Category: play through

In The Great Room

It is a mild and sunny Monday afternoon and I am happy and healthy here in New York City.

At the moment I’m working on my NaNoWriMo trying to increase a word count that currently sits at just past 45,000 words. I gotta get 5,000 more written by Friday to make it past the goal line.

I think I can I think I can.

In order to inspire myself, I’m sitting in the great room at the New York City Public library tapping away at the keys to my MacBook.

It really is a great room:




Copyright 2010, Karen Fayeth. Taken with an iPhone5 using the onboard app and the panorama function


Downstairs there is a free exhibition of some artifacts from Charles Dickens. Among these treasures is the late Mr. Dickens pen and inkwell. Now that really is inspiring.




Copyright 2012, Karen Fayeth. Taken with an iPhone5 and the Camera+ app.


Here I lament tapping away at the keys, trying to make the words accumulate into something good while our man Charles scribbled them all out longhand, dipping pen into ink every so often.

I suppose one might be a bit more thoughtful about the words if one had to write them out one by one in pen and ink, eh?

For me, I can’t imagine going back to even writing on a typewriter. I remember having to type up papers for school on my mom’s old manual typewriter and being so head bangingly frustrated at having to type each page perfectly with no mistakes. Argh!

No, I’ll take my beat up old MacBook, words slopping out from the edges of my Word document like water in an overfilled and somewhat leaky bucket.

I can veritably shower in the words here as they fly free and easy from my fingertips.

Then again, he was Dickens. I have yet to fully be Karen Fayeth.

Back to tip tapping away in the great room.

Many words and many miles yet to go….



Happy Gobble Gobble Day

Now a holiday tradition. Doodle-y goodness!

_______________
First published November 25, 2010

To celebrate the holiday, I present to you a doodle from my marker board at work.

I was on a *really* long conference call. It was boring. I got distracted.

May you and yours have a fabulous, gluttonous day!

Photo and doodle Copyright 2010, Karen Fayeth, and subject to the Creative Commons license in the right column of this page. Photo taken with an iPhone 4 using the Hipstamatic app.



The Sound You Hear

Wait, what is that sound? Muted yet distinct. Gentle yet forceful. Repetitive percussion, steady like a metronome.

Oh, yes. Well then. That’s the sound of my forehead upon my work desk. The press board laminate feels so cool against my fevered face.

The rhythmic thumping hurts, only a little, just enough to help take my mind off the other pain. The other agony.

Maybe I’ll intersperse some groaning in there in syncopated time. Yes, that might be symphonic. Soothing. Calming.

This skull produced tintinnabulation* began just about five minutes ago. Yes, that was it. Just when my boss left my office.

Ah yes. The boss.

He’s acting a little wacky lately. Too long a story to type up here, but he’s very much trying to garner the favor of his own boss. He’s living in the US for six months and so I believe he’s decided that for the entirety of those six months he is going to tap dance upon my neck, which may delight the Big Boss and make him clap like a toddler child over a tambourine monkey.

“Do it again! hee hee!”

We’re one and a half months into this polka and I’m not having nearly as much fun as he is.

We got into a little spat earlier about a slide deck he wants my team to create for him to deliver to the Big Boss. My Boss started weaving this storyline of what he wants this deck to do, to say, to mean.

According to the line of reasoning of what he wants, my team is to deliver a PowerPoint deck that will cure hunger, give everyone in the room a mani-pedi, and make a sandwich.

It should be that magic.

That beautiful.

That perfect.

It will have pie charts more delectable than a whip cream festooned holiday pie made up of metrics we do not have.

It will show graphs with upward shooting trend lines representing successes we did not achieve.

It will have strong bullets saying profound things in only six words per line and six bullets per page.

Or better yet, tarted up with graphics like puzzle pieces forming an interlocking circle, or arrows that grow from small to big across the page. Oh! Be sure to add in lots of those fun little transitions like bullets flying in from the left side and spinning objects.

Yes, make me a deck that would take a professional slide deck maker a week working full time, do this while still doing all your other work and quit bitching about it.

Oh, and can you have it on my desk by December 1.

Yeah. *thump, thump, thump*







* Gotta love thesaurus.com

Image from Sara is Reading What blog



Words. Sweet, Beautiful, Delicious Words

Tired, morose and limp from an already rough week at work, I found myself with a few minutes on my hands before the next meeting, so I idly visited my favorite idea site and took it for a spin.

It asked me: What was the last word you looked up, and why?

That got a furrowed brow from me as I struggled to think what word that would be. The proverbial light bulb went on over my head and I remembered likely the last word I looked up was still in the search field of my WordBook Dictionary app on my phone.

And so it was.

The word was avuncular. Meaning “1. resembling an uncle in kindness or indulgence; 2. being or related to an uncle.”

So there you have it.

Why did I look up that word? Because I was reading a book and came across the word and I had absolutely no idea what in the sam hell it meant, not even in context.

I like to think of myself and a pretty wordy person, a word nerd, in the vernacular.

I read a lot and I love the English language and all its quirks (American, British and all other forms of English included).

But for as much as I like to think of myself as a linguistic bad ass, sadly, I am not.

And so while reading whatever tome finds its way into my hands, I often have to turn to the dictionary app on my phone to look things up. Which is WAY better than having to slip out of bed, pull the dictionary off the shelf and look it up, as I used to do.

Ah the wonders of modern technology, eh? Creepy, yet good.

By the way, according to the app, today’s word of the day is: locoism. Meaning “1. A disease of livestock caused by locoweed poisoning.”

What a fitting word for my personal work related vida loca.

Well then, that was a nice break from the craptacular. But one must dive back into the morass as that’s how one earns a paycheck these days.






Image from King-Sheep.com