Apologizing through the crafting arts.

So, when I was in New York a few weeks ago, I got to meet adorable YA book blogger Sharon (from Sharon Loves Books and Cats) at the Strand, the famous bookstore in Union Square. Sharon is the master of the Strand and she showed me all the good spots, as well as picking out some great books for me to buy and take home with me.

However, horribly, I was a sneezing mess the WHOLE time we were in the bookstore. It was so weird, because I had just had lunch with Agent M, and I don’t recall sneezing on him at all. I must be allergic to books. Sharon was very nice about it, though, and didn’t do what a lot of people would have done, which would be to hold up a cross in front of me and shout, “Away, swine flu vessel, away!”

No, we just hung out and it was cool.

But then I came home and you can only imagine my horror when I read on Twitter that Sharon was SICK! That’s right, she had the cold from hell, and even had to miss work.

So, awash with guilt, I did what any self-respecting crafter does to atone for a dastardly deed: I sewed up some bribes!

And Sharon got them this week, and she vlogs (that’s video-blogs) about it in her typically cute manner here.

So thanks, Sharon, and I’m sorry! Even though you absolved me, I’m still sorry. I mean, even if it was your job that got you sick, being sneezed at for forty-five minutes couldn’t help.

Here’s the video itself, for those of you who don’t feel like clicking a link (I won’t judge you)…

1 comment June 27th, 2009

Despite the plague…

The husb got sick early last week, and I thought I might be able to sneak through the week without catching it from him. WRONG! It knocked me on my back. You know that feeling like there are hundreds of little germ battles being fought all over your body? I had that. For like two days. One morning the husb went to work and I realized I still had to get up and take the dog out, and I wanted to cry.

Yuck! Anyhoo, I’m back to about 80%… you won’t catch me on the treadmill, and you wouldn’t want me snurfling next to you in a movie theatre or anything, but I can go up and down stairs and even talk coherently on the phone (unlike Friday, when of course I decided it was a good time to call my agent). Sort of like drunk-dialing… more like Dayquil-dialing.

So despite the sickness, some very fun and cool things this weekend… one is a big surprise that I can’t really talk about except to say that it is something very awesome to do with Bad Girls Don’t Die.

The other thing is that Winston and I went to a free trial for a canine agility class, and Winston was great at all of the little tasks. I knew he would be. To speak in technical terms, he is good at behaviors, plural, but not at behavior, the concept.

The husb just got home from grocery shopping, and the way I feel toward a brand new carton of orange juice right now is like Edward Cullen toward Bella Swan. Therefore I must take my leave.

But cool things are coming! And if you’re reading this, Agent M, the thing I said wasn’t going to happen did happen! And it was cool. (And sorry I Dayquil-dialed you.)

8 comments February 15th, 2009

Open letter to gravel.

Dear gravel,

You are mean. Just because someone is tra-la-la-ing across you, looking forward to getting in the car and getting warm, and in a good mood from being at a fun wedding while you have been providing the surface area of a parking lot all night, does not mean you have to roll under said someone’s feet and somehow launch her out of both (!!!) of her shoes, downhill, in a manner that causes her to somehow slide-slash-stumble-slash-careen down to the ground, ruining her tights and scratching her hand and wrist and toe and knee and scaring the bejeezus out of her husband, somehow forcing him to (!!?????) step on her.

Sincerely,
Katie “I Fall Down a Lot” Alender

“I fall down a lot” is actually a phrase I inadvertently coined a few years ago, one night when I’d had too many White Russians. I didn’t know I had coined this term until I heard some friends-of-a-friend saying it to one another in the manner of a pop culture reference, aka, “Bob, you only gave the bartender three dollars and your drink is seven!” “D’oh! I fall down a lot!”

But I do fall down a lot.

4 comments October 12th, 2008

"Say SNEEZE!"

There’s a piece of Southern California urban wisdom that says, if you had hay fever when you lived on the East coast, you won’t have it here. If you were fine back east, invest in tissues because, brother, you’re in for it. This correctly assumes that everyone in LA moved here from somewhere else.

