My brain persists in refusing to cooperate in the matter of either of those DS stories. It's offering me a number of ideas for different stories, none of which would actually work in execution. Sometimes I really wish my subconscious would just talk to me clearly, so I wouldn't have to play these guessing games with myself, trying to figure out what it is that I really want. (Women. Sheesh.)
For instance, I heard "Music Of the Night" on the way to the office today. I've never seen Phantom, but that song really enthralls me. Partly it's Crawford's voice (and Streisand, I guess), but part of it is the lyrics themselves. And part of it is the music. It's so amazingly lush, I always feel as though I could sink into it, like the world's finest velvet.
I daydreamed half my commute away designing a story around the emotional resonance of the lyrics before I realized that the characters I was hearing were OC and half of the story was playing out like MYSA-AS.
(It's my opinion that someone who just recently celebrated copying a sketch of a cat so that it looked like a cat, even if not much like the one in the sketch being copied, shouldn't be daydreaming in pictures. I mean, I know a daydream is a daydream, but still. I don't usually dream in pictures. Maybe it's because I've been trying to look at things recently? Trying to see shapes and perspective and light-and-shadow?) (Or maybe it's because I had a 7:00 a.m. call and my mind is all discombobulated by the change in routine.)
My brain seems to think that I am not the boss of it, which is a little aggravating.
Still. It's sort of encouraging that something seems to be burbling away in there, don't you think? I want my brain fixated on RayK and Fraser, but if it's decided to take a circuitous route to get to them, I can wait. I'm willing to give the unconscious creative process at least 24 hours before I start getting testy.
Maybe 48 hours. Let's face it...it's been a long, long time since my brain tossed out any kind of stories ideas at me. I should be more receptive.
My Lunch Friend and I discussed this whole writing-fandom thing at length (along with several other topics) today. I've decided that what I miss isn't so much fandom as it is some of the kinds of conversations and interactions there used to be in the early days. (Back when newsgroups were thin on the ground and only a few e-mail lists existed. ROG. That's what I miss.) I miss the creative energy we used to generate, the excitement, the fun in finding your mind expanding as people shared serious (and lustful) ideas you'd never thought of.
Sigh. But, I've moaned about that so many times that I think I'm pretty much wearing it out. So I'm going to shut up about it.
Unless, you know, I get to feeling whiny. If I do, all bets are off.
In other news, the client who has decided they don't need our services any more needs them badly enough this week to have dragged Buehler and me out of bed for a 7 a.m. conference call today. During which he annoyed me, but not tremendously. (And I did have the opportunity, at one moment, to explain to him that something hadn't gotten done in the last two months because he told us not to do anything and that was very satisfying.)
I haven't heard back from Coco yet. I don't know if that means the news is good, bad, or delayed. I'm going to give her a few more days. Don't want to look over-eager...or desperate. Don’t want to jinx it.
The R.C. and I have, I think, finally accepted the fact that we're going to have to move to a place with more space. Since I might be working from home, instead of commuting downtown, that opens up a lot of areas to us we might not have been able to consider before. We're looking out in the southern area. There are a lot of newer and very nice places in the area. Sadly, the first one we saw that we liked didn't offer three-bedroom apartments. It was a great location, but we really need the third bedroom, so we can dispense with the $50/month storage unit, which will help make up for the difference in rent. (And for me to use part of it for an "office" space.) (And so we can use part of it for a "library.") (In my imagination, this third bedroom is the size of Carnegie Hall.)
She refused to even consider the completely fantastic place I loved most, just because the rent is double what it is in our current place. Snif. (Okay, I didn't see it, but I saw a floorplan on-line and I loved that.)
There's another one that I like the sound of (we haven't seen it yet) that does offer three-bedrooms and is only a couple of hundred more than we're paying for two, but for some reason the R.C. seems to have taken against it, sight unseen. (Or, I was having a little psychotic episode myself at that moment and now I'm projecting, in retrospect?)
Anyhow, time will tell. Our lease isn't up until April (I think), so we have time to look around.
After this morning's meeting, I dressed for work in a hurry, dragging on a pair of jeans and a shirt that I now realize should never have been paired. (And I saw the BEHM today, for the first time in a week, too!) Also, jeans are too hot.
Chatty today, aren't? That's probably because I've already had at least twice my usual allotment of caffeine and I'm sucking down still more.
I forgot to pack a lunch, so it must have been destiny that a friend just called to ask if I want to have lunch today.
(Do I feel chatty today because I can't get into my blog-site to upload new posts, or am I locked out of uploading new posts because I feel chatty and my posting karma is bad? Sometimes it's difficult to know just how personally to take the universe's little tricks.)
I have this whole sex thing going in my head right now. More specifically, this whole fade-to-black thing. I'm entirely bored with explicit sex scenes. Having written, what? Seventy-five of them? Something like that, anyhow, and I'm pretty sure by now I've said all I have to say about Tab A and Slot B and the various permutations thereof.
That's part of the problem with the DS story, you see. Why it's not moving faster.
In the past, I've always copped out, splashing pints of UST around to disguise the lack of an emotional landscape in my stories. (Or, you know, I just have the characters talk. And talk and talk and talk, until no one can tell if they've said anything or not.)
With this story I've decided (brace yourselves) to try something new!
(Yes, that's always a disaster in Anne's World O'Writing, but one must try to fly, even if it means jumping off a cliff a thousand times before you figure out how to flap.)
I haven't been talking about it up until now because I figured I've bored my friends enough with endless discussions of stories they'll never see, but I'm not feeling that kind today. (I've thought of turning that OaT opus into a PWP and just posting it. There are, I think enough decent lines in it to create a PWP from.)
(Also, I'm starving, it's two hours until lunch, and I'm desperately focusing on the fact that I'm on a diet and have no business diving into the barbecue-flavor potato chips in the kitchen.)
So. Anyhow. The Newest Impending Disaster in my writing career involves writing a story where the words, and the emotional connection between the characters are the ultimate focus, and not the anticipation of just when they're going to drop their britches. They will not, in fact, be dropping their britches at all.
This presents some interesting problems for the inexperienced writer. One cannot focus too intently on the physical attraction. One must, instead, concentrate on building an emotional connection. In the past I've always written about the sex and hoped my readers would provide their own emotional content. Can't do that this time. Have to decide what the connection is, what it seems like to each of them, and how to describe it either changing or them becoming aware of new facets.
Has anyone but me ever noticed that the more I think about what I'm doing, the less able I am to write? I haven't completed a decent story since the first moment I began to explore improving as a writer. As long as writing was a total right-brain sort of thing, there weren't enough hours in the day for the quantity of stuff (frequently junk, yes) I was churning out.
The purchase of my first "how-to-write" book and the development of my writer's block occurred almost simultaneously. I can't quite remember at this point if I felt myself slowing down and thought the book(s) would help, or if I thought as long as I was writing, I might as well try and do it well and was subsequently blocked and I'm not entirely certain that this sentence is grammatically correct up until this point but to put it more simply I have no idea if it was the chicken or the egg but I totally wanted an omelet and all I wound up with was a vague memory of hot wings and I don't like hot wings.
If I ever remember where I was going with that, we'll come back and I'll take another stab at it.
Let's move on.
So. Emotional development sans explicit physical passion.
That's what has me stymied at the moment. I know what the characters are supposed to do to fill the hours/days that the story covers, but that just takes me as far as creating an atmosphere that my actual story can exist in. I'm puzzling over how to present the necessary emotional plotline.
I don't want to descend to the literary immaturity of, "he was jealous." I don't like to be told what someone is thinking or feeling, I like to be shown and left to interpret it on my own.
I don't want to write some kind of "think piece" that just details a character's thoughts. I like to see two characters interact, not read about one character thinking about things, you know? (With apologies to those of us who like internal monologue stories. I'm not dissing them. It's just not what I want to write or prefer to read most of the time.) (Although if I get frustrated enough with this story, I'm not ruling out that as an approach.)
I'm using Fraser's POV, which isn't an easy voice for me, and that's another complication. I think it's pretty clear from watching the show that his thoughts are frequently very different than what he says aloud, or how he acts, so he's frequently acting in contrast to his internal impulses. That needs to be handled.
Above and beyond all that, I really need to pick just one of the two stories I have going, and focus on it, if I want to make any actual progress.
Yeah, I know. The discussion ends pretty abruptly, but I've eaten my lunch, my dessert, and my mid-afternoon snack in the past hour and now I'm too full to think and feeling too comfortable to care much. One thing you have to say about a diet, when you are allowed to eat, it sure does make the world a brighter place.
I put together the status report for the client on the Hell's Own Software project. Since 90% of it is on "hold" at the moment, that little job takes 15 minutes instead of the 2-1/2 hours it used to take.
I could make a phone call, but you know how I feel about rushing into the day.... Besides, sad to say, I've already mentally "left" this company and I feel a lot less pressure from my never-imperative work ethic than I did a week ago.
Add to that the fact that I'm a teeny bit cranky about having gotten a call from a client looking for a box they sent in for repairs three weeks ago, and....
Hmmm. Okay, I researched that one. I found the box, which is accompanied by a letter written two, not three, weeks ago, so the box has been here, at most, for seven working days. So, partly the client was lying.
But there's also reference in the letter to phone discussions with the Tweenybopper, currently on vacation, and since she never bothered to check the box in or fill out the paperwork, I have no idea what the conversations were about, whether or not it was established the client has to pay for the repairs, or anything else. (It seems to have been in dispute.)
Every time I think my work ethic is sad, I should go to the shipping room and take a look at the stacks of unopened shipped cartons, all full of boxes maybe/maybe not needing to be repaired or checked in or cleaned or have some other action taken on them. It's beyond my comprehension to understand how someone could leave for a week on vacation and leave that kind of mess.
(Yes, I know I haven't been busy for the past four months and I could have pitched in to help her with this project. For the record, I go into that room at least once a month and do a massive cleaning and tidying and ask the Tweenybopper what all of the boxes currently stacked around are and what needs to be done with them, and she never wants my help with them.
Considering that I'm already doing a number of the jobs she was hired to do, including answering the phones, getting the mail, running off the armloads of sales people at the front door, faxing, copying, and cleaning the office kitchen until I went on strike, I don't think it's unreasonable of me to think that she could do some of the jobs she was hired for...accept help when it's offered, or ask for help when she needs it.) (Or at least leave some blasted documentation for the people who have to clean up behind her.)
If Extension 17 ever shows up for work today (it's 10:45), I have no idea whether or not to ask him to work on this box. And the client is waiting for me to call her back and tell her what's going on.
For the record, I'm not as cranky as this section of the post makes me sound. Switching the hormones to morning, instead of evening, seems to have eliminated 90% of that little problem with psychotic episodes. I'm low-level grouchy sometimes, but I haven't had Uzi fantasies recently.
I could be practicing my drawing or even dabbling with a story idea, but with Buehler here in the office, I think it's better not to get too involved in non-work stuff. (Not that he's here at the moment. No one but me is here at the moment, but it's not even 9:00 yet.) Sadly for you, blogging is a pursuit requiring very little brain.
Current dietary excitement: I just ate an egg.
So...the weekend. What did I do?
Well, on Saturday, we went to Cherry Creek. Shopped at Tattered Cover (naturally) and had a delicious lunch in the 4th Story. The R.C. had salmon, I ate scallops. I bought three books on drawing.
Then we went across the street to the mall where we found none of the things we were looking for (but we never do at that mall).
Then to Guirey's where I lusted after, and then fell for, twelve dollars worth of drawing stuff. Pencils. A different shape of eraser. A new kind of pencil sharpener. (I'm a marketer's dream in that kind of mood.)
Not much else of excitement on Saturday. I did play with my new drawings books that evening, but produced nothing noteworthy. A book on drawing animals enabled me to tackle a sketch of a puppy but since it turned out looking more like a hellhound, I can't consider it a major success. (I found an entire book on hands! And one of drawing human heads. Nothing on putting heads and bodies together in scale, though.) I drew a reasonably successful mouth but in the absence of a head to put it on, I don't think that's much to brag about.
Sunday, it was my intent to do laundry and clean house. Instead I...wait for it...went out to lunch and did some shopping. My weekends are so predictable. Sunday's purchases were...hmmm...a pencil box to put all of my new pencils in. And some other miscellaneous stuff, which I happily played with for hours.
Later....
Okay, now it's 10:00. Buehler is here, but he's reading aloud to himself, which is annoying.
Sometimes I wonder if getting a new hobby for me is about doing something new or about shopping for something new, you know? It's like the Game Boy. The only games I really like are the Final Fantasy ones, and that's because I figured out that success is all a matter of wise shopping when you're buying armaments and weapons.
My drawing class starts next week. I'm reconsidering whether it was wise to begin with the "Mixed Media" class instead of the basic drawing class. The basic drawing class didn't start until October and the Mixed Media class began on September 7, which is how I made my decision. (I have no patience when it comes to my own amusements.) The MM class is six weeks, which means I won't be able to sign up for a drawing class until November.
Still, I've been practicing madly. Everything but negative spaces, which is what I intend to focus on this week. (But! I haven't done any still lifes! Something tells me we'll be doing still lifes. I must add those to this week's Practice Agenda.)
Okay, enough about drawing, which is fun to play with but much less entertaining to read about.
What else? I did no writing. I need to watch more DS episodes. And, you know, actually buckle down and get to it. There's just never enough hours in the day.
I may get another unpaid day off this week, but I offered Buehler tomorrow as the most logical day and he refused because he has an important phone call tomorrow. (The ways of management are a mystery to me sometimes.) I have four hours worth of meetings scheduled on Wednesday, and I refuse to do them on an unpaid day off. Buehler is out of the office on Thursday and Friday and he usually wants me here when he's gone, so those are out. I may not get another day off this week. If I had a day off, I'd clean the bathroom and kitchen and do laundry. Honest I would.
I'd hate to be one of the people reading my blog. I'm so boring.
Blah, blah, blah. The problem with blogging every day is that you have to do something in between blog entries, so you have something to talk about. That's sometimes an issue for me.
Hmmm...last night I had turkey and brown rice for dinner. Later in the evening I went wild and crazy and ate some bread and butter. White bread. (French baguette, actually. Warmed. With soft butter. Mmmm.)
This morning I had an egg for breakfast.
1-1/2 pounds! That's what I was down yesterday when I weighed. I was afraid to weigh this morning, in case it turned out to have been a mirage. (In spite of my Fear and Loathing, I went ahead and brought turkey in for lunch again today. And I had it for dinner last night. Because, while blechy food is not fun, losing weight is a great deal of fun.)
Today I drew a cat. (Actually, I drew several views of a cat, with varying success. These are my first forays into the animal kingdom and I decided that since Pippi likes cats, I'd start with cats. I can send her some of my efforts and make her laugh.)
That takes care of the usual topics, right?
Yesterday, Post-Talk, Buehler was almost embarrassingly relieved and grateful. Today he's back to normal, which is a relief. I'm not entirely comfortable with being thanked every two minutes for doing minor things like handing someone a pile of mail.
Last night I broke the news to the R.C. While she agrees that Continued Employment is ideal, she's not happy about the idea that I'd be home and underfoot if she had a day off for the foreseeable future. My idea is that we could move to a bigger place. She agrees in abstract theory but doesn't actually want to go to the trouble and expense of moving. I could get my own place...but it seems tacky
I have some Actual Work I could do (well, okay, I have a phone call I could make) but I'm saving it for my late-morning excitement. In theory, someone is going to call me this afternoon so I can do a reinstall of a software program, too. The thrills never stop at Anne's Desk.
So. Buehler and I had The Talk.
How long he intended to wait, I don't know, so I just got all proactive and introduced the subject myself. I figured, in the long run, it was a lot easier for me to sit him down and say, "hey, why don't I leave" than it was for him to sit me down and say, "hey, why don't you leave" and I'm all about doing things the easy way. As it turns out, he was very grateful for me for saving him the guilt and the pressure.
Buehler, Bernie, Sassy, Diamondgirl, Bossyboots, Extension 17, Moe, Curly, Frogmorton, and the Mad Doctor. What a cast of characters they've been! No more DDIALMFTTS stories of office life and urban adventures, either.
Coco's meeting with her boss tomorrow. It will probably be a couple of weeks before she's able to hire me, if my karma remains good and she's actually able to do it, but it's not like Buehler wanted me out the door tomorrow or anything.
I have not yet broken the news to the R.C. I'll do that tonight, I guess. She won't be best pleased to hear I'll be working from home soon and for the foreseeable future, but we'll figure out a way around the inconvenience of that. (We really do need more space.) I'd imagine I'll be working at Coco's some in the immediate future, just for training. And then I'll be in the company's office a day or two a week. At least, that's what I assume. It's all new and unknown....
The fact of Continuing Employment is the most important, that's what I'm reminding myself. A paycheck is a very good thing to have.
Anyhow. I'll have to start gradually cleaning out my desk. Taking home my personal stuff and finding somewhere for it to live in my house. Having one last lunch from Kokoro's. Re-arranging my bedroom to make an office space. Tidying up the hard drive on my work PC to make sure I don't leave any suspicious files on it. Making notes on What's Going On for Sassy, so she can pick up the threads of my projects. Dong all of those Leaving Things. (But not today.)
Stair count so far today: 112
So, how to fill the hours between 8 and 5 today?
Well, I managed to fill the first 1/2 hour trying to get to the office. It took me that much extra time to drive the last 10 blocks, thanks to some pitiful (but very annoying) geezer whose car had broken down.
Nothing like sitting there looking at your office but being completely unable to get to it to start your day off well.
And when I got here, Buehler was already here. He gets into the office before me about once every 3 or 4 months. It's scary.
I have a training scheduled for 10:30 - 12:00, so that's another 1-1/2 hour filled.
On another project, I need to help someone reinstall their software. I've no idea how long that will take.
In spite of yesterday's Non-Enthusiasm over my nutritious, healthy turkey-and-brown-rice lunch (I looked at every bite with loathing before shoving it into my mouth and forcing myself to swallow it), I brought more turkey today. This is because during this morning's weigh-in, I discovered that I've lost another 1-1/2 pound in the last 10 days. I can shovel down turkey for the rest of this week if that's the kind of results I'm going to get.
Or, can I? Turkey is vile and nasty and lunchtime shouldn't be a thing you dread. Also, with this morning's Breakfast Egg, I tried some turkey sausage. After 1-1/2 bites, I've realized that turkey sausage is a sin against nature. I would, in fact, prefer no sausage at all.
Still. 1-1/2 pounds, right? So I brought turkey again today. Us wage slaves have little enough excitement in our days (I used to love turkey, before this stupid diet. I can't imagine ever enjoying it again) and it seems a pity to make lunchtime one of the worst times of the day, but that's the way it goes.
Eating turkey and fish gets the