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.
More and more, I feel like I need to make decisions not on what I want to do, but on what I want to do most, and how much time I have.
Part of it’s the new job making me feel that way. I don’t think it’ll be bad; the worst thing about it is that it’s in a location I’d prefer not to work, and I can cope with that. I’m just feeling very tiredly adult about leaving a job that I was actively happy to work at for a pragmatically-better job where I might not be as happy.
(Plus I’m leaving my current position to take the new job, and I can’t actually recall the last time I left a work contract before it was due to end. I’ve refused a renewal in one case, but that’s it.)
Part of it’s that while my wrist and elbow are getting better, they’re still not all the way better; I was knitting a bit today, and I had to stop. I’ve got several projects I want to get done, and I’m at the point where I need to figure out what few I’m going to get down in 2015, and whether or not I need to frog some.
(Frogging is unwinding a piece of knitting. It’s called frogging because you “rip it” back–ribbit, get it? Similarly, unknitting more slowly is called tinking, because “tink” is “knit” backwards.)
((Thus is knitting vocabulary developed.))
Aside from that, I’m reading Beasts of Tabat and playing Below, both of which have come out this month and both of which I am really excited about. (I may have also spent the weekend watching Daredevil, which has put a crimp in my writing time.) I’ve been able to pick up a bit of knitting again, although I think I’ve over-extended myself.
Not entirely comfortable with how quiet I’ve been this month; going to try and work on that.
Things I’ve been thinking about, and will probably attempt to ramble about in a more coherent fashion over the next month:
Superheroic powers as magical realism.
Uplifting TV shows. (This is mostly me trying to figure out what exactly it takes to make a show qualify as one. Being funny isn’t enough, and being constructive isn’t enough.)
Timing and scheduling, I guess? I’ve started work, and it seems to be going well, but I need to get back on top of my time schedule.
Cracked. It’s a police procedural that has a unit where police officers (one of whom is dealing with PTSD-related issues) are teamed with mental health professionals. It’s sort of ridiculously kind. (I was extremely suspicious of this as a conceit, and its execution has kinda smit me.)
Days. I actually haven’t talked at all about James Lovegrove’s Days ever here, I think. It is a lovely, strange, funny, and rather weird novel about a day in Days, the world’s first and (provisionally) foremost megastore.
Which might actually let me cycle back to “Evening Primrose”, and assorted other fiction with the conceit of “let’s all go live in the shopping mall”.
Well, my elbow’s actually bad enough I’m supposed to avoid both mouse and keyboard for a couple of days, at least with my right hand. I’m writing this left-handed on a touchscreen.
I am frustrated, since I wanted to write a couple of book reviews, and also I have some things to say about why Z Nation is actually a really enjoyable show that has completely replaced The Walking Dead in my TV pantheon.
I honestly didn’t remember it was the fifth of November until I was trying to come up with a post title. That puts today as being concurrently in the territory of NaNoWriMo, Noirvember, and Guy Fawkes Day; I think I may go with the “watch a movie and call it good” approach to celebrating.
Hallowe’en was very quiet; while I did the usual jack o’lantern, we ended up putting out candy with a sign asking people to please take one. The trick-or-treaters in our neighbourhood are mostly young kids with accompanying adults, so we figured it was a good bet, and it worked out.
Saturday was awesome; while some of the other people taking the Zombie Diefenbunker Tour were annoying, the tour itself was that kind of cheerfully unselfconscious pulpy creepy setup you’d expect from a Hallowe’en haunted house set in a Cold War bunker. And the bunker itself was amazing, in a rather understated but very stolid way.
(Apparently all 32,000 cubic yards of concrete were hand-poured. I find this particular detail oddly endearing.)
I will need to go back and pay attention to what it’s like when it’s not full of zombies, clearly.
Sunday was fun; the actual getting together and playing of board games in the same room as other people is something I haven’t done in way too long. There were several games of Gloom, one of the new Doomtown, one of Pandemic, and one of Redshirts. I find myself weirdly fond of Gloom in particular; there’s something about trying to kill the family or team represented by your own cards while saving everyone else’s that makes the competition a lot less acrimonious than it could otherwise get, which makes it a good game when you don’t know people too well yet. Plus the art is reminiscent of Edward Gorey.
Work actually ran out of work for me to do, and asked that I not come in today, so that’s kind of nice. I’m trying to catch up on various things around the house before lunch.
Written eighteen hours ago on the plane, published now.
The actual moon, and the reflection. I didn’t have a flash on, so you can’t see the wing.
The moon is reflecting off the wing outside my window. The reflection is harvest-orange, but the actual moon is white as bone. I can see the wing, but my camera cannot.
Back when Usenet (a time marker I actually think is perfectly adequate–distinct from most social media currently in vogue in that it was a real PITA to edit your posts), there was this term I ran into on one of the newsgroups I spent time on, and that term was “Gothic Super Hero”. It referred to someone who worked a well-paying job that could pay for all of their awesome clothes and makeup, and whose workplace was totally fine with them showing up in full regalia, which was convenient because they always had time to put it all on, and…
(Yes, I spent time on alt.gothic.fashion. Hush.)
