Day by Day – Page 12

Disposal and decluttering

I have a fair number of books. (I’ve met people with more, so I don’t say I have a lot of books–I think it’s still under two thousand.) Occasionally, I go through my books and either garage-sale or give away ones I’ve decided I don’t care to keep. It took a fairly long time to come to terms with being someone who would get rid of books (a digression for another time), but it feels good to have the clutter gone, and to know that the books are not being kept in a place where they are not being read.

I can’t do this with ebooks. Rather, I have not yet figured out how to do this with ebooks.

Overwhelmingly, the way I get ebooks is through a service–Kobo, Smashwords, Weightless Books, emagazine subscription, DriveThruRPG, what-have-you–which requires me to create an account. The ebooks I own are associated with that account; if my computer explodes or if my ereader is run over by a stampeding moose, I can log in to my account from another computer and get fresh copies of said ebooks.

This makes it fairly hard to get rid of them.

I don’t want to give them away when I still own copies. I sometimes don’t have the option of not owning copies; it’s actually fairly frustrating to try and figure out how or if I can move something into a “yes I own this, stop reminding me” category and then duplicate that in Calibre, when I need to juggle scripting permissions to even log in (Kobo, I am looking at you), although a lot of the services are getting better about that.

I appreciate that ebooks don’t take up physical space. I do. But they’re still potential clutter, and if I am looking at a pile of badly sorted, unclearly organized, occasionally unwanted books, then my situation is not actually substantially better because the pile exists on a screen.

Juggling vegetables

audrey_ii_prop_replica_by_fortuneandglory-d2z2dz5 — If we ever get this in our biweekly basket, I am *leaving*.

We’re subscribing–I think that’s the word?–to a Community Shared Agriculture program this summer. We’ve decided to go with only once every two weeks, since last year we got a weekly box of produce, and it got a bit overwhelming.

(Kale. I had no idea there could be so much kale. And I pretty much gave up on hand-carrying things back from the pickup point after they started giving us watermelons.)

We got the box last week. Wednesday, I made a concerted effort to use up as much as possible, and made a dinner of garden salad, oil-citrus-garlic dressing, roasted asparagus with Parmesan cheese, and rhubarb crumble. This only used up half a cucumber, the mixed package of spring greens (five plants and seven herbs!), all the rhubarb, and some of the asparagus. (I mean, it used up more, but I’m strictly discussing things which came in the produce box.) There was enough salad for a second meal since then, and we’ve also used up the tomato.

This leaves us with

half a cucumber
Lebanese cucumbers
beets and radishes (I suspect I will make these into the backbone of a lunch at some point)
spinach
arugula
a yellow pepper
two more asparagus bundles
a squeezy-bear of fresh honey
some of a dozen eggs (we hardboiled some right away)
a beeswax tealight

Pretty sure we can get through that before the next box comes in. (Maybe not the honey, but honey keeps.) And having them around does make it a lot easier to eat well. It’s kind of like the fridge is gently nagging me to empty it, like a cute little inversion of “feed me, Seymour.”

Shiny, sharp, and green

The light of my life got me a Razer keyboard today–the BlackWidow. I saw one in… September or so, I think, wanted it very badly, and then it had sort of slowly slipped off my radar in the intervening months.

takketa

I may have made extremely undignified joyful squeeing noises upon unwrapping it. I am just saying.

This is a mechanical keyboard, which means (1) ultra-satisfying clicky noises–

clikclikclik tic tic takketa tap clik

–and tactile feedback, (2) lasts maybe ten times as long as your average keyboard, and (3) could probably serve as a blunt instrument in a (small) zombie emergency. It also has braided sleeves on all the cords, and when I say all the cords I mean that this thing has a power USB connection, a data USB connection, and runs speakers/headphones and mike out of the little port on its side. It comes with macro keys, and multiple settings, and software that backs all your custom settings up to the cloud so that when you get a new keyboard, you don’t need to fiddle around rebinding and re-entering all your custom setups, not that I am envisioning getting a new keyboard anytime soon because mine and it’s delightfully clicky.

clickety

The keys are slightly narrower than my old keyboard; they’re small squares, rather than subtle oblongs. I need to sit back a bit, instead of vulturing over my keys. Obviously, I will have to use this a whole lot in the coming days to practice.

