Hello, all. Skye here, for another Feline Friday. In case any of you are worried, the ten pound cat in this week’s title does not refer to me. I do not weigh ten pounds, nor have I ever been stuffed in a bag of any sort. (There is the carrier, though, but we are not talking about that here. This time.) “Stuffing a ten pound cat in a five pound bag” is a metaphor Anty uses, and I will talk about that in a minute. First, though, here is a link to last week’s Buried Under Romance discussion post. You can read it here, and it looks like this:
Anty is pretty sure that some people may be only seeing this now, since she is a little bit behind on things this week. By a little, she means…uh, I am getting a look that tells me I may have gone far enough on that one. Anyway, she wrote that particular post ahead of time, which was convenient, because she was at the conference all weekend, but it was also inconvenient, because she did not get a chance to share the link once the post did go live, because she was at the conference. She feels bad about that, and is rather impressed that there are comments anyway, and a little (she wishes I would stop using that word as a speech pause, because it is one of her big language peeves, so I will try my best) embarrassed that she is only noticing it now. Never fear, she will answer anyway. It has been a big week. Here is what Anty looked like when she got back from the conference:
About five minutes in the door after coming home.
That is a very tired human, even though it was all for a good cause, and, while I am sure that she will get back to normal at some point, that is more or less what it’s been like for the past week. She has been grouchy, too, which is a part of being tired. This is where the stuffing a ten pound cat into a five pound bag thing comes into play. That is a term Anty came up with when she was taking care of three humans at the same time, a few years ago, and it means to have more things to do than time in which to do the. I do not know why she used cat stuffing as a comparison, but maybe it is because cats do not usually go easily into such containers. I think that is probably it.
Anyway, that has encompassed a lot of Anty’s week. One of the workshops she attended had to do with managing time so that a writer can write more, and she was eager to try that. She still is, only, because this is Friday, tomorrow is both her CRRWA meeting and the Tulip Festival (she has a date with Uncle for that one) and Sunday is Mother’s Day (it is not Anty’s favorite holiday) she will have to try them next week, because this one is basically toast. She suspects better planning could have found a way around that, but until she masters time travel, she can only move forward.
Well, mostly. There is the matter of a few assorted photographs from the conference, that Anty sent herself, which took a while to actually show up in her email. She is not sure how that works, but now they are here, so I can share the with you. Anty did not end up wearing the red shoes in this picture, like she had planned, because she forgot to break them in enough beforehand, but she showed them to Anty Melva, who agrees they do look like a pair of shoes in the story they are working on together:
Non-fictional version of fictional shoes.
Anty promises herself that, next year, she will plan what pictures she wants to take, intead of trying to remember and ending up with an odd assortment. Here are some pictures from Saturday’s breakfast. The bread table and Brenda K. Stone’s Froot Loops. Miss Brenda asked Anty to take the Froot Loops picture, so Anty did. Maybe I should ask Anty to take a picture of my food. Because she would have to feed me first, before she could do that.
Speaking of stuffing big things into small bags, here are all the books Anty brought home from the conference. She was very good (walletwise) and did not buy any more books that weekend, though she did see many books for sale, that tempted her, very much. This is why Anty always brings an extra, empty bag to these events. It always gets filled.
Eight more for the TBR shelves….
That is eight more books for Anty to read, and she already has her TBR shelves, plus her Kindle, and books to read so that she can write about them, all on top of writing books for others to read. I can see where that might make a human feel ever so slightly overwhelmed, but that is okay. As Anty says, the feelings have a job to do, so the best tactic is to let the feelings do their job and keep moving forward. That is best done by deciding what task is the most important, and doing that first. To keep with the cat and bag analogy, get the head in first, and the rest will follow.
Uh oh. I do not want to give Anty any ideas about getting me in the carrier (we do not have any trips planned, but we kitties can be suspicious about this sort of thing) so that had better be about it for this week. Until next time, I remain very truly yours,
Until next week…
Skye O’Malley Hart-Bowling
(the kitty, not the book)
Typing With Wet Nails 