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 The last few days of my life (in a bulleted list!):

~ I got a new desk on Saturday!  My mom was getting rid of the desk she’d been using for years, so we decided to throw out my desk (a little hand-made thing that used to belong to my dad when he was my age, which has little graffiti-like designs scratched into the wood), and replace it with my mom’s.  The desk works fabulously in my room!  Unlike my old desk, this one has shelves to hold books and a huge writing surface that I can actually use.  Plus the fact that it isn’t cluttered with my stuff, which makes it easier to think in my room.  The new desk has actually sparked a lot of creativity, and now I want to write more than I did before.  I am so in love with it! 

~ In the late morning on Saturday the strangest thing happened.  Out of nowhere there was this amazingly powerful gust of wind that knocked over fences and made the tree branches curve in unnatural directions.  I was staring out the window when it happened, and while I was watching a twig hit the window with the force of a baseball.  If anything larger had hit the window, I’m sure it would have broken!  The gust lasted about two minutes and then was over.  We went outside to find that one of our ash trees had lost one of its largest branches.  (Sad!)  A few minutes later I was sitting next to another window and noticed a huge column of thick, black smoke jet into the air from somewhere in our neighborhood!  My dad jumped on his bike and rode off to find out what it was.  Turns out a power line came loose and landed on someone’s roof, setting the house on fire!  Around that time you could here sirens going off all over the city, so I am sure the wind did a lot more damage than we even knew about.

~ My family and I went on a hike in the mountains on Sunday!  We went to a trail we had never been to before, and discovered some of the most gorgeous scenery we have ever seen.  It was absolutely amazing.  I will probably end up writing a separate post about it, but I’ll give a few details.  The trailhead was at 10,000 feet, and the trail ended at around 11,000 feet, a little ways above timberline.  We were underneath large ponderosa pines for most of the hike, and through the trees we would catch glimpses of mountain meadows filled with wildflowers.  There were several lakes and a lovely river running near the path.  It was a hard climb going up: three miles up a steep mountain.  When we started hiking it was sunny, but as we climbed higher the sun was lost behind ever-darkening clouds.  We were above timberline when we heard the first bit of thunder.  It was far off at first, so we didn’t worry too much about it.  After a while we passed a man heading back the other way.

            “Looks like a big storm heading in,” he said as he approached us.

            “How far is it to the lake?” my dad asked.

            “It’s not far, but I wouldn’t go any farther,” the man said urgently.  “I would turn around right now and make as fast as I can for timberline.  It could get real ugly real fast.”  He continued his hasty climb down the mountain. 

            Now, we weren’t sure exactly how far it was to the lake, but we were sure it was pretty close.  My parents debated what to do.

            “Please,” I said.  “Let’s just hike a few more minutes.  If we don’t get to the lake in that time, we turn around.  It would be a shame to come so far and not see the lake.”

            My parents agreed, and we set out at what can only be called a jog up the mountain.  We arrived at the lake just as the thunder overhead started getting pretty loud.  We stared at the lake for a minute and snapped a few pictures, then turned around and started running down the mountain.

            Now you must understand something about thunder and timberline.  When you are above timberline, you are the tallest thing out there besides the mountain.  Which means that if lightning is going to strike, it will strike you. 

            We went down the mountain as fast as we could without slipping on the rocks and falling to our deaths.  We were forced to focus only on putting our feet in front of us, because to give in to fear could be paralyzing, and that would be the worst thing possible.

            When we got to timberline (yes, we made it!  None of us got struck by lightning!), the rain started falling in large drops all around us, and we pulled out our rain ponchos (thank God for those!) and continued to walk through the rain.  Besides being cold, it was actually quite lovely to walk through the mountains in the rain.  There was nothing to hear except the sound of the rain and the occasional thunder, and if you pulled back the hood of the poncho you could feel the rain fall on your face and hair.  I’m sure that memory will inspire many poems in the future. 