Well, I never had seasonal allergies when I lived in Florida, and I guess you can figure out where that leaves me. A few weeks ago, I noticed that Winston seemed to be snoring more emphatically, and it wasn’t more than a day or two before I started to completely fall apart. If left unmedicated, I turn into a sneezing, red-eyed, pathetic-voiced mess.

(And my sneezes are exhausting, because they always require an explanation. I sneeze quietly, like a cat, so people have to ask me if I’ve sneezed or what, and by the time I start to answer, I sneeze approximately eighteen more times in quick succession. At which point the person is so entranced by my alarming display that they forget what they were asking about. It’s like the grand finale at the fireworks show. I still surprise my husband, nearly every time, with how many times I can sneeze in a row. He’ll say, “Bless you!” the first time and then just sit there, watching, and saying, “Geez,” every few sneezes.)

I don’t think it helps that the giant oaks in our backyard are so pollenated right now that they look fuzzy. Plus, the house is on a hill, so the fuzzy tops of those trees are basically nose-level when you’re in the house. And we love leaving the windows open (the better to allow the pollen to infiltrate) and sitting on the balcony. And we walk up the hill and shortcut through our newly be-staired backyard, which means huffing and puffing right underneath the oaks. And I drive home with my windows and sunroof open, because even though I’m not an outdoorsy type, Santa Monica in the late afternoon is just too pleasant to box myself in from. (–”in from which to box myself”?)

So let’s be clear: I’m not taking any precautions. I’m just popping allergy pills (the non-drowsy kind) and hoping things get better before I accidentally blow my ears out.

How does this tie into publication? Well, seeing how all the fun stuff is happening with laying out the book and designing the cover and all, I needed to take an author photo for the inside jacketflap. (It goes next to the bio.) So even though I swore up and down a year ago that I’d lose those pesky *cough* few pounds before taking the photo, it was time, and I had to go for it.

If you’re still wondering how this ties together, let me simply say: the world will now know me as a girl with one squinty eye and one normal eye. Because for some reason, my allergies settled in my right eye and wouldn’t let go yesterday. (My right eye is always slightly squintier (just about everyone has asymmetrical eyes), but not to this extent.)

HOLD THE PRESSES: That’s my LEFT eye that’s all squinty! My right eye looks normal. I am so confused right now. Apparently I just AM that squinty… which is cool, right? Because perfection is boring and squintishness is awesome. Even though natural selection would condemn me for my asymmetry, my friends will just find it quirky… right? Right? Right?

So that totally negates the whole point of the post. Don’t tell anyone who hasn’t read this far. Anyhoo, here’s the picture we chose:

Photo credit: Mike Clark

Cheerio! Happy sneezing!

14 comments March 28th, 2008

Ear drops are nothing like eye drops.

(This was brought over from my old MySpace blog.)

Current mood: uncomfortable
Category: Life

I have a new writing blog up: Slightly Savage. Possibly the whiniest one ever.

Why, you ask?

Because of my ear infection, I answer! My horrible, horrifying, horrid ear infection. I hate it. And you know what else I hate?

Ear drops!

Oh, sure, they seem so simple. I mean, it’s a little bottle with a dropper nozzle and liquid in it. This isn’t rocket science.

No — it’s HARDER than rocket science. Yeah, there, I said it.

Because with eye drops, you can actually SEE whether the dropper is in the right place before you squeeze it. And then you can SEE the drop going into your eye. But with eardrops, you can’t SEE the earhole. For heaven’s sake! Nobody can see their own earhole. It’s all hidden.

And then when you squeeze it, you think you dropped a drop, but chances are good that you almost dropped a drop and then suctioned it right back into the bottle. Yeah. We’ve all done that six or eight times.

And then, when you miraculously do get the drop out of the bottle and into your earhole, does it make like an eyedrop, that model of ocular industry, and spread out to right your otinary (I’m guessing on that word) wrongs?

NO! It just sits there! For, like, hours! And I asked my sister-in-law, who had eardrops a few months ago and clearly held all her heartache inside, the doing of which I am not capable, how to get your eardrops to get in and do their job.

I’m going to paraphrase:

“You just grab the most painful part of your body — probably your ear, considering it’s infected — and you pinch it and shake it around until you’re in so much pain that you pass out, hopefully sideways, in which case it will only be forty or fifty minutes until the eardrops worm their way down into your ears.”

