and a one-night stand with an old friend that would have been harmless if I'd had the sense to leave it at one night.

The next year was spent in NZ, where I got loads of practice at saying no to boys who hit on me; but that August I was still bewildered and helpless in the face of this new thing.

I had three-quarters of a draft of what would eventually become my first novel sitting on my hard drive, lonely and abandoned: it was still in Thinly Disguised Star Wars Fanfic mode, and I knew something was wrong with it, but I wasn't admitting what. It would be nearly a year before I got the nerve to chuck the setting for a near-future one.

Where were you one year ago?

A year ago I was in Canada, taking the Shakespeare class that would inch me to within spitting distance of my degree (and enjoying it immensely, I might add). I was living with Dan after eight months of long distance; it was the first time I'd lived with a boyfriend since I was eighteen, and the first time he'd ever lived with any girlfriend. We were alternately floating on clouds of Relationship Joy and trying to kill each other. The former was winning over the latter by a hair.

I was learning many arcane rituals of the real world, such as "writing a resume", and not enjoying it much.

I was revising my second novel via my own peculiar process of revision, which involves tweaking the first quarter, severely editing the second quarter, and then throwing out the last half. Yes, this is the novel I'm revising this summer too. Don't anybody take my revision methods as a model.

Where were you yesterday?

Yesterday was a pretty typical workday:

a) Got up. Always traumatic. Especially traumatic when you stayed up late finishing that Timothy Zahn novel.

b) Washed my daily quota of cheese while listening to the Counting Crows. Just for your information, that's about 150 10-pound wheels of cheese that I have to heave around every day. I'm getting mad cheese musclez.

c) Updated the farm webpage to list the three, count 'em, three new vendors we picked up last week. Have I mentioned business is booming around here? If the restaurant in Arizona picks us up permanently, that'll be 15 states we're sold in.

d) Helped hoop the day's cheesemake. Did not fall in the vat.

e) Spent my lunch break trying to find all the people I need to call to turn various things on in the new apartment, which is very nice, by the way, and which we won't move into until Dan gets here in September, but I don't trust these buggers with less than two weeks' notice.

f) Listened to my mother rant about our one outside employee after he left. He's a good guy, but he has his limitations, and unfortunately my mother can't see a limitation without hurling herself bodily at it. Hers, someone else's, doesn't matter. It's a good trait in a business owner and a good-but-exhausting trait in a mother but a not-so-good trait in an employer.

g) Milked, and was shat on. Bastards.

h) Discovered that the bro had gotten to the shower before me and used up all the hot water, leaving me to wash off the cow doodoos under a rain of ice. And ye verily, I was pissed.

i) Numbed my brain with Internet for an hour or two.

j) Talked to Dan.

k) Slept. Dreamed. Et cetera.

Where were you today?

Erm. At this point, today is yesterday, but it went something like this:

Washed my cheeses, put yesterday's cheesemake in brine, shipped two orders and prepped a third for pickup, washed hoops, washed the cheeseroom, washed my mother's cheeses since she had to do deliveries, made my half of my grandfather's birthday dinner, and came back up at 9 pm to take the cheeses out of brine. I was also supposed to milk, make yogurt, and make some shelf space in the cooler, but I ran into that whole "no cloning vat" problem. Darn pesky non-existant technology.

Have I mentioned we're understaffed? We're understaffed.

You'll note the lack of writing in this and the yesterday question. I'm not happy about this, but hey. Darn cloning vats.

Speaking of which, this is a really long meme. I think I'll post this half now and do the rest later.