Tag: minutiae

A disconcerting ping

A couple of months ago, I made an (at the time) sensible decision; I decided to go to the work golfing event. I wasn’t expected to be good, and I thought it’d be a nice thing to try.

A few weeks ago, I did something painful to my elbow. I made another sensible decision, and went to see my chiropractor. And I improved considerably.

(You’re seeing how these two things might interact with each other, aren’t you? Guess what: You’re smarter than I was!)

Golfing was okay – the weather was pleasant, there were robins and red-winged blackbirds and chipmunks and extremely large dragonflies. But my elbow and forearm started sparking off those tingly little ping sensations about halfway through, and they’re not entirely better yet.

I’m going to quietly bond with an icepack for a few hours. Hopefully I’ll be better tomorrow – I want to spend a lot of time on my keyboard this weekend.

Counting ink.

It is late, and everyone is discussing 2014. With my habit of getting bogged down in quantifiable minutiae, I am therefore posting about my reading and writing this year.

In 2014, I aimed for 80 books and finished 95, covering a total of 24421 pages.

I was also trying to aim for gender parity in my reading, and I failed. Overall the split was 38:14:43 (the numbers representing female authors:authors of non-binary or unspecified gender, or multi-authored works with a gender mix, or anthologies:male authors, respectively).

  • one was non-fiction. This low number isn’t surprising; I tend to dip in and out of non-fiction works, rather than read them end to end, and I don’t count RPG books as non-fiction. 1:0:0
  • eighteen were short standalones (stories or novellas); most were ebooks, although I did get four in print, including copies of Bob Leman’s “Instructions” and Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light. 9:1:8
  • sixteen were anthologies! Unsurprising, as anthologies are generally my favourite kind of book to pick up. 2:13:1; the first two were Two of the Deadliest and The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women, and the last one was The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack.
    (I ran across two other Mythos anthologies this year which only featured male authors, earning Mythos anthologies the distinction of being the only genre of anthology I’ve learned I need to check when I’m tracking gender in my reading, as I clearly can’t assume they’ll actually have a gender mix. A++ Nyarlathotep, carry on. You jackass.)
  • fourteen were collections of stories by a single author (including one of the graphic novels, since the Jonah Hex collection felt more episodic than any of the others). 6:0:8
  • three were RPG sourcebooks. 0:0:3
  • five were game-related fiction: two Wasteland standalones, two Deadlands Noir standalones, and one Pinebox, Texas (now… re-mastered, I guess? as East Texas University) anthology. 0:1:4
  • eight were graphic novels. 0:0:8
    Yes, really. And I thought Mythos anthologies were bad. If you count the writer and the artist as co-authors, that changes to 0:1:7, and my overall stats become 38:15:42
  • twenty-five were ebooks; I read more of these towards the end of the year, and suspect I will read more in 2015. Cheers for a tablet and a new ereader. 11:2:12
  • thirty-seven were novels. 20:0:17

Four of the books I read I five-starred on Goodreads, which is a rating a reserve for books that I think people should read even if they usually pass over that genre (The Last Unicorn, The Inheritance and Other Stories, Save Yourself, and Strong Female Protagonist). 2:0:2, or 2:1:1 if you count writer and artist as co-authors.

Four of them I two-starred, which means I did not hate them but pretty much stopped enjoying them and ground on to see if they would get better. If they had, I would have rated them higher.

And the oldest book I read this year was Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light, first published in 1952.

I also submitted stories 34 times, and got 31 rejections (although one of those rejections came in for a story I submitted in 2013, so you can say I only got 30 2014 rejections. This does not mean I got four acceptances, but it does mean I am expecting at least four rejections next year. 😉 ) I am slightly embarrassed by how little I wrote; my yearly wordcount hit five digits, but not six.

Happy New Year! See you on the other side.

Weather

Next to the Caribbean, it was sugar sand; softer than sugar, actually, if you pressed the individual grains against your skin. A kind of powder of shells, too large to be dust and too soft to be grit.

Now that we are home, it’s salt snow. The wind is running it across the streets and windowsills with a sound like a saltshaker spilt across a table. It’s very clearly something built up from frozen water, not something ground down by liquid water. (This morning it hadn’t actually built all the way up to being snowflakes, it was just little bits of icy grit.)

In other news, good grief I miss the warm weather.

Monday was productive, Tuesday was less so. Hoping to make today more of a Monday than a Tuesday. Onwards!

If not silence, then rarer posts

On top of being horribly sick on Wednesday (and recovering for two days), apparently I’ve gotten an RSI in my elbow. This is putting a serious crimp in both my typing and my knitting. (And it’s my right elbow, so I can’t even take this as an opportunity to learn crochet, since while I am up for many things learning a new crafting skill with my off hand just does not seem like a productive use of time. I do want to learn crochet, though.)

It’s fairly straightforward to treat, involving an elastic joint support and over-the-counter anti-inflammatories. I’m going to speak to work and see how they feel about my working at home more often, since my setup here is better for me. (I’ll also need to speak to them about getting an ergonomic assessment done on my workspace, but since I’m technically a temp I am not sure if it should come directly from me or from the temp agency. I’ll figure it out.)

Ergonomic assessments are things for which a medical professional hands you a prescription. I was previously unaware of this, but I find it rather neat. I always think of prescriptions as being for things, not for services.