Well, drat.

I slipped and not-fell down the stairs today (feet out from under me, sat down hard, slipped several steps, bruising, nothing worse), and while grabbing for the railing I managed to rip my left thumbnail loose from its bed along one side.

A bandage is taking care of it; it sprang back without creasing, so I figure the best thing to do is keep it in place and let the loose bit slowly grow out. And it’s not interfering with my typing.

But it has made it impossible to knit.

My right needle keeps catching on the bandage and punching through it, which gets adhesive on the needle and pulls the bandage loose. The bandage itself is slowly pulling free and collecting loose fibers from the fabric, too. It’s not so bad when I’m trying to finish my cotton T-shirt, but the silk-merino shawl I’m hoping to make myself is off the table for at least a few weeks.

I’m actually making it downtown tomorrow; I’m going to try picking up one of those rubber thimbles that you can get to help you turn pages. That should at least protect the bandage from the needles, and make it possible to get at least cotton knitting done.

Loss of time.

So I got home, and it was tired and quiet, and I had an idea for something to do.

Instead of doing it, I… er. Well. Sort of Pinterested for an hour.

…possibly a little more than an hour.

This was, I feel, less than strictly useful. (On the other hand, I have figured out that I can declutter my likes, which I often use as a “decide if I will pin this later” holding pen, by creating a board for fonts, posters, and bookcovers.)

I did discover that there’s an annual event called the Wasteland Weekend in Southern California, which involves… uhm, well, it looks like a four-day post-apocalyptic version of a Society for Creative Anachronism party. I am charmed[1] by the aesthetic, which is pretty heavily Mad Max. (Their site notes that it is a post-modern apocalypse: laser guns, powered exoskeletons, cyborgs, zombies, and high-tech robots need not apply. But Pip-Boys are okay.)

So it has not been a productive evening. But it has been a relaxing one, and I am at least going to go to bed managing to enjoy the fact I’ve looked at pretty things, if not done everything I wanted to do.
—
[1] I initially wrote “weirdly charmed” but… well, know thyself, and all that.

Arriving in a screech of dust.

Good god, that was a long break.

Spring has come, and then viciously run off again, and now come back grinning like a dog that wants you to understand they are really not a bad dog, they just saw this awesome squirrel and kinda had to leave you standing there with a snapped leash in your hand, yelling about how there’d been sun and things were melting and what the hell is this thirty-five degree drop from one day to the next!

(I think that’s a sixty-three degree drop, for people who use Farenheit.)

I’ve managed to do some serious cleaning out stuff that’s slowly accumulated and that I’m just not going to use anymore or that anyone’s not going to use anymore, so that’s nice. There’s a charity that schedules pick-ups of donations of clothes and household items, so having a deadline to work towards helped. All told, I’ve gotten five garbage bags[1] and a box of stuff out of the house, so I feel way better.

I’ve also managed to sort a lot of my knitting. I got rid of a couple of old finished pieces, and frogged a couple more. I put all my in-progress projects in one place, and all my yarn that I’ve decided on a specific use for in another (neatly bagged together with the pattern in question). It makes it feel a lot more manageable (and has drastically reduced my interest in buying more yarn for the foreseeable, so that’s nice).

It’s not exactly interesting progress, but I suppose it’s progress. And it’s nice to occasionally sit back and think about how much more air there is in the house, now that there’s more space for it.
—
[1] Garbage bags are what they ask you put old clothes in.

Cheers.

Well, the bleaching and dyeing went well! My hair is now purple–mostly a blue-purple, some parts reddish-purple, and a few bits of bleached-but-not-dyed hair wisping around in front of my ears. The Vaseline got on them, it’s a resist, it happens. 🙂 I wasn’t sure using the two different dyes would actually make a difference, but it seems to’ve done so.

(In comparison to the other vegetable dyes I have used–Manic Panic and SFX–Punky Colour seems to bleed not at all. It comes out a little with shampoo, of course, and I had to use cleaner on the bathtub when I first rinsed it out. But it only comes out with shampoo, doesn’t stain the bathtub after the first rinse, and the first night I put a towel over my pillow and could not actually find anyplace my hair had stained it in the morning.)