So, yeah, I don’t want to do that.

But I have to, every four hours, for the rest of my life!!!!

No, just for the rest of today and three more days.

Light a candle for me. Or, better yet, direct a supplication to the attention of Saint Cornelius or Saint Polycarp, who are the patron saints against earache.

Do it. Do it! There are evil drops in my ears!

March 4th, 2007

I’m So Dizzy, My Head Is Spinning…

I made it through my entire childhood without an ear infection, and now I have one.

Let there be no risk of ambiguity on the subject: I HATE EAR INFECTIONS.

First of all, they hurt the inside of your ear, but they also hurt the outside of your ear. The whole ear.

Second of all, you can’t hear.

Third of all, it hurts to chew, so all I can eat is ice cream.

Fourth of all, I spent the whole day in bed yesterday, which means zero hours of work got done on TGLL. So now I’m camped out in front of ye olde iMac, hoping to slog through a couple gross (numerically speaking, two dozen dozen) pages and let some pure brillance pop into the narrative. This will take all day, though, especially considering all the breaks I have to take for antibiotic pills (every five hours), anitbiotic eardrops (every four hours), and ice cream (whenever the urge strikes). The beauty is that every twenty hours, the stars align and things come together like poetry. Ha.

And what is today’s writing-related thought?

I think it’s this: since I finally got over the massive storybump that was giving me metaophorical hives, I sped through the ending (not on purpose, it just worked out that way), and as of today I have started at the top to do a rundown. I would say a final rundown, but I think it puts a lot more pressure on you to think of anything as final. As long as the deadline does not loom with ferocity (and mine doesn’t, but I do want to finish early for a number of reasons), there is no harm in leaving both the front and back door of the book open, so to speak. Run through the house, take a lap up through the side yard, and run through the house again.

If I’m talking nonsense, it’s because I’m dizzy, hopped up on antibiotics (which I hate, by the way — I’m part of the problem now, and don’t think I don’t know it), and can only barely hear out my left ear.

It gets much better if I hold my head sideways at a 90 degree angle. Bonus — it doesn’t even matter which side. But that makes it really hard to type.

Also, that thing where you try to clear your ears — ? Don’t do that. Trust me.

This makes me wonder about my poor characters. They really get the smackdown put on them (I don’t write books about sex or drugs or drinking — just violence). They really are much cooler than I am, because there’s no way I could fight an angry spirit with an ear infection, much less, like, a bleeding spleen and a broken wrist.

March 4th, 2007

I can’t stop coughing, and my dog is as plump as a polar bear.

I’m in that awful “meaningless coughing” stage of my illness, where you just cough because it’s easier than breathing.

Not to dwell on my poor health, but hoooooly cow, I was sicker last week than I’ve been in ten years, not counting food poisoning, which I achieve yearly. I learned that all of my feel-good Frankie Muniz philosophies have a tendency to minimize when I’m ill, and I’m not above honking at people or asserting my true place in two merging lines or even saying softly, “I feel like I’m going to pass out” to the good people of Bed Bath and Beyond. Happily, the guilt associated with these acts also seems to minimize, and perhaps that is the universe paying me back for all of my excuse making for its children.

I felt physical pain throughout my entire body, even when I wasn’t moving! It was horrible. And I was so excited, because I knew I was baking with fever but the nerd in me wanted to know how baking, so I bought a fancy thermometer, and then I got home and the battery was dead, dead, dead. So I resorted to self-pitiful crying, which was nice because Winston then came and licked the tears from my face, no doubt thinking, “How delicious are Mother’s self-indulgent tears!”

What was my point again? Oh, anyway, I didn’t know what it meant for a fever to break until mine broke, and it was terrible. But I’m much better now.

Christmas was nice. Saw the fandamily.

Home again. Winston is still in that crazy “post daycare” state of mind where he seems to be in the process of shaking off the crazies and auditioning for his spot in the household. Licks a lot. Needs tummy rubs. Fat as a fat little monkey and I’ll be damned if I know how he keeps getting fatter when he’s on a strict daycare diet.

That’s all, I guess. I’ll keep it short and sweet since I have nothing to say. I just wanted to make my mark on the blogosphere.

December 28th, 2006