The Neptune Society

Two bits of news! The first is, I have finished the rough draft of The Piper's Debt! Whoooo! I plan to let it sit to the side and stew until after NaNo season. Meanwhile, I'm planning for NaNo and debating whether to try some short stories.

The second piece of news - The Neptune Society needs to stop sending notices to our house. For those of you who don't know, The Neptune Society cremates people. So, their notes often come off like little reminders of death. This alone is a little annoying, but they have upped the annoyance factor by addressing these notices to my grandmother who passed away quite some time ago.

How to solve this problem? With a pointed letter sent in the their business reply envelope! Here is what I plan to send them -

Attn Neptune Society:

One of your letters recently arrived at our house for my grandmother and namesake extolling the many virtues of cremation and advertising the possibility of winning a free cremation. You even list the name of the July 2007 winner for this contest, Mrs. S. Well, while this all may have been very exciting for Mrs. S, I regret to say that even the possibility of winning could not instill any sort of excitement in my grandmother. You see, she has been dead for over four years now.

Now, normally I would not take the time to tell you this, as I’m sure you have many other more willing bodies to deal with, but you have now sent several such notes to our house. Don’t get me wrong, I find their ill timing darkly humorous, but others in this household do not. These people find them insensitive and rather hurtful. I agree with the insensitive part, after all, you do not get much more insensitive than computer generated death reminders, and I don’t much enjoy seeing others being hurt. And so, I kindly ask you to stop sending ads and offers to this address. Those of us still living here find a bizarre comfort in our coffin ceremonies and are not going to change our minds.

Thank you very much,

Me.

I don't normally write things like this, as I'm not usually one to complain, but this particular one really got to me. Hopefully they get the point. If they don't, I'm sure I'll end up with many more envelopes with prepaid postage to send back to them.

An Update (What a creative title!)

And now it's August.

This summer has gone by way too fast. Not that it matters as much as it used to. After all, this year my schedule doesn't change at all when the fall comes. It is always a bit startling to realize so much time has passed without much notice.

Part of the reason the time has gone by so quickly is because there's so much happening. Work has been going great, and almost every weekend something has been happening. This past weekend I went to Disneyland with most of my sister's wedding party. The whole group is made of great people and we had a lot of fun. The weekend before was spent at my brother's house where I spent the night because my sister-in-law had a slumber party for her birthday. That was also a lot of fun, much more fun than the slumber parties I went to as a kid.

On top of it all I've joined the community band and have continued with my writing. The Piper's Debt is almost done; the rough draft is still scheduled to be completed by the end of this month. It isn't coming together the way I would like, but that's what rewrites are for. As always I have several ideas of what I want to write about next, so even if I push this project aside as a lost cause when the first draft is done I'll at least be able to apply what I've learned to future projects.

So, basically, time is going too fast but life is okay. Not where I'd like it to be, but slowly inching that way.