            We made it to the car.  We were tired, we were damp, but we had pictures and beautiful memories.  Here is a picture of the lake we risked our lives to see:

~ I need to try and work out a decent spelling for ‘Aenywroe’ today.  As most of you know, ‘Aenywroe’ is the name of the main forest in the book I am writing, and it appears in the title (The Prophet of Aenywroe).  It has come to my attention recently that the current spelling is horrible and that no one would even be able to guess how to pronounce it.  The correct pronunciation is [ay-en-AIR-oh-ay].  My mom and I came up with a list of about ten alternate spellings for ‘Aenywroe’ that would probably work better, so now it’s only a matter of choosing the spelling that is best.  I was thinking that perhaps I could narrow down the list a little bit and then post the list on my blog and have my readers vote on which spelling is best.  What thinketh yea about it?

~ I started reading Ted Dekker’s book Showdown today.  *shivers*  The man can get into serious horror stuff when he wants to.  I haven’t even finished chapter two, but I rate this book PG-13 for some very disturbing images.  You need a strong gut to read this book.

~ The time has come to vote for the winner of Crandall’s story contest!  See post below.

~ A case of writer’s block as high and hard as a castle wall has besieged me, and I don’t know how long it will be before I get out.  I mean, I know what I want to happen; I just have no idea how to make it happen.  I am trying to convince one of my characters to go along with something (I won’t give it away), but he has just given a fabulous, near foolproof argument against the idea, and now I have no idea how on earth I am ever going to convince him.  It’s a strange thing: when you really bring your characters to life, a part of you loses control over them, and they can get in your way. 

~ I swear, I have had an explosion of ideas for blog posts, and there is almost no way I am going to be able to post them all as soon as I want.  However, if you happen to notice a lot of posts appearing on this blog in a very short period of time, you will understand why. 

 ___________

Wow, this is a long post.  For those of you who happened to notice: yes, I did post twice today.  No, I don’t think I’m crazy.  This is the effect of the new desk.  It gives me so many ideas for posts that I can’t help myself. 

Copyright 2008 by Cherise A. M. You must ask me before using any of my stuff, and my name must appear along with the poem or post if you reproduce it

I am here to give a long-overdue account of the Feelin’ Feminine Challenge, along with other stuff.  Unfortunately, I am not allowed to post pictures of my outfits, for internet safety reasons. 

My favorite outfit from the challenge was a jean skirt coupled with a cute black top and a stunning necklace of bright, sparkling blue beads.  Plus, on that day I was wearing my hair down, and I felt that the whole combination brought out my best features: namely, my eyes.  One cool thing about the challenge is that, because I was wearing skirts all week, my hair looked longer.  My hair is currently almost down to my knees, but when you can’t see my knees, you may think it is down to my calves. 

Throughout the whole challenge, I was amazed at how special I felt wearing skirts.  I felt like I really was a young lady, and the physical restrictions of the skirts I was wearing pushed me to act more like a young lady.  Now, I do not want to convey the message that skirts in general will keep you from doing things you want to do.  It is just that, in my case, two of the skirts I have do not flare wide enough to allow me to sit cross-legged (which was hard when I went to a Bible study where everyone sat on the floor).  Moral of the story: buy skirts that allow you to move like you want to. 

I really want to do the challenge again sometime soon.  I feel that I didn’t try hard enough to look my best (a constant struggle for me), and I want to see what happens if I take the absolute best care of myself for a week. 

I am still working on writing up my complete story and sending it to my friends (I am so slow at doing everything) but it will be done soon.  I had a lot of fun with this challenge, and I can’t wait to see if my friends do it. 

Click here to see the new Feelin’ Feminine website that Jocelyn Dixon just set up. 

I wanted to announce that the HSB NaNoWriMo blog has been set up!  Please visit it, and add it to your friend’s list.  Anyone who is doing NaNoWriMo 2008 is welcome, as well as those of you who did NaNoWriMo last year and want to share about your experiences.  Writer4him made a beautiful template for the blog of her own volition, so stop by the blog to see her beautiful work, if nothing else. 

I read an amazing post on the Persecution blog about extreme worship.  I found it so inspiring and convicting.  It will really make you think about what God calls us to do as Christians, and what worship really means.  Read it here. 

I have also posted Part 2 of Chapter 2 of my story on my story blog!  Click here to read it.

I hope that you have a blessed day!

