Day by Day – Page 9 – Aphotic Ink

Second Sunday.

We’re nearly a third of the way through January, and the Eastern Canadian in me is deeply confused. We’ve had about a week of winter all told, and today it was warm and raining and everything was getting washed off the lawns and streets and sidewalks.

(This is January-in-Ontario “warm”, which means “definitely above freezing” rather than “iced drinks and T-shirts!”, but still.)

It looks like it’ll be closer to normal over the next couple of weeks, but I’m more used to a month and a half of winter by this point in the year, so the back of my mind is remaining slightly confused by the fact that the snow showed up after the days started getting longer.

Mostly I’m hoping that there isn’t an ice storm coming. People are worrying a little about that, but it’s hard to tell where that is on the spectrum between “worrying because knowing they have a plan will make them feel better” and “worrying because it’s actually likely to be a problem”.

In other news, my goodness there are a lot of lovely things that can be nominated for the Hugos this year. I’m trying to pull a list together of stuff I particularly liked, but it’s a bit overwhelming. Still, it’s a goal.

Pixel renovation

I’ve reorganized this site a bit. New year, new look, general tidying, and all that.

It kind of looks like a Thomas Kincaide art collection threw up all over the top of the page, but given how little sunlight I’ve seen lately and how much time I’m about to be spending indoors at work, I am actually perfectly okay with this. I may prune down the number of images over the next couple of months, or change the layout, but for now I’m good.

The first weekend of 2016’s been okay. It looks like January will be a lot colder than December, but since I actually now own my first winter coat in about a decade, this is filling me with considerably less trepidation than I might have expected.

Work starts up again tomorrow, and writing has been going well, and I suppose things are generally being fairly unremarkable and pleasant. Going to call it a night, now, I think.

And that was even longer.

I thought there had been a few hectic days, and a bit of sick time, and the next thing you know I look around and it’s seven days to Christmas.

In my defense, there has still been no snow, and very little cold, and I am currently having a bit of trouble convincing myself that it’s actually December and very nearly the longest night of the year, rather than mid-October-with-less-daylight. Or April.

I hear that a mild lead-in to winter leads to an absolutely horrible February. I honestly can’t remember the last time we had a really mild December, but even if we just get a regular February with a couple of -40 days, it will come as a shock after this.

Honestly, there’s not a lot to say right now. This is, in part, an “I aten’t dead.”

I missed the pumpkins.

Someday I’ll do a proper and full con write-up – by which I mean one that satisfies me – but today is not that day, for reasons of Work and Commitments. I will say, though, that CanCon was lovely and both the panels and the hallway discussions were fun and informative.

(I do wish I’d been able to swing a hotel room. Next year, maybe.)

The time change has been lovely, for the record. I’m going to try to keep my sleep schedule generous this month, especially since I’m trying to hit a NaNoWriMo word count. Whether I manage it or don’t, sleeplessness is not going to make the end result any more useful, nor my coping with stress any more graceful.

(It’s not upsetting, but it is weird enough to make a note of: I think this year is the first time since we’ve had a front porch that I haven’t carved a jack-o’-lantern.)

I think that’s largely it. A pretty brief update, I realize, but there’s still a ton of stuff I need to do tonight.

Momentum

I am going on a trip! In fact, I am currently in the airport. There was a short and very polite delay at security. It might have been the soap.

(Bar soap, not liquid, in case you were wondering.)

I had most of a post written about how I felt about the upcoming travel, but it seems redundant now that I am actually on it.

Hope you’re all well, will be alternating between checking in and napping while I spend the day in transit.

And the year rolls ’round again.

(In a weirdly light-hearted counterpoint, I have “Don’t Push That Button” by Duane Elms running through my head.)

I’d have said something about this earlier, but Saturday was for unwinding and Sunday involved poking my computer with sticks until it stopped giving me kernel errors.

September 26th was Stanislav Petrov Day, which is an entirely unofficial holiday. Short version: 28 years ago, Stanislav Petrov did not push The Button. The systems he was dealing with told him he should, because the Americans had very definitely fired missiles, and he didn’t.

(Twenty-eight years ago, it was 1983. If you were talking about The Button being pushed, you were talking about nuclear war.)

It’s a day I notice for several reasons, which are in no particular order

not being dead is awesome;
oh look, more post-apocalyptic references;
I wonder how often it nearly happened; and
I cannot imagine what it was like to live in that context, and I am curious.

I’ve rambled about the last a bit; as I’ve said before, I don’t think I can get it, although I think I can understand it.

Anyway. The weekend involved a slightly higher consumption of post-apocalyptic fiction than usual, and a general state of not being radioactive smithereens. It’s occasionally nice to pause and appreciate the little things.

Ravelling

I went to knitting last night, and I cast on a new project, and I knit–slowly and carefully–until my elbow politely went ping and I decided I should stop.

It did that after a hundred stitches.

