You know, I'm getting good at this every other day thing. Now that I have a routine of every other day going, I don't feel so much pressure to drop one in _every_ day!
Well, the Yanks are in third place, 3 games back of Boston and everybody around here has come to the firm belief that the Yankees are done. This, of course, says nothing to the fact that we have played 18 out of 162 games. To all those who hold the firm belief that Boston has the division in the bag already, please let me direct your attention to 1978, when they lost a 13 1/2 game lead in September. Three games back in April concerns me not at all. 'nuff said.
Remember how I said I thought I had broken my momentum on Civil War books? Well, I didn't. I actually found a good way to transition between good fiction and sometimes dry history. Authors like Bruce Catton and Stephen Oates and Shelby Foote, who write history the way it should be - as a story. Getting into who moved where with how many numbers at what time is, necessarily, a dry business. I discovered, though, that working one's way back into the area through storytelling histories can make the cold hard facts more bearable. It also provides the distinct advantage of helping illustrate how to pass history along to others. On the trips that I take with large groups to battlefields, I do parts of the tours. The trip to Antietam about a month ago was my best in terms of storytelling as opposed to spitting out facts. I still spit out too many facts, but I made it flow a lot more than I have before, started stringing the facts along into a whole story, not just 'x number of men came here at 9:00 and met y number of men and there were z number of casualties'.
I feel so.....'stupid' isn't the right word..........'scatterbrained', maybe, at times like when I wrote the above paragraph. I have a tendency to start talking about something, have it turn into something else, into something else again, and then have absolutely no idea where the second idea was going, much less the first! It's not bad sometimes, especially if I can pound the initial idea out of my head eventually. It can even be a good thing, bringing up stuff I also wanted to say, but would've forgotten. Still, every time it happens, I take a step back and look at myself and go "you're an _idiot_!"
Just as a little addendum, I FINALLY got smart enough to copy the whole entry into notepad before I tried to save it to the page, and *prestobingo* there was an internal error in the page I was working on and I lost everything! Right now, I'm just proud enough to have gotten around that little problem that I had to throw in this little pat on my own back! |
