I’m starting to feel like I’m nine months pregnant. The ninth month of pregnancy is the longest month. You mothers out there will know what I mean. When you get to a few weeks from your due date, people start calling you up to see if you’re still pregnant or whether you’ve got a baby in the cradle yet. As you pass your due date (as I did every time) you get even more concerned calls. All the affectionate interest begins to get a little wearing. You want that baby out more than anyone else, and every well intentioned question emphasizes the delay. You watch the days pass on the calendar and when the next person asks if you’re still baby-less, you want to scream, “I will ensure the whole planet knows once junior has arrived, please leave me alone to agonize in peace over this miserable delay!”
Welcome to my experience with publishing! I hear I am not the only one who has discovered that those in the publishing industry have their own time vortex. They say ‘2 weeks’ but that really means ‘2 months.’ They say ‘soon’ when they really mean ‘later.’ I hope having named a month, they don’t mean the one NEXT year, since the one named has already passed.
I once heard of a writer who was waiting to hear back from his agent. Being used to long delays and poor communication, he just waited patiently. He didn’t want to be an irritating pest, after all. Eventually he wrote, and discovered his agent had been dead for a year already! Oh dear.
It’s a waiting game, and I’m in the longest month. Pretty soon I’m going to have those contracts in my hands and the adventure will be undeniable.
Or maybe I’ll be sending flowers to a funeral.
If you keep your goldfish in a bowl, it will remain an inch or two long forever. If you put it in a pond it will grow to fit the pond. There are apparently documented specimens over 90 lbs. The one in the Yahoo story is given as 30 lbs, so you can imagine how gigantic a 90 lb carp would be!
Shawn L. Bird 
push overs September 13, 2010
I’m getting really irritated with the neighbourhood vandals who keep tipping over our community mailboxes. They lie face up, so our boxes fill with rain water and our box locks seize up. And of course, while the boxes are lying there, the postal carrier doesn’t deliver mail to us, and if there is something important we’re waiting for (like cheques or a writing contract, for example!) we just have to keep waiting.
The city could install street lights on our street so that the boxes were illuminated better. That might help. Or they could put a triangle of support bars on the backs of the boxes (although that might just mean the vandals go the other way and push the boxes forward. At least they wouldn’t fill with rain, though). Many boxes in our community are cemented into the ground or bolted onto their cement pad, not just sitting on paving stones. That would help, too. While I wait for the post office to come up with a real solution to the issue, I’m thinking about Drew.*
Drew spent years as a teacher and administrator, though he’s been retired for a few years. He lives in the country and his mail is delivered to a mailbox set on a post at the end of his drive-way. Apparently every once in awhile some local hooligans would get it in their minds to play vandal baseball. One would drive, while the other sat on window ledge of the passenger door, and whacked mail boxes as they drove by. A lot of hooting and laughter accompanied this ride of mailbox doom. The neighbours would hear the car, laughter, the smash, and then more hoots of delight as the vandals drove onto the next box. In the morning, broken mailboxes and smashed posts littered the road and the ditches, making lots of work for everyone.
After years of dealing with youth, Drew knows students learn best from real experience. He had replaced his mailbox once, only to have the vandals return to wreck it again a few months later. Drew decided he was not going to replace it again. He got busy in his shop.
A few months later, after the neighbours had all repaired their boxes again, Drew was in his living room when he heard the telltale late night laughter that indicated another baseball game was about to begin. He listened as the kids roared down the street, whacked a box into the sky, and laughed drunkenly. The pattern was familiar as they approached: roar, whack, laugh, roar, whack, laugh, roar, THUNK, howl. Then there was cursing, muttering, and the roar of the car leaving the neighbourhood.
Drew had decided his post needed to have a little reinforcement. He’d set a 3″ steel tube into a deep concrete base, and then he’d filled the steel tube itself with concrete before mounting his mailbox on it.
Drew’s mailbox remains firm after many years, and as an added bonus, so have his neighbours’ mailboxes. A lesson was learned.
Maybe I should ask if Drew can think up a more secure system for our community mailboxes?
*name has been changed
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