Getting stuff done.

[nolawitch58]

The bin I use to take confidential stuff to work to recycle is half full. I used to keep statements, but no more. Too much clutter. Once it's paid, it's tossed. Besides, almost everything is done online now.

After torturing myself with the taxes, I spent another chunk of time yesterday torturing myself with my budget spreadsheet. If I use half my refund to retire two more small debts, I should stick the other half into savings pending refinancing the condo. According to my current lender's website calculation, I could drop down to a fifteen-year mortgage for a smaller monthly payment than I'm making now. Of course, I'd continue to pay the same amount and retire the mortgage even sooner. That's if I could refinance with my currently less-than-stellar credit score due to two year's of under- and unemployment. On the upside, the place is worth twice what I paid for it. I'll ask a loan officer at work. It can't hurt to ask.

In the afternoon, I reworked the timing of Chapter 12. The critique group had problems with the way the narrative lurched along. I'm adding a series of scenes to transition between late fall and spring that will contrast with the previous winter scenes in the story. The guys in the group won't be happy because all the new scenes are centered around a subject they find boring: needlework. Too bad. I suffer through their boring stretches of crap.

We had a women's seder last night. It was beautiful and moving. Our open chair was left for the Prophet Miriam. We listened to reading from a book co-written by Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem and others on the Jewish traditions denied to women. I'm hoping the wave of misogyny this country has been awash in the past decade or so subsides for good so that we can go on to address misogyny in other regions of the world. Maybe America has awoken from its long conservative nightmare where hating on women and gays was an acceptable pastime. We shall see.

Today, we go to my in-laws' for feasting. When I get back, I'll transcribe my handwritten notes. I'm still not able to do with the book what I'm doing now: sit in front of the computer and compose. I hope to hell the next book doesn't decide to extrude in the same way. Typing is so much easier. Maybe it's because the action occurs in the Sixteenth Century. I have written primarily using the computer before. I don't know why Ruxandra is being such a bitch to write.

Comments

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

I'd like to see the hating on women and gays vanish, too. We have to out-teach and out-meme them. And out them.

I asked a fellow Toastmaster of mine, who happens to be Jewish if his congregation had any female rabbis. His horrified reaction was almost comic, and perhaps meant to be, considering his usual sense of humor. Still, it's really sad that in this day and age there are people who believe that women have no place in certain areas of society, and in fact, might not even be real people.

Sigh...

My solution to the misogynist belief systems is probably the baby-with-bathwater sort, but I feel that their very fiber promotes misogyny, and therefore cannot, in good faith, practice them. We need to rebuild and reclaim them from the ground up.

[voxwoman.livejournal.com]

there is a woman Rabbinical student who blogs somewhere on the 'net. When I attended a Bat Mitzvah at a conservative temple (daughter of a friend of mine), the cantor was a woman. I had a very emotional reaction to the service (I actually wept at one point) - if that path had been open to me at the right age, I never would have become Pagan.

But then, they paraded with the Torah, and everyone's reaction to that turned me off again. I never want to be so beholden to a book.

I also work with a lot of Israelis. Their attitude is... difficult to deal with, that's for sure. Arrogance *and* misogyny all in one package. Joy! (I keep trying to tell myself that the entire country isn't populated with these guys, but it's been getting harder to convince myself of that)

[nolawitch.livejournal.com]

What continued to disgust and dismay me was in the readings. Some fuckwitted bastard the authors referenced at some point claimed that a Torah would be better off burned than read by a woman. The way Miriam was marginalized was repulsive as well. Yahweh is a jerk of a deity.

I don't get the so-called Christians whose panties are in a continual bunch about passages from Leviticus and such that they use to hate on gays. If they were really about the Jesus guy, they wouldn't be so negative toward gays. That's why monotheism is such a bad idea in my opinion. If your deity is wrong, you can't turn to another deity for a second opinion.

[voxwoman.livejournal.com]

I just got my taxes done, too. I owed them some money, but not an unreasonable amount.