Tag: face to face

Keeping moving

My cat is sleeping on me. This makes me feel useful.

We went to visit friends for the Labour Day weekend. The travel there was pretty painful, but once we arrived, the event was actually really nice; a lot more people them I’m used to seeing at once for a lot longer than I’m used to hanging out. I was a little worried I’d burn out (or be horribly unwelcome after the first few hours), but neither happened.

(As a tangent: in and around Detroit, diners are called “coneys” or “coney islands”. I find myself oddly delighted by this.)

However, yesterday and today (and possibly tomorrow, creeping on its dusty path from day to day, as it is after midnight) have been a little vacant. I’m getting things done, but these things are trending more heavily towards the “maintenance duties” end of the spectrum than towards the “active interest” end of it.

(I am also reading a fair bit. Reading is good. It is not all I want to do.)

I am staying up too late and running myself into a dully tired state, and that needs to stop. I think a couple of days of strict scheduling may be in order.

Books, again.

I’ve been culling our bookshelves for a couple of weeks now.  While I’ve collected a fair number to get rid of, perhaps fifty, it hasn’t made a huge difference.  I have a lot of books. Most of them still aren’t in Goodreads (and I get that funny guilty twinge whenever it recommends a book I’ve already read and have on the shelves to me). And given that Goodreads lists about six hundred books on my “owned” shelf, and yes, I really did mean most of them still aren’t in the system…

…I have a lot of books.

It’s easier to cull them this time than it was in times before, and it’s nothing to do with not wanting to read. On top of the books, I have a particular attitude: I don’t want to be the kind of person who gets rid of a book. I have had this attitude for a long time.

  • I’ve had it since before we bought our house.
  • I’ve had it since before I rented my own place.
  • I’ve had it since before I moved out and went to university.
  • I’ve had it since before I went to boarding school in Switzerland[1], and that was for ninth grade.
  • Like some of the books I still own, I’ve had it since I lived in London as a kid.

I think it’s very easy to embrace absolutes when you’re a kid. And it’s easy not to question those absolutes, especially when they’re not overtly harmful. I don’t want to be the kind of person who lets go of a book. Because books are awesome, dammit. I mean, that hasn’t changed for me–books are amazing, books make me happy, new ones can be a wonder and old ones are a comfort and I don’t see this changing. I love (the best of) my books, and I love the idea of books, and I have a respect for the physical integrity of books (even ones I don’t like) that’s… quite hard to override.

When I developed this attitude, I didn’t understand certain things that I understand now.

  • The fact of limited space in housing, and how sheddy long-haired cats can be, and how books can pile up and collect dust.
  • Shared space, really shared space, and the importance of not having someone you live with made uncomfortable by your housekeeping.
  • The low-level cringe that a cluttered room induces.
  • The embarrassment of finding you already own a book you just got[2]–fortunately I’ve never bought one and had that happen, but there’ve been friend loans and library loans and… yeah, it’s not a good feeling.

I’m still not the kind of person who gets rid of books casually. But I don’t want to look at myself and say I’m the kind of person who won’t get a book out of her house if it’s making her unhappy to have it there. There’s nothing noble or devoted about that.

That’s damaging, albeit in a low-level constant-background what-weight-do-you-mean-oh-this-weight-I’ve-been-carrying-this-weight-so-long-I-don’t-hardly-notice-it-no-more, and I am, finally, too old for that shit.
—
[1] In a former tuberculosis sanitarium.
[2] This is totally different from buying a replacement for a battered copy, or deliberately picking up a second copy for love or loaning purposes. On this note, you should all read Days by James Lovegrove, Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, and Mystic River by Dennis Lehane. Seriously.

Blinking at the calendar

Wow, it’s been a long time.

Most of February was taken up with some acute household health stuff (everyone’s fine, life carries on, thank god the crying jags were mostly staggered in timing because I think that if we’d had them all happening at the same time it would have been harder to get through).  March was tied up a lot with some temporary work.  And I can’t believe it’s halfway through April, good grief, where does the time go?

I spent a chunk of last night trying to update my CV to reflect something that I’m good at but that I’m not usually hired to do, and it’s a little scary.  Besides that, there’s not much really going on.  I’m tired and I realized today that I’ve dropped the ball on something, and I’m trying to get it back together rather than bolting in the opposite direction throwing excuses behind me.  Should be manageable, really.

Piper’s having trouble walking, so I’m sitting with her in the living room and going to get through as much as I can today without leaving her alone for too long.  I foresee a lot of laundry in my future today.  It won’t be so bad, if I can get to the doing rather than the talking about.

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.

Monsters and monsters and monsters, oh my.

Dinner out tonight (was lovely), involving a fluffy drink and a wonderful lamb shank (which I think was actually a bit light on the thyme, but then I am very partial to thyme) and much discussion of the Laundry Files series by Charles Stross. It’s British humour/horror, involving a government organization defending the world from eldritch monstrosities which are attracted by complex equations. Like spells. Or mathematics. I’ve read the first book, three of the four short stories, and some notes. The first book is the rockiest, but I think that’s actually pretty common–I can’t think of a series where I recommend the first book written as a good place to start.

Except the Narnia books. (Even with The Lord of the Rings, I would not recommend starting with the first book of the series. I would recommend starting with the prequel–that is, The Hobbit–and just… trying not to think about the jolly elves.)

Stopped at Chapters on the way back. I picked up Dodger and The Killer Inside Me on the same trip and am mildly amused by the contrast.

In case of needing some assistance unwinding for the weekend, I have found that this image (completely work-safe!) is very helpful. May not be suited for ailurophobes, but then again, I don’t think I know any.

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.

Carrying on.

I occasionally wish there was someplace I could file a complaint for matters related to real life – not anything that is anyone’s fault, you understand, more little hiccups that just need to be rectified.

For example, the way stress makes you hungry without actually seeking to burn up anything in the way of fat our calories. Come on, seriously? It would just make so much more sense if the two were linked. And then I could go out after a week of trying to do three people’s jobs in the time allotted to one person, and not feel bad about the fact that I want a hamburger. I really want a hamburger.

In the meantime, however, there is a drink:

image

image

Bless the weekend.

I thought I was somewhere different, but everything felt the same.

The work week so far has felt like I am scrambling to put one foot in front of the other so that I actually keep doing something that could charitably be called “hurrying forward” rather than “falling and rolling downhill”. Between the person I was replacing coming back and the person replacing someone else moving offices, it’s been a bit hectic.

I went out of town over the weekend, on a day trip, which was odd; I don’t travel much on my own, and I always enjoy it. Wandered a little, met a friend for tea and geekery (knitting, moving, books, Cthulhu, gaming, horror, gaming) in a lovely little tea shop, and headed home. It felt weirdly not like leaving town, and I am trying to figure out why. I’ve had a stronger “oh I am away” reaction when going down to visit one of the tiny yarn stores that you need a car to get to. Possibly a combination of going to a place I know (in passing) and being sure I could get home even if there was a problem with the planned return.[1]
—
[1] I checked. If I’d missed the bus, I could’ve gotten a train, and then a local bus and a walk to get home. Not pleasant, rather expensive, but still a definite option.