mens sana in corpore sano – Page 3

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.

Staggering determinedly on

Yesterday I ran Zombies, Run! for the fourth day in a row. I’ve decided I’m aiming for the “Every day ending in ‘y'” achievement. The game counts days as running from midnight to midnight, which is fairly straightforward.

Unfortunately, it’s a British game, and I am in North America. So the time difference means that because I ran later in the day on Wednesday, and then ran again yesterday, it counted my runs for this week as happening “Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Thursday” rather than “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday”.

(There’s not much I can do about this but shrug. Oh well.)

I am hoping to at least keep going today and through the weekend, at which point I will be able to honestly say to myself that I ran every day for a week, even if I didn’t get the achievement. After that, I will see what happens, and probably get the hospital built for Abel Township. The base-building was revised in Season 2, and the collect-resources/spend-resources/upgrade aspect of it is very motivational when it comes to interval training. (Interval training consists of zombie chases, and if you don’t run fast enough, then you loose some of the items you’ve collected as you drop or throw them behind you to distract the zoms. This means you don’t have those resources to actually upgrade the amenities in Abel.)

Hoping to get the hospital built by the end of the weekend. It would have been done slightly sooner, except I sort of misclicked on the base, and accidentally expanded it in the wrong direction. Hospitals require a 3×3 space, and I managed to clear a 2×4 one instead.

Not very interesting, I know, but it’s been a long week and this is about the only area in which I feel that my efforts to be productive have produced a measurable result.

By main persistance, to unscheduled absence

There are two quotes that I keep thinking of when it comes to writing. One is from Maya Angelou, speaking directly. The other is from Stephen King, speaking as a character. Angelou’s I have handy, it’s

What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks “the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,”… And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, “Okay. Okay. I’ll come.”

The Stephen King one I cannot find right now, but the gist of it is along the lines of “starting to write feels like French-kissing a corpse”. And while I can’t speak to the truth of that statement, I believe it. Because those first few moments when you’re coming in cold and the story is more a list than a sequence of events… Yes. I will completely believe it is like French-kissing a corpse, and goddammit it’s so hard to get anything moving.

Still, we persevere, yes?

Alright. I’m running on three hours sleep, and I actually just found this–I thought I’d posted it a week ago–so I am going back to bed. When I wake up everything will be a lot more coherent, because that is what Enough Sleep does for you.

The word for year is library.

Early this year, I read a post on Captain Awkward[1], and one of the things she mentioned–cited from the Blogess, actually–was the idea of 2013 as a library. A safe quiet space where you can get ready for something.

Maybe you spend the year recuperating from last year. Maybe you burn the Thanksgiving turkey and forget an important birthday. It’s okay. It happened in The Library. It was just practice for next year. Maybe it’s insanity, or maybe it’s just me, but somehow I think we all need a year in The Library. A year where it’s safe to make mistakes.

Probably the biggest thing for me was trying to actually commit to writing[2]. (Cat Rambo gives excellent classes, by the way, and I am not sure she self-promotes quite enough, and there’s a deal on her classes if you sign up before 2014. Just saying. I like the six-week course best.) I’ve gotten seven rejections so far and I think they’re getting easier to take, which is nice?

Other things this year: I tried to do Mary Robinette Kowal’s Month of Letters challenge, but that got interrupted by a pet health emergency. (Pet in question is fine, but leave us just say February got itself repurposed very hard.)

What else? Started staggering along to Zombies Run again after I’d stopped for longer than I’m happy with. Started reconnecting with someone I’d kind of lost touch with. Went to Farthing Party and CanCon (for the record, doing two cons in two weekends is not a great idea; that said, so glad I managed to get to a Farthing Party).

The house was cleared of about ten feet of bookshelf space and perhaps twenty-five bags-and-boxes of things that weren’t being used, or wouldn’t be used, or would be better used elsewhere, or just really needed to go. And I finished installing a cabinet. Admittedly in the bathroom we use least, but still, it’s installed.

I knit 0.76 of a mile of yarn into a sweater for my mother, and it worked. I mean, it fit and she liked it. I was terrified that I’d need to reknit half of it and the yarn store would be out of the dye lot, and…

Anyway, it worked.

And I cut my hair. Myself. (I haven’t dyed it again yet, but… maybe next year. The light of my life dug up an old picture, and I miss the purple.)

What did you do this year? What’ll you do the next?
—
[1] Lovely lady, very thoughtful, excellent advice, minimal Evil Bees.
[2] I had to work through a brief bout of “omigod I am admitting in public that I want to write things and care about whether I’m good at it!” to even type that. Oy, my issues.

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.

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.)

Sore and tired, but trucking on.

Viciously sore throat today, and not much sleep. Plus one of the cats threw up first thing in the morning. I think it’s going to be a long day; may try for a midday nap.

On the plus side, there is a lovely softly-grey sky outside, shading from dove to slate, and the rain and thunder are at least making indoors seem cosier.

Pets are exhausting to take care of sometimes, but I will grant that they give you a sense of purpose.