The good news is that I made a fair bit of progress on writing yesterday. The bad news is I'd intended to devote the day to other things. The reality is that yesterday was the third time this week I'd heard about the parent or friend of a friend dying, and I'd also reread my favorite story by a very gifted fanfic writer who'd been killed by breast cancer two years ago (it's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight slash, if you dare), and a friend's grandmother just went into the hospital, so sometimes one just has to scrub the bathroom floors instead of herding commas into line.

*deep breath*

Two links for you today. At qarrtsiluni, there's a poem by Robin Chapman that begins,

My friend with ALS has moved to hospice.
Rick Steve's tours of Europe streaming
on the Mac, a mouse he can click with a toe...

Keep reading. I love what she does with angels, and that's not a phrase you will see in this blog very often. (Apologies to the angelphiles, but I'm allergic to most incarnations of them - I was a bookseller during the height of the early 1990s angel-mania, and even before then my instinct where most giant things with flappy wings are concerned is to hide. Though the turkey buzzards on my back deck were pretty cool, but I digress.)

The other link: Carla Zilbersmith has a calendar for sale. Part of the $25 being charged for each one may qualify as a tax-deductible donation to ALS research. Personally, what tipped me into pushing the purchase button was not the worthiness of the cause (I've got worthy appeals overflowing out of my recycle bin at this point of the year), but Carla's vivid (put mildly) writing. (Something to offend everyone, and I do mean everyone, myself included, and I kept reading through her archives anyway.) Two excerpts from her most recent post:

Not that I'm complaining, which I totally could, but in the two years I have had ALS, I've lost the ability to walk, to feed myself, to type this e-mail, to sing, to dress myself, and to wipe my own ass. And the party's barely started. My lungs are failing and by mid-afternoon, I'm hard to understand. I deal with the indignities of having someone give me a suppository so that I remain regular (a concern when you have ALS) and I deal with the humorous aspects of the same. For example, one of my caregivers--I won't say who, but it's the same one that put my hand in a cast--stuck the suppository up the wrong hole, which is quite a task, since a baby's head has past through the hole she chose. After the deed was done, she had to root around in my vagina until she found the suppository thus giving me my first lesbian experience. Dear Lesbian friends, tell me its better than that!

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[from the FAQ]
1. My family are a bunch of tight-asses. Is there something in the calendar that will offend them?
Absolutely. Here's what you do: You color in the panties of Miss January and you change Mr. July's quote from, "Yes, my cock still works." to "Yes, my glock still works." with a little deft penmanship. Glock still makes him seem like a bad-ass and it could be a euphemism for cock since they both shoot.