Day by Day – Page 14

Security nagging.

Okay, does anyone actually have anything (either good or bad) to say about WP’s repeated suggestion that you/we/I enable two-step authentication? The backup code thing seems neat but fussy.

Closing in on Christmas, which is never a relaxing proposition. (I will grant exciting in a good way, on good years, but not relaxing.) Gift flail, card flail, and trying to figure out how many days between now and mid-January I can reasonably block off and declare to be mine and mine alone, for my peace of mind. It’s been a very busy week.

The guy who’s coming to install our new sink did call this morning to say he’d be late, but we haven’t heard from him since. I am hoping he either calls or shows up in the next ten minutes, but I’ve been hoping he’ll call in the next ten minutes for nearly an hour now, and it’s getting increasingly distracting. Lots of “but if I start X won’t I just get interrupted? Surely I will get interrupted soon, right?”

Sure it will get sorted out. Meantime… well, onwards.

(I have a holiday goal–possibly not specifically a Christmas goal, but definitely a “within the next three weeks” goal. It involves nice movies, possibly candy/popcorn, a fireplace, and the humans in the house not outnumbering the pets. I will keep this in mind as something to work towards, slowly and with grace.)

Time is slipping away.

Wow. Sixteen days with no posts. (Coincidentally, eleven days with no writing and, barring yesterday morning, twenty-one days with no running. Correlation is not causation, but I do suspect that I am looking at some correlation, rather than pure coincidence. Will need to keep an eye on that.)

Right. Words.

…I have just, for the record, spent a good three minutes staring blankly at this screen.

Today was pretty draining; I spent eleven hours and twenty minutes of it either in transit or doing work that’s definitely useful but was (today at least) kind of repetitive and exhausting. Lunch consisted of catching up with a lot of online things, which was slightly less than relaxing, if informative. When I finally got home, the light of my life and I split dinner-arranging duties, and by the time that was done I had enough energy to go out to knit night. I’m actually really glad I did; everyone was swapping “how did you start coming to knit night?” stories, and it was good to catch at least the tail end of that.

I’m actually thinking of cutting back on my knitting a fair bit – so many of the ways I spend time (writing, knitting, puzzles, talking to people except face-to-face, gaming, reading unless it’s on an e-reader) require a pair of hands free, and I might need to start prioritizing.

(I understand this is part of being an adult, or something. When I was young, I thought adults got to stay up, like, forever, and had all the time in the world. I feel that a terrible misrepresentation is being perpetuated.)

Of cats and wires

The rewards of bravery are scant and cruel.

The technician who came to fix our internet connection seems competent and pleasant, but I don’t think the salesperson he was talking to quite followed what needs to be done differently for installation sales orders.

Hoping all issues are resolved so everyone gets internet access and gets paid.

Angus very bravely came out to watch the new human, at which point Piper sat on him. (Angus, not the technician.) The rewards of bravery are scant and cruel.

Right now the cats are patiently studying the high winds outside, and I am mourning the lovely weather we were having. Nice while it lasted.

Update:

Well, the internet problem is not actually fixed, which is really annoying. Hoping it gets sorted tomorrow morning. I mean, for the moment, we at least have flaky internet access, but we had that before so it isn’t really an improvement. And the afternoon was a whole lot of fussing back and forth that just enabled us to stay in one place.

Eh.

On the plus side, the weather hasn’t gotten quite as unpleasantly chillier as I was worried it would, and we are getting some lovely windy bluster and occasional spates of rain. Combined with a warm house and extensive amounts of tea, this actually makes for a pretty pleasant afternoon.

Sticks and string (and probably bloodthirsty radioactive mutants).

I am fond of post-apocalyptic settings. I’m particularly fond of ones with a retro-futuristic styling[1]; god knows why I keep coming back to that, since it’s not as if there haven’t been some beautifully detailed and realized post-apocalyptic settings which don’t conform to that aesthetic. I imagine it hooks into that part of my brain that always argues for finding a diner[2] if one is looking for a restaurant.