~Cherise

Copyright 2008 by Cherise A. M. You must ask me before using any of my stuff, and my name must appear along with the poem or post if you reproduce it.

I have decided to break out of the mold and just give you an honest account of my life, my heart, and myself, because that is really what I want to do.  From here on out I will try to regularly write shorter entries giving little insights into my life and the thoughts that are going through my head.  I figure if I do a lot of little entries, then I won’t have several gigantic entries that are hard to read.

Yesterday was a fabulous writing day for me: I wrote 1,300 words, all of which were in chapter 2 of my novel, which I am desperately trying to finish before the month is out.  It is mostly done except for the central scene in the chapter, which is turning out to be longer than I thought.  Chapter 1 was only 10 pages long, while chapter 2 is currently 16 pages long (and I’m not even done with it yet!) 

So far, my novel is 62 pages long, or 33,033 words (isn’t that a funny number?).  I did the math yesterday, and I discovered that chapter 2 alone comprises ¼ of all I have written for my novel so far.  Chapters 1, 2, and 3 (what I have of them so far) comprise a little less than half of the whole thing.  I am scared by how big the chapters are turning out to be, because - since I’m planning on having around 25 of them - my novel will probably end up being longer than I originally thought it would be.  (I decided at the beginning to do a fairly simple plot for my novel, and now am glad that I did.  Who knows where I’d be if I’d chosen to do a spectacularly huge plot?)   

I have noticed a pattern in my writing that I find peculiar.  I have been keeping track of how many words I write on which days, and I found that recently I have been writing mostly on Wednesdays and Saturdays.  The other days of the week I spend happily trying to avoid working on my novel (I pretty much succeed in doing that).  On the days I do write, I tend to write around 600 words.  I was wondering: do any of you have certain days that you can’t write?  Or could you pretty much spend the entire week writing, if you wanted to?

I was very proud of my word count yesterday since I feel that it makes up for the days this week that I didn’t write, but it scares me to think that the product of a great writing day, 1,300 words, still falls short of what I will need to be writing every day during NaNoWriMo. 

Speaking of NaNoWriMo, I know I asked in a post about two months ago how many of my fellow blogging buddies are doing NaNoWriMo this year.  I was surprised to find that quite a number of you are planning to or thinking about participating, and I got to thinking: since a lot of us are probably going to do it, wouldn’t it be cool if we started up a special group blog just for NaNoWriMo?  I know that none of us will be on the internet very much during November, but if we set a blog up just for NaNo then we would have a sort of ‘support group’, so that we wouldn’t feel too alone in our struggle to reach 50,000 words.  Whoever felt like it could post about their progress, and we could all put little wordcount graphs on the blog so we could all see how everyone is doing.  Then we could have a little blog party on December 1^st to celebrate the end of NaNo.  What do you say?  Is anyone else game?

 Well, this post is turning out to be much longer than I thought it would be, so I’d better wrap it up.  While you are down here at the end of this post, please read the one below it (it’s short, I promise).  It’s about free prayer bracelets that Voice of the Martyrs is giving out. 

By the way, I did do the Feeling Feminine Challenge, and a post about it is coming soon.  Please forgive me for taking so long to post about it.

God bless all of you!!!

~* Cherise, the Poetic Maiden *~

Copyright 2008 by Cherise A. M. You must ask me before using any of my stuff, and my name must appear along with the poem or post if you reproduce it.

I sat down and tried to write more of my story this morning, but, despite all my efforts, I could not bring myself to say write anything worthwhile that was even closely related to my story.  Because I was in such angst over my writer’s block, I wrote this.  It pretty much sums up the last 24 hours for me.  I couldn’t decide whether to put it on my story blog or on here, but since it isn’t exactly a complete story I put it here.  I had a lot of pain in my back yesterday, so I decided to combine that with the writer’s block to create a little bit of prose. 

Paul finally found his older sister seated in a chair on the front porch.  She was bent over her pad of paper, and her head was in her hands.

            “Lorie!  Are you…ok?”

            She groaned.  “Please go away!  I’m trying to write!”

            “You look more like you’re in pain.”