(It also smells like Grape KoolAid, or at least the two purple dyes I used do. I have no idea if this is a nod to the old… tradition? method? …of dyeing hair bright colours by using KoolAid, but I would not be surprised.)

I’m feeling like a bit of an ass for waiting so long to do this again, to tell the truth. I keep thinking about an old joke about the woman who gets a nose job, feels great, takes a cruise, goes mountain-climbing, deep-sea diving, has a wonderful time. She runs into her plastic surgeon at a party or something several months later, he asks her how she’s doing, and she bursts into tears.

“What’s wrong?” he says, confused. “I thought you’d had a wonderful time since I saw you?”

“Oh yes, doctor,” she says. “But I could have done it all with my old nose, and I feel so stupid for waiting.”

(Let us not unpack why this is expected to be funny, I am in a good mood right now. But the waiting. The maybe-it-won’t-be-right, the bloody inertia. I get that.)

In other news, my work contract is done, and spring is here. I am contemplating shovelling some of the snow off the lawn–the pile is currently only four feet high or so, but it’ll melt down to the grass faster if I take off a little. And Elise has posted a tease of names for some of her earrings, so I expect to be able to see some lovely shinies within the week.

Very few colours, I think, are unnatural.

I need to dye my hair this weekend, or possibly Monday evening. Because I’m using vegetable dyes (as opposed to dyes-in-a-box-that-come-with-developer), and because my hair is fairly dark, this is a two-step process. First I’ll need to bleach, then I’ll need to dye.

The dyeing is not the stressful part; I put it in and comb it through, and then I can leave it in for… well, there’s probably an upper limit, but IME six hours does not even come close to hitting it. Washing it out takes mild effort to minimize the skin staining, but I had that down pretty well. I’m fairly sure I can still do it.

The bleaching… I haven’t bleached in ages. That bit I’m actually a bit uneasy about.

(I have asked the light of my life to promise that, if I burn all my hair off and he is moved to laugh at me, he will at least hug me while doing so. He agreed to this, and suggested he might call me Ms. Luthor and ask about my plans to destroy Superman. I told him I would rather not have DC references, and he could call me Charlene Xavier.)

Because it’s been so long, I am kind of tempted by the idea of only partially going blue-purple, but the two-stage nature of the process means I would need to first bleach in a streak and then dye in the same streak, and that seems rather more difficult that just treating all my hair at once. Maybe I will feel more optimistic about it tomorrow; will see.

Unwell

I have a few words for people who come in to work when they are snorking and wheezing and letting out those ragged velvety coughs that just make sure you know that their lungs are laced with muck.

I am feeling polite, so I am not reproducing those words here.

I am also (for reasons which I feel are not completely unrelated to being exposed to the current office plague) at home feeling drained and exhausted and needing to give serious consideration to whether I am up to looking at a computer screen instead of napping on the couch.

(I was going to go with sleeping on the couch, but Angus abandoned me. Without him, the couch is just this padded expanse of old fabric instead of a warm and comforting dispenser of purrs, which is much less appealing.)

(…I’m still using it, mind. I’m just not dozing on it.)

It’s being an unproductive day. I am mostly making my peace with this, and trying to recover.

RightWellThen.

Apparently this “up at six, out of the house by seven, back around seven” thing is putting a bit of a crimp in my usual writing schedule. I am not very deeply surprised.

The work is work I am good at, and all the people there are quite pleasant. Also I’ve decided to see how long it takes me to knit a hat when I’m only knitting in transit to work or over lunch. It’s going pretty well.

The cats are yarbling at each other; there are apparently highly sensitive negotiations in progress, concerning such topics as who gets to lick whose head and which hollow in the cat-tree is Best Hollow. (Based on the available evidence, I would say Best Hollow is the one that already has a cat in it. But I may be missing some subtle nuances, here.)

Oh, hey, a reminder – submissions to Women Destroying Fantasy open up tomorrow, and Cat Rambo‘s posted some notes on what she’s looking for as editor. Very much looking forward to that issue coming out.