I also knit.

These two things meet in my brain not infrequently, and apparently I’m not alone. Alex Tinsley is editing a book called Doomsday Knits, which also includes lovely photos and amusing flow charts to assist you in identifying your apocalypse, and I am so there. (I think that of the patterns I’ve seen on the blog tour so far, I am particularly fond of the Fennec shrug. Am just sorry I missed the Kickstarter.)

It’ll be coming out next month. Something to look forward to.
—
[1] For those who don’t know me: why yes, this covers the excellent game settings Deadlands and Fallout, particularly Fallout: New Vegas. For those who do: yes, I’ve got my brain in Deadlands and Fallout again. Hush. It’s just one of those things that happens every now and then.
[2] This is occasionally overruled by other parts of my brain. My brain is large; it contains multitudes. Still, I acknowledge the impulse. Tangentially: diners are apparently called coney islands in Detroit. (Also, would totally accept Detroit as a future Fallout setting. Michigan has been sadly underused. Also Ronto.)

Breathing room.

One particularly good thing happened this weekend. I’d cleared a block of time, and worked on clearing up my office. The light of my life stepped in to help when I hit the bad patch–you know the one, the “oh god, this is never going to work, there’s so much, I don’t know how I’m ever going to get it all under control.” And it’s not all done as well as I want it done, but there’s what feels like a huge difference.

The wall of my office furthest from the door is (obviously) the first thing I see when I walk in. It used to have a couple of things stacked up against it, and the edge of my desk that was up against that wall had clutter on it as well. And now neither of them do, and when I walk in through my office door, I see it looking better, and it’s just such a quiet relief.

I have been a fairly regular follower of UfYH (page title uses NSFW language) for a while now. I knew intellectually that the bit about “clutter makes it harder to think” is true. But it’s kind of awesome to actually notice it because I can feel things getting better.

Always it is the zombies.

There’s a nifty little running app called Zombies, Run! It assembles a playlist from music on your phone (I can’t remember if it uses WinAmp specifically or if that’s just how I use it), and then it intersperses the songs with radio transmissions from a camp of survivors after a zombie outbreak. You become Runner 5, one of the camp’s couriers, going out on assorted survival missions and not incidentally dealing with plot twists and betrayal and (speaking as someone who has not played very far in) another Runner who I think is just being a teeny bit too gleeful about the prospect of shooting me as a lying traitor.

(Okay, she probably wouldn’t use a bullet if she could avoid it. That would be wasteful.)

Anyway, it is a pretty awesome app for encouraging running–you get a cute little radio play mixed with your favourite workout songs, and then there’s also the option to have intermittent hordes of zombies show up and encourage you to really run, what with the slavering and the groaning–and I’m very sorry I took a break from it as long as I did. But I picked it up again today, and…

Eh. I have done worse. Mostly by not trying to go out for exercise walks at all, but I have done worse! So that was a productive exercise moment in my day.

Catching up.

I have been stress-inducingly behind on a few things lately. The last couple of days have resulted in my managing to clear up some of them; hope to continue to make progress (touch wood, smile, move along to other topics before something comes up to throw a wrench into the works).

I’ve found I do fairly mechanical things (knitting, sorting, or repetitive coding) much better when there’s a familiar movie in the background, so I was able to make fairly good progress on a day which involved two run-throughs of Trick ‘r Treat (mentioned back here), a playing of Coraline, and a playing of The Shining. (I may not use The Shining for this purpose again; the soundtrack is too prone to blaring.) The length of a movie also provides an excellent cue for when it’s definitely time to get up and take a break.

I’ve drinking a mix of teas from David’s Tea lately–a place that sells fairly normal blends, and interesting herbal blends, and then blends which have little gold sugar confection decorations or pieces of popcorn or candy sprinkles. This is quite lovely, except for the bit where a fair number of the blends are tea, which is not a caffeine-free substance, and thus is not conducive to drinking in great quantities a few hours before bed. (I’ve recovered. I’m sure someone with a less ragged sleep schedule than me could come up with something quite pithy to say about (1) tea and (2) the sun never setting on the British Empire.)

I read Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep in three days, and yes that is an unusually long time for me to take at it. Pleased overall, looking thoughtfully at a couple of details, more thoughts in a bit.

I read Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s This Strange Way of Dying and really quite loved it, just saying. Dreamy, dark, sharp, and oh dear god I need to get back to writing proper reviews again because this one so deserves it. (It’s here on GoodReads, for those so moved to add it to their shelves.)

Several more things I am hoping to get done today; am going to take a short break (possibly until the tealight in my cute bat holder finishes burning down; it’s chilly and rainy and dark and wet out here, and candles do improve the mood), and then get back to it.

Life is wet.

(Sorry, the phrase has been stuck in my head for a while. Specifically related to petrichor, actually.)

I made dinner, tonight. I also made glue. Unfortunately, the two overlapped.

There was a particular time I was aiming to have dinner ready for, and since I had a little time in advance, I figured I’d get everything ready to cook ahead of time. (I understand people who do not make the kind of mistakes I made call this a mise en place.) So I measured out the appropriate amount of chives, mixed the broth and spices, measured out the butter and left it to soften in a cat-free zone at room temperature so it’d melt faster, and chopped and floured the chicken.

The error, in retrospect, should have been obvious.

Raw chicken is moist.

When you add flour to cubed raw chicken, you are (besides creating something that always makes me think of Turkish Delight) adding flour to moisture and creating a paste.

As I am reminded anew every time I make bread dough, there is a reason flour paste is used as glue.

Oh well. It delayed dinner a bit, but the end result was good, and the leftovers are already boxed for meals for later, so yay. (They are also already boxed because it vastly reduces the odds that I will go for seconds, which is always a tempting danger with a dish that has a lemon/butter/salt/garlic sauce, I am just saying.)

Taking stock.

Well, the number of books in the intersection of “owned” and “to read” on GoodReads is staying fairly steady. I was kind of hoping to get it down to double digits by the end of this year, but that is currently looking pretty unlikely. (If I can get it down to 120, I will be well pleased. 125 seems more realistic.)

There was some cleaning today – not hugely in-depth stuff, more the “hum, this counter/shelftop has not been stripped completely bare and wiped down in a while” kind of thing. (I think, in my mind, “hugely in-depth” involves either moving furniture or breaking out Products Only Used For Cleaning (vs a damp sponge/cloth).)

My sleep schedule is completely off; I woke up around noon today. The sore throat that was threatening to appear around the start of the weekend isn’t in evidence, at least, but today has felt like fighting my way uphill during the Great Molasses Flood to get anything done.

(There really was a Great Molasses Flood. Boston, January 15, 1919.)

I finished the second hat I’m knitting to donate to a local school, but I think it’s too small. Will speak to one of the people who actually works there and check.

End of the week.

I’m sort of ashamed to admit I didn’t realize until mid-late morning that it was Friday the 13th.

It’s been a bit of a long week. Upsides include finishing with the current batch of documents at work, apparently rather more quickly than expected, and the light of my life bringing home sushi for dinner. Downsides include possibly coming down with something, and a crick in my neck from falling asleep on the couch.

Unwinding with ginger-pepper tea (no, seriously, it’s very soothing, although I think it’s technically an infusion because there isn’t actually any tea in it) and a watching of Deathtrap – it was that or Trick ‘R Treat, and I’ve seen the latter really recently. (I was also considering Oscar, but it’s not on the computer, and since there is a cat very imperiously sitting on me, I did not want to deal with getting up to fiddle with the DVD player.) Michael Caine having a conniption fit is sort of adorable.

Placed an order with the local book store for a copy of This Strange Way of Dying while I was running around yesterday, so am looking forward to that.

(Not much to say, really: I think this is just a slightly wordy “Yay, time to sleep!” at heart.)