            Lorelle straightened and looked at him.  “Do you realize how hard writing is?  I want to write, but nothing is coming into my head!”  She threw her pencil on the ground.  “It’s not working, the Valkyries and the dragons.  And I had hoped to finish this story!  I never seem to be able to finish anything!”  Lorelle dropped her head back into her hands.  ”I guess I just need to start over.”

            Paul was unsure what to say.  “Uh, yeah.”  He turned and started to go in, but behind him his sister gave a violent groan.  He turned around quickly.  Lorelle was bent almost all the way over, her face twisted with pain.  One hand was reaching for her pencil on the ground, and the other was grasping at her back.

            “Lorie!” he shouted. 

            “Lovely time for a back cramp!” she moaned.

Copyright 2008 by Cherise A. M. You must ask me before using any of my stuff, and my name must appear along with the poem or post if you reproduce it.

I swear I have had the strangest couple of days ever.  I have so much to say, but where to begin?  This is a pretty long post, so hang in there with me. 

I have to go back to Thursday. 

I was downstairs practicing on the drums when my sister came up to me, her eyes wide and her face blank with shock.  She wouldn’t even tell me what was wrong; she just motioned urgently for me to come over to the other end of the basement, where we keep our chinchillas. 

We have had chinchillas as pets for about five years, ever since we took some from my grandma, who raised chinchillas for many years before that.  In that space of time we have had numerous babies.  In a series of events too complicated and detailed to go into at the moment, we ended up with a total of twelve chinchillas.  They are all so cute, and it is hard to part with them.  We sold one (finally) back in January, so as of three weeks ago we only had eleven.

Two weeks ago, Thursday, February 21, was a busy day.  My mom and sister and I were going to a youth concert hosted by the Colorado Symphony Orchestra in the morning, and in the afternoon we were going with some friends up to Estes Park for the weekend. 

We came home for lunch and found our youngest and cutest chinchilla, Gracie, dead.

We still don’t know what killed her.  She had seemed perfectly healthy, and it had only been the night before that we were all downstairs looking at how cute she was sitting there in the cage.  We only had a few minutes to touch her dead body and say goodbye to her, and then we had to start packing and getting ready to go. 

Being away on a mini vacation helped heal the wounds a little, especially for my sister.  She was more attached to Gracie than I was.  We were able to accept her death and move on. 

Two weeks followed, filled with activity and visiting, that lead up to Thursday, March 6.  The first day in two weeks that had nothing planned.  And my sister was standing there with a shocked look on her face, pointing to the chinchilla cages.

I walked over and saw what I had feared the most in those two weeks: another dead chinchilla.  One named Lucy.

Now, the thing that is so wonderful about chinchillas is that each one has a unique personality.  You never get two that are exactly the same.  That is why it is easy to get attached to some, and not to others.  All of them are adorable and lovable, but after seeing a lot of them, there are some that stick in your memory and some that you think about more.  One of our chinchillas is bold and fearless, and she will hop onto your hands immediately after you open the cage door.  Another one will ‘bark’ at you (give a sharp clicking noise) if you don’t give him a raisin.  Another loves to be cuddled. 

Lucy was one of the most memorable chinchillas we have had.  She was fat, overbearing, slightly crazy, and had the attitude of a Roller Derby Queen.  Her whole life was bent on escaping.  She would stand up at the entrance to her cage, chewing on the bars, shaking the door of the cage with her paws, and staring at you with a determined look.  If you opened the cage door, you had to be careful.  No matter how many times you pushed her away with your hands, she would still come back and try to push your hand away with her paws.  She was very quick to escape.  Surprisingly, once she got out of her cage (which was usually every other day), she didn’t seem in a hurry to run and hide.  Lucy meandered around, taunting you to try and catch her.  If you ever did try to pursue her, a merry game of chase began.  She ran just fast enough so that it was somewhat difficult to catch her, but not as fast as she could run, so that we usually caught her after only a few minutes.  Arrogant and crazy she was, and we loved her for it. 

Now she was dead. 

We ran upstairs and told our parents who came down wearing latex gloves and carrying the one-gallon plastic bag that would serve as a body bag. 