Anyway. The point was, you did not need to try to be that person. It was, in fact, quite possible that that person did not even exist. And it was okay to not be that person.[1]
My point is, I am sitting here, with my phone, and I feel that if I had the wherewithal, I could actually write a moderately pithy, incisive, anecdotal post which would entertain. I feel, obscurely, that I should be able to.
But I’m not that person. I’m tired and sick and mostly I’m okay with that. So this is what you get: the moon’s reflection is a harvest moon, and I remember first learning that it was okay to not be as cool as the people online seemed to be, and I’m going to try to sleep.
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[1] Tangentially, when I first got onto the internet, when I was very young and visiting an aunt’s, I read several short horror stories.[2] One them involved a usually exquisitely dressed goth who was murdering people that saw her in frumpy glasses and pink knock-around clothes. PINK. The horror.
[2] This comes as a surprise to precisely no-one.
Over the last few years, I’ve been making an effort to log more of my reading on GoodReads. (Lately I’ve also been looking at BookLikes, but that is a bit of an aside.) A fair bit of the stuff I read isn’t already on GoodReads, or has incomplete records there–authors are missing from anthologies, cover photos aren’t provided for books, standalone stories or small epubbed collections aren’t in the system. Usually I grumble about this a little and correct it.
(Someday I’m going to put all the old Hell on Earth stuff into a proper series list, oh yes. Organized by publication number and everything.)
Since I’ve been commuting a lot lately, I’ve been reading a lot more epubs–picking up some old stuff, picking up some new. And one of the things read earlier this week was a collection of draft stories and partials that you could get being a sponsor during the Clarion West Write-a-thon last year.
It’s not for distribution, which is fine; it is something which does not belong in GoodReads at all.
And it feels so weirdly good to read something that I don’t have to track.
(I mean, I don’t have to track what I read in GoodReads, of course. But it’s become an ingrained habit now, and the yearly challenges have a gamified appeal.)
I suspect this is exacerbated because I’m a bit stressed at the moment, and have a lot of things going on. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind, and perhaps I will clear myself a block of time when I can just read and give myself permission to not document it. I am already behind on reviews of books that really deserve it (can I just mention This Strange Way of Dying, which really needs more love), and I don’t imagine it would help with that. But at the same time writing reviews is actually pretty hard for me, and I think the breathing room–official self-given breathing room, rather than falling-behind-and-not-doing it–might feel lovely.
If we ever get this in our biweekly basket, I am leaving.
We’re subscribing–I think that’s the word?–to a Community Shared Agriculture program this summer. We’ve decided to go with only once every two weeks, since last year we got a weekly box of produce, and it got a bit overwhelming.
(Kale. I had no idea there could be so much kale. And I pretty much gave up on hand-carrying things back from the pickup point after they started giving us watermelons.)
We got the box last week. Wednesday, I made a concerted effort to use up as much as possible, and made a dinner of garden salad, oil-citrus-garlic dressing, roasted asparagus with Parmesan cheese, and rhubarb crumble. This only used up half a cucumber, the mixed package of spring greens (five plants and seven herbs!), all the rhubarb, and some of the asparagus. (I mean, it used up more, but I’m strictly discussing things which came in the produce box.) There was enough salad for a second meal since then, and we’ve also used up the tomato.
This leaves us with
half a cucumber
Lebanese cucumbers
beets and radishes (I suspect I will make these into the backbone of a lunch at some point)
spinach
arugula
a yellow pepper
two more asparagus bundles
a squeezy-bear of fresh honey
some of a dozen eggs (we hardboiled some right away)
a beeswax tealight
Pretty sure we can get through that before the next box comes in. (Maybe not the honey, but honey keeps.) And having them around does make it a lot easier to eat well. It’s kind of like the fridge is gently nagging me to empty it, like a cute little inversion of “feed me, Seymour.”
So I got home, and it was tired and quiet, and I had an idea for something to do.
Instead of doing it, I… er. Well. Sort of Pinterested for an hour.
…possibly a little more than an hour.
This was, I feel, less than strictly useful. (On the other hand, I have figured out that I can declutter my likes, which I often use as a “decide if I will pin this later” holding pen, by creating a board for fonts, posters, and bookcovers.)
I did discover that there’s an annual event called the Wasteland Weekend in Southern California, which involves… uhm, well, it looks like a four-day post-apocalyptic version of a Society for Creative Anachronism party. I am charmed[1] by the aesthetic, which is pretty heavily Mad Max. (Their site notes that it is a post-modern apocalypse: laser guns, powered exoskeletons, cyborgs, zombies, and high-tech robots need not apply. But Pip-Boys are okay.)
So it has not been a productive evening. But it has been a relaxing one, and I am at least going to go to bed managing to enjoy the fact I’ve looked at pretty things, if not done everything I wanted to do.
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[1] I initially wrote “weirdly charmed” but… well, know thyself, and all that.