For the non-knitters among you: this is not a lot. I ended up producing a swatch of fabric about as long and slightly wider than my index finger.

This is after a month of treatment and a lot of not-knitting. So I think knitting needs to get put away again. At this point, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get back to it in two months, six months, or ever.

The “not ever” option makes me a little sad, but since there’s not much I can do beyond waiting and seeing if treatment and exercise make it better, oh well.

(The number of UFOs I have hanging around will irk me a bit, though.)

On a lighter note, I got the executed contract back for my story “The Gannet Girl”, so that has a home! Expecting it to be out 2016-ish.

Make it a pome. Real pomes rhyme.

I have rhymes in my head this morning; a little bit of Poe, a little bit of lyrics from the Traveling Wilburys[1], the perpetual stressed-silver-and-dust chime of Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm”.

I didn’t get as much done as I’d like to have gotten done over the last few days, but on the flipside, it was actually really relaxing. The weekend felt like it was a weekend, not just a recovery period.

Possibly related to this: the light of my life has set up his controller in my office, and I got to play video games again for the first time in a while. There is a bit of a learning curve with the new controls, but it’s definitely a workable solution. At least for Fallout: New Vegas, which is what I have especially been craving lately.

(Also, I cleaned off everything which had slowly accumulated on my desk. Currently my desk is much neater, and I hope to finish sorting the accumulata by the end of the week.)
—
[1] I am constantly astounded that I never heard of them until this year. First, I am really fond of at least two of their songs, and second, their lineup is the kind of thing I would expect to have heard of.

So many words.

It’s been a long week; heavy on the editing, light on the writing, with Thursday being a sick day.

I’ve started reading The Thousand Names, by Django Wexler. I’ve also started putting more of a dent in my magazine backlog, which is kind of huge. And it’s going to get bigger in the next five days, when September’s issues come in. And I have a copy of Fran Wilde’s Updraft on pre-order.

(…and I look at all this and I think oh, goodness.)

My morning glory has continued growing enthusiastically despite the fact that its stem has been broken clear through. It’s put out six flowers in the last week, and grown at least a foot of vines. I’m somewhat bewildered by this, but really, it can’t keep doing this for much longer, can it?

The flowers are getting smaller, at any rate. And paler. But the stem below the break is putting out new leaves, and I’m hoping that I’ll get some new climbing vines before it stops growing. It’s odd to think that it’s nearly September, and October’s just around the corner. I need to start looking up what to do to take care of the garden plants over the winter. (The foxgloves haven’t flowered this year, but I’m hopeful for 2016.)

I am thinking I might need to add a gardening tag, if I keep struggling with the plants.

Trisennight, short

(Yes, nearly three weeks since I’ve posted. That said, I find sennight to be a rather lovely word.)

A quick roundup, definitely not in order;

I finished edits on one of my accepted stories, and it’s currently with the copy-editor.
I developed double tennis elbow, which has slowed my typing down quite a lot. It is currently being alleviated by a little nailgun-like object that, instead of nails, fires pulses of pure sound. (Cue another chorus of “I love living in the future.”)
The light of my life got me two bottles of wine of a kind I have been trying to get for the better part of a month, and (even better!) a print of the Sockdolager cover in which my story appeared! (The entire magazine is free to read online, but the first link is to the store where you can see the print cover which you may buy. The second link is to my story, and you can find all the rest of the issue there.) I am plotting which wall to put it on. There are many options.
I got a small birdcage for my Venus Flytrap at the dollar store. (The cats have a great interest in Venus Flytraps. It’s how the last one died. I am hoping that the birdcage will serve as a protective enclosure for Seymour 2. (It is a spooky birdcage, all in black with “bars” that mimic a spiderweb. (The dollar store is a great proponent of Hallowe’en goods.)))
I decided that I am not going to the convention I had earlier planned to attend. I am a little sad, although a lot of that has to do with not getting to go on a trip. Have made plans to attend a different con, though.
I watched the Hugo Awards. I do wish I could have made it to WorldCon for many reasons (postapocalyptic smoke being among them), but I am glad for everyone there who had a good time.
I have been mildly astounded by the resiliency of the morning glory plant on the balcony. It was wilting and dying, and its stem was broken in half sometime last week, for which I blame a squirrel. Since then, with no connection to its roots and with leaves that resemble peels of green paint, it has put out six blossoms.
I got a full centiBrad’s worth of rejections, and submitted the same number of stories.
I have turned my sleep schedule into something resembling Swiss cheese.
I got close enough to both a young bluejay and a downy woodpecker that I think I could have taken decent pictures of them if I’d had a camera handy (and, you know, all the chops to use it). The bluejay in particular was fun to watch; he was making strident and typical bluejay sounds, and rather confused sounds, and some very brave attempts at raucous noise that trailed off into a hesitant stutter.

So those are all things.

Prompter attempts to update will be forthcoming. The Swiss cheese issue needs addressing first, though.