I stood off to the back as the rest of my family gathered around the door of the cage to take out the body.  I am one of those people who gets grossed out really easily and can’t stand the sight of blood, or gutting fish, or hearing people tell medical horror stories…or handling a dead chinchilla. 

My sister suddenly turned and ran up to me.  “There’s a baby in there, and it’s barely alive!”  She started sobbing, and I tried to comfort her. 

A baby!  That was completely unexpected, but gave a reason to why Lucy had died: it had been a rough childbirth.  We almost had a different chinchilla die in childbirth about a year ago.  The fact that the baby was still alive after the mother had died was really surprising. 

Dad called me over to hold the plastic bag open while he put Lucy into it.  She was already stiff, which meant that she had been dead for a while.   Which also meant that the baby had been without care for a long time. 

Dad reached in to grab the baby, which was lying down in the bottom of the cage and had its feet stuck down in the grating.  I heard the squeak as Dad lifted it free.   We rushed the baby upstairs and set it in a cardboard box, while my sister wrapped her hands around the baby to try to keep it warm.  Baby chinchillas are born with all their fur, but can die of hypothermia if the mother chinchilla doesn’t lick the baby dry and if the baby doesn’t squeeze under her body to keep warm.  My mom started trying to feed the baby regular milk with an eyedropper, but for a while the baby just lay there.  But we were persistent: eventually we were able to get the tip of the eyedropper into his mouth and squeeze out some milk.  We didn’t know if he swallowed it or not. 

Mom went to the store and picked up some KMR (kitty formula) for the baby to eat, since we heard that continuing to feed it cow’s milk was probably not good for it.  Meanwhile, my sister and I kept taking turns holding the baby and trying to keep it warm.  He perked up quite a bit.  His fur dried out, and he began squirming and squeaking. 

Or should I say she began squirming.  We found out around that time that it is a girl. 

By the time Mom got back, the baby had been transformed from a wet rat to a cute little fuzzball. 

We tried feeding the baby the KMR (we weren’t very successful), and then did some searching on the web.  We found out that baby chinchillas need to be fed every two hours for the first two weeks.  That includes during the night.  Not so nice. 

We set up a little habitat for the baby, and then assigned shifts.  I got the 4 o’clock shift.  We also agreed that if one of us found the baby dead in the middle of the night, they would turn off the others’ alarms and save the bad news for the morning.   

I woke up at four, like I was supposed to, and tried to get the baby to eat in the quiet of the night.  The stubborn little creature would not cooperate, so the endeavor took me about 45 minutes altogether.  But in a way, it was worth it.  She was so cute.  She’s only about 2 and ½ inches long, not including her little fluffy tail.  I consider myself lucky, in a way, because usually we aren’t allowed to hold a baby chinchilla until 3 days after it’s born, and then only for five minutes at a time, twice a day at the most.  This baby was ours from the beginning. 

It’s an orphan.  Its survival depends on us.  If it ever grows up, it will be because of us.  Not very many people have ever had to raise an orphaned chinchilla, because for chinchillas, birthing complications are unusual, and if the mother dies then the baby almost always dies. 

This is a grand new adventure.  The baby has survived beyond the first day, much to our surprise.  Looking at it for the first time as it lay in the cardboard box, I was pretty certain that it would hang on for only a half hour at most, and then die. 

My duties now include trying to feed a tiny fuzzball with a syringe filled with kitty formula every two hours.  It’s not exactly your average occupation.

What really makes feeding fun, though, is when the baby forgets that she is eating and falls asleep with the food still in her mouth.  After about a minute she wakes up and swallows, but it is so funny to see her just sitting there, in my hand, asleep. 

I will be posting more about this baby, which we have named Fuzzy Joy.  Hopefully I can figure out how to put pictures in my posts and you can see what she looks like.  Please bear with me; my brain is half-fried from lack of sleep, and as far as I can tell, that trend is not going to get any better for the next two weeks.  But do not expect me to stop posting about serious matters, with the anti-homeschool ruling in California, which I somehow managed to find time to post about yesterday.  If you haven’t heard about this already, please read the last post.  It is a vastly important ruling that could set a horrible trend for the rest of the nation. 

Well, that is all until my next post!  Thank you so much for reading!

The Poetess