Idea Overload

I had another one of those weekends where I kind of need a weekend to recover. It wasn't quite as busy and crazy as the previous weekend, but it had its own kind of stress. Working backwards, I had to direct the combined preschool and kindergarten choirs to sing in the main church service, which is kind of like herding squirrels and making them sing. However, the result was insanely cute:



I'm responsible for the silly choreography. You can tell the kids who are in dance classes and who were very carefully imitating everything I did rather than just doing the motions. I know the lines are very uneven, but there were kids who were supposed to be on the bottom row who moved, and that threw things off, but it wasn't a battle worth fighting in front of the entire church.

Saturday, I had my workshop at the writing conference. I had a fun surprise when the moderator for my session turned out to be someone I worked with about fifteen years ago. Then I had the moment of "yikes!" when I realized I was wearing a skirt I wore to work then. I haven't been wearing it all along. I just rediscovered it last year and put it together into a totally new outfit. And then I realized that I wouldn't have known if she'd worn something she used to wear to work, so there's no reason to expect her to have noticed that about me. Though now I've made it public.

My workshop was on developing story ideas, so it was essentially a long brainstorming session. That seems to have triggered my brain into that mode, so I have still more ideas to play with. I came up with one as I fell asleep that might be more of a novella thing, but it's worth playing with. And then I was dreaming another just before I woke up that was highly amusing. I'm not sure if I could tease a story out of it, but it's fun for anyone who's a fan of those Saturday-night SyFy monster movies because I was simultaneously watching one and in the story.

I was with a group of people spending a weekend in a Scottish castle. We were watching TV, and a movie about a were bear attacking a group of people staying at a Scottish castle came on. It was about us! Some of the group went out to find and deal with the were bear, and they didn't come back, so another group, including the guy I liked, went out looking for them. Someone called in a famous were bear hunter, who was straight out of Central Casting as a wild Scot -- bushy red hair and beard, wearing a great kilt with no shirt, just the plaid thrown over his shoulder. He asked if we had any weapons, and I pointed to the walls that were covered in swords, axes, and the like. But that wasn't what he was looking for. He ended up raiding the silverware drawer and taking all the silver knives before heading out to do battle. Meanwhile, I was getting worried about the people who hadn't come back yet, since the guy I like almost always seems to die in those movies. He was the cute, nice, level-headed one, and in the movies that's usually the hero's best friend whose sacrificial death provides additional motivation for the hero. In real life, the level-headed one is probably more likely to survive, but I didn't know which rules were at work in this situation. I helped the rest of the people who were fleeing in terror load their cars, then went back inside and found my guy calmly watching TV. He informed me that the movie was over and a new one had started, and then my alarm went off.

I think there's some potential fun for the meta of it, with the people watching a monster movie finding themselves living one. Or is it a magic TV that made the monster movie happen -- the caretaker may have warned us not to spend our time watching TV? Or maybe the cute guy is the castle's owner, and he had warned the others against it. I think then the rest of the scene would have been the next movie being about alien invasion, then weird lights showing in the sky, and then we look at each other, scramble for the remote and turn off the TV. At any rate, this was very distracting and I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to tease a real narrative out of this.

I did get my HD cable box, and it turns out I could even set it up exactly like I had the old one, without getting fancy. I may not be getting full, true HD that way, but the important part for me is that I get the proper aspect ratio for the networks that don't letterbox the non-HD version, just cutting off the sides, instead. It was lovely to watch PBS the right way. I figure that if there's something I really want to see in true HD, I can just attach the appropriate cable and undo the other one. Unfortunately, the main reason I bothered with the new box turns out to still be a problem, as I'm still not getting the expanded range of channels. I'll have to call them again and get that taken care of. But today I have work to do, no matter how much I'd prefer to go back to bed.