But overall I am doing fairly well, and it’s been a good weekend, and I am having fun playing with the Last Court now that it’s out. I didn’t expect to–I have generally gotten the impression that Dragon Age is a fairly generic fantasy setting–but Failbetter Games has done a stellar job of making it interesting to play as the lord of a small fiefdom in such a setting and not boiling it down to All Those Mechanics I Have Seen Before.

A simple enquiry into what he has been eating or drinking…

Among the many lovely thing Roald Dahl wrote was Matilda, and among the many lovely scenes in that book is one where the evil principal finds out that a boy has stolen a slice of her cake and forces him to eat an entire chocolate cake. It is an amount of cake which should cause him to explode. (It’s Roald Dahl, so this might not have been purely figurative.)

But he doesn’t explode. He eats the cake. He eats the whole cake, and when the Principal loses her temper and smashes the platter over his head, he just shakes it off and keeps grinning. The line that describes him is something along the lines of “by now, he was so full of cake that he couldn’t have been hurt with a sledgehammer.”

The light of my life made a dinner tonight, modifying an existing recipe to be cooked in a crockpot. The end result is about as awesome as you might expect anything to be when it contains that much butter, cream, bacon, and cheese.

And having had dinner, I am really feeling very… equanamous. I mean really calm. Sedate. I feel mellow enough to catch up on some of the things I’ve seen online in the last couple of days[1], and the thought of reorganizing my office is considerably less tension-inducing than it has been for the last few days.

I recognize this isn’t a method that always works to ground a mood, but right now, I’m having a good night.
—
[1] Which have been fairly ugly in some cases. Moving on!

London, travel, computer, flail.

…dammit, I wish that title weren’t so apt. Anyway.

I’m leaving for Loncon in ten days, and I am trying to decide whether or not to bring my laptop, and if I bring it whether to keep it in my (non-con-located) hotel room or take it with me to the con.

(Important note, for deciding: I can keep the con schedule on my phone.)

If I leave it at home:

  • pro: it will not get lost.
  • con: my laptop. Life without my laptop for eight days. In airports. (I will note that I have not had an international plane trip not take an extra half-day at least in years.)

If I take it to London and leave it in the hotel:

  • pro: I will have all my writing, my Skype, my bookmarks, my GDrive connection, my everything
  • pro: I can write while in transit. I find I actually really like doing this, and while it is technically possible to do on my phone, the smaller screen makes it much more of a PITA.
  • pro: I will not have to carry it around a con (I have a Lenovo Thinkpad; sturdy as all hell, but kind of bulky)
  • ???: I would need to get a laptop bag. My current laptop bag is actually a backpack. No-one who is at risk of standing behind me or in my blind spot wants me maneuvering in a crowded area with a moderately heavy backpack, even with padded corners.
  • con: I would need to leave it in the hotel, which would probably be perfectly fine but which would, for at least the first two days, distract me.

If I take it to London and to Loncon:

  • pro: will have all my writing, my Skype, my bookmarks, my GDrive connection, my everything.
  • pro: I can write while in transit.
  • pro: can sit in A Spot at the con and get stuff down. (At Anticipation–the Montreal 2009 WorldCon–I ended up posting eight times from the con itself. Admittedly at that point I was in the con hotel, which makes a slight difference… OTOH, judging by FarthingCon, I really do like having my laptop with me. The “back off, breathe, find a place to sit for late-night coffee or dessert, and type” is a nice way of processing events.)
  • con: carrying around a heavy thing, which means that if I pick up anything else (get thee behind me, dealer’s room) or am carrying anything else (such as books to get signed), the total weight will be that much greater.
  • con: will need to lug it along if/when I decide that I should go somewhere/do something else.

Ugh. I don’t know. But at least I have every pro and con I can think of down, so I may revisit this in a bit. Thoughts?

Dropping down for air

Oh good grief that was a long eleven days.

Job hunt continues. Cats extremely fluffy. Library is apparently getting all my holds in, yay.

Finally finished the first season of Zombies Run. Not entirely sure if the events described actually happened or if some villain is engaging in a bit of theatricality to mess with us. Either way, looking forward to season two. (Have, after much internal deliberation, asked the light of my life to remind me when I fall behind on the schedule I am aiming for.)

Have a few posts kicking around in semi-drafted form. I think the next one is going to be about weird Western fiction (and, weirdly, not entirely Deadlands!).

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.)

Keeping moving.

Today felt a lot longer than Tuesdays usually do.  I didn’t sleep well, which I imagine is part of it, and it took me a while to wake up.  And most of the day seemed to go on strictly Sisyphean tasks; laundry when more clothes will be worn, dishes when more meals will be cooked and eaten, cleaning the litterboxen, and on and on.  It was raining this morning, which was actually kind of lovely, and I wasn’t able to make it out for that; in fact, with one thing and another, I wasn’t able to make it out until after dark, which always feels a little as if it doesn’t quite count.

Still.  I did make it out, and the house is cleaner than yesterday.

I’m hoping to sleep better tonight (a goal which I am sure I will get to a lot more quickly if I stop typing, but I also want to get this finished), and for tomorrow… not sure.  Thinking I may need to start blocking out specific chunks of time for specific tasks in order to keep the day from slipping away.

On the plus side, the collaborative writing project I’m in seems to have started slowly unstalling itself, which is nice.  Touch wood and hope it carries on.