{"id":660,"date":"2010-03-11T10:13:38","date_gmt":"2010-03-11T16:13:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=660"},"modified":"2010-03-11T10:13:38","modified_gmt":"2010-03-11T16:13:38","slug":"countdown-five-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=660","title":{"rendered":"Countdown: Five Days"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Not that I&#8217;m jittery or anything&#8230;just because the US edition of <em>Oath of Fealty<\/em> will hit the stores in five days&#8230;but I started thinking about fives.\u00a0 Five bits of wisdom about fives that I&#8217;ve accumulated over the years:<\/p>\n<p>1.\u00a0 Five hours of sleep a night is not enough once you&#8217;re over forty.<\/p>\n<p>2. Five pennies make a nickel, but if you&#8217;re going to save coins, save bigger ones: five Susan B. Anthony dollars\u00a0 is five dollars, which will actually buy something.\u00a0 And it&#8217;s just as hard to lean over and pick up that penny as it is to pick up the dollar.<\/p>\n<p>3.\u00a0 Flowers with five petals create more different shapes than flowers with four&#8230;for no reason I can see, but they do.<\/p>\n<p>4.\u00a0 A musical interval of a fifth is easy to sing.\u00a0 Not so a sixth.\u00a0 For me, anyway.<\/p>\n<p>5.\u00a0\u00a0 Five pages of writing usually takes me less than two hours, but the next five pages will take twice as long.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->I have other bits of wisdom about fives (and other numbers) that I&#8217;ve accumulated (such as &#8220;Two times five fried oysters is always OK, but somewhere between 11 and 15 I wonder if I really want another&#8211;and the answer is No, don&#8217;t eat it.&#8221;) but there&#8217;s no reason you should suffer through that.<\/p>\n<p>The blog entry for the UK Orbit site is almost-nearly-completely finished (letting it sit before a final check for typos and flow) and is called &#8220;Two-Trick Pony.&#8221;\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I&#8217;ll send it off today, before my trip to College Station tomorrow (leaving at 7 am&#8211;chances are you won&#8217;t get a blog entry here for March 12; I&#8217;ll be back Saturday.)<\/p>\n<p>Stealing a line from it, to explain (in this case) why it seems to be taking forever for next Tuesday to come&#8230;.my husband said once, when I was struggling with a book and worried that maybe I&#8217;d never finish another one, &#8220;More than one is an infinite number.\u00a0 You&#8217;ve already finished three books, that&#8217;s more than one, so there&#8217;s no limit.&#8221;\u00a0\u00a0 In the present case&#8230;five is still more than one, and it can <em>feel<\/em> infinitely large when what we want is over there, and not over here. \u00a0 (It can also feel infinitely small when what you don&#8217;t want is looming &#8220;only&#8221; five days away.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not that I&#8217;m jittery or anything&#8230;just because the US edition of Oath of Fealty will hit the stores in five days&#8230;but I started thinking about fives.\u00a0 Five bits of wisdom about fives that I&#8217;ve accumulated over the years: 1.\u00a0 Five hours of sleep a night is not enough once you&#8217;re over forty. 2. Five pennies [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,5],"tags":[112,107],"class_list":["post-660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=660"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":661,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660\/revisions\/661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}