Category: Day by Day

Personal details; life, time management, work, cats, and sleep.

Quite tired.

The job hunt continues, and I think that’s enough said about that.

I’ve been tidying the house a fair bit, and while it was never horrible, it looks a lot less cluttered now. (I got rid of fifteen litres of yarn on Thursday, actually, and am rather ridiculously happy about that. Am currently trying to figure out how best to rehome comics and graphic novels.)

I lost two hours in the middle of the day, today, and while I don’t think it was a bad loss I wish I’d been a bit more productive.

And I’ve joined A Month of Letters because really, I have all these bits of stationery around and after a while an unused stack of paper can start to seem as sad as an unread book.

(I’m still working on books, too.)

One of our pets probably needs elbow surgery, and we’re still waiting to hear back from the surgeon (we, at this point, means both us and the vet we took her to see). I am trying very hard not to get frustrated at the delay, I understand that there are probably not a lot of veterinary surgeons in town, but I really want to know what can be done for her. She’s not okay, right now.

I’m trying not to get ground down. It’s mostly working.

A bit of a dull day.

It feels a little like I’ve been wading through molasses. There are things I would like to have done that I am not ready to do, and other ones that I got distracted from and did not get done.

On the other hand, I did get the screens for the living room windows washed. And sorted out the natural gas leak from the meter without freaking out. And I updated someone’s website for them. Finished Black Wings, although I didn’t write a review for it yet. Got up at a reasonable hour. Dressed and left the house. Took out the garbage.

(It’s an “accentuate the positive” kind of day; or at least I am making it be one because I am trying to avoid the doldrums.)

(In relation to this: I will note that a Google image search on kittens noses flowers is occasionally a helpful stopgap. Some of them are so cute.)

Also wrote 500+ words, even if they are in serious need of revision. And I think I just got a twist in a short story, and I don’t know if it’s a good one or a bad one to use.

Still life, with cats.

Not much to say tonight, but I’m awake and can’t get back to sleep and am trying very hard not to pick up the latest Laundry novel because if I do I’m going to finish it rather than go back to sleep.

I went downstairs for a warm drink, and was cornered in the kitchen by three sadly hungry cats.  “Feed us,” their eyes said. “You weren’t doing anything important, so feed us–and then hang around and adjudicate to make sure Newcat doesn’t steal all the food in Mediumcat’s dish, and Oldcat gets hers allllll to herself. You didn’t want to try going back to sleep, did you? Look, we’re cute. Feed us.”

(Given that it’s actually kind of important that we find out ASAP if Oldcat goes off her food again, I actually do need to keep an eye on her when she’s eating to see if she’s eating her food, or if the amount’s just decreasing because one of the other cats dove in when she wandered away for a bit.  And given that she’s really too skinny, whenever she indicates that she wants food we give her food, because then she will have more food and hopefully put on some weight.  And what this all boils down to is that I spent twenty minutes in the kitchen watching her mumble away at her wet cat food when I would much rather have spent five minutes in the kitchen making myself a hot drink and then ten minutes upstairs poking at the computer before going back to bed.)

(But she’s eating, so I don’t really mind.)

Lucifer Tailypo.

From Nolan, via Stephen King:

Nothing is so frightening as what’s behind the closed door, Nolan[1] said. You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching at it. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. “A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible,” the audience thinks, “but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall.”

Every time I see this picture of Lucy–

lucy-100feettall

–yeah, that one. 🙂 Every time I see that picture of her, in my mind, I imagine a gleeful scratchy voice, specifically Isme’s voice from The Emperor’s New Groove, cackling out “–and behind the door was a bug A HUNDRED FEET TALL!”

That’s a clever girl, Lucifer. You’ll upgrade to a thousand feet any day now.

Also, I figured out what I really wanted her middle name to be yesterday, when we were bringing her back from the vet’s. It’s Tailypo.

So she is Lucifer Tailypo, and she is settling in beautifully.
—
[1] William F. Nolan, at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention.

Slightly surprised.

I could have sworn I’d written something here in the last month.  Looking over where I’ve actually been typing, though, I can see how I didn’t manage that.

I’ve been chipping away at a couple of stories–one handwritten, one typed up, and it’s interesting to see how the pace is slightly different.  I’ve also been working on a story for a game–the Story Nexus engine’s open to the public, now, and it’s got the potential to be a huge timesink.  (You can check it out online over here.)  And there were some repairs at home, so there’s some work putting everything back into place.

And I’m job-hunting, too, since my contract was not renewed.  That last is probably the most draining of everything, to be honest.

Oddly content

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Came up, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the context of Game of Thrones.  Martin’s ability to make characters that do frankly reprehensible things into people you actually start to like is unlike pretty much anything I’ve ever seen (although, you know, suggestions for similar writers to check out is welcome).

It actually got to the point where I was deeply uncomfortable with someone’s pointing out exactly how objectionable the behaviour of one of my favourite characters was.  That’s fairly unusual for me, although probably it has to do with the fact that people who commit murders aren’t usually portrayed as sympathetic characters.  It’s not as if I am in a position to stand back and say “well, usually I have no problem with the criticism of characters I like which do bad things, but something about the way GRRM writes them makes it different.”

(Note that I said “people who commit murders” instead of “murderers”.  On the one hand, this illustrates how much focus gets put on other aspects of the character.  On the other, I picked those words, and they are words that minimize the murders in question.)

========

I’m putting off being annoyed at something.  I mean, possibly I won’t have reason to be annoyed, but I might, and the possibility is sort of trying to squinch up my spine.  It’s annoying, and between watching The Newsroom and pausing it to discuss Game of Thrones and getting the occasional news squib from the real world (mostly cheerful) I think I am mostly overcoming it.  Which is nice.

Sidetracked by palimpsests.

If that is in fact the plural.

We’re watching In the Name of the Rose, and the text is in German, and the credit is something like “a palimpsest from Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose“.  I don’t assume that it means exactly the same thing as in English, but I can see where a similar meaning could be useful.

A palimpsest, for the record, is a document or part of it–a manuscript page–that has been scraped clean and reused.  Wax that was melted or pressed smooth again, vellum that had the top layer (and the ink) scraped off.  The idea that there’s a specific word for this always sort of intrigued me.  A bit difficult to articulate, but it’s a word for something that once had a characteristic which no longer exists; which is defined by being itself made over again.

There are very few terms for things like that.  “Recycled” or “upcycled” focuses on what it is now; “reused” is close, but it’s about what happened to it, not what it was/is.

I don’t think I’m being particularly persuasive; I’m seriously distracted by the movie.  It’s a deeply lovely film. Not pretty, it is very good at not being pretty, but it has a lovely depth to the faces and architecture and light and framing.

(I was going to write something about how I’d lost touch with people and how I was okay with that, but I can save that for later.  Now I am going to focus properly on the movie.)