Each Kid is now "guilty"

Each of our three children has now become 'guilty'. Guilty of what you might ask... after all they are just kids.

Well they are now all guilty of writing on walls or furniture with markers.

Max, when he was 3, used a black sharpie (yes, the permanent type) to scribble all over the kitchen wall in our house in Hudson. It took 3 coats of paint to cover that AFTER I sanded.

Travis, when he was 3, used markers and wrote all over the wall in the master bedroom. It was so bad, I had to repaint the wall.

And tonight, Tessa joined the ranks of the guilty by using a green magic marker and writing all over the couch. Using resolve, water and a lot of scrubbing we now have a wet coach. We will just have to see if when it dries whether her art is still there for our butts to sit on.

I am sure that at some point in the future this will be quite funny to me, but for now markers are my "do not buy for kids" list.

A dream come true

For those that have known me since I was about 10, you would know that I LOVE swimming pools. In fact, I was a lifeguard during my high school and college years.

Finally, I am realizing one of my dreams: to have an in-ground pool in my backyard. Starting in about a week, heavy machinery (the type to make any boy drool) will begin a month-long process of building a gunite pool. The idea is for the pool to be completed by Labor Day!

This picture is a pretty close to what it will hopefully look like.

I don't know who is more excited: me or the kids!

What I Learned Today

I have been pondering whether it is possible to dictate a novel into a computer using some sort of voice-recognition software. I hate the idea of sitting at a computer typing away......oh how I fantasize about walking around a large room and simply pouring out fantastically deep words into a bluetooth headset.

Having never written a novel or even short story for that matter, I wonder how much editing great authors do on a particular chapter or paragraph.

Is it possible to have a chapter just pour out into a mic that is nearly perfect?

I did buy a digital dictaphone a couple of years ago thinking it would be the holy grail for writing. Instead, it was simply awful and made me so distracted because it failed to record correctly. The idea was to record my voice and then pay (yes, I was willing to pay) for a service to type up my dictations.

However, in reality, I would dictate for 5 minutes or so what I thought was surely the most profound statements ever recorded only to find that the thing was not recording at all. Oh, the anger! I had lost the world's most profound statements!

Using that as an excuse, I stopped all attempts to find the story inside me that is longing to be released.

So You Want To Be A Writer?

There is something deep inside me that desires to be a writer. The sad part is the fact that there is something else deep inside me that dreads the idea of writing.

Writing is work.

The kind of work that can be dreadfully slow and boring, yet at the same time kind of work that can, when completed, be quite satisfying.

I am David James and I know that I have a story to tell. This blog shall be my forced (and first) attempt to get me to write. An attempt to force me to find that novel or memoir that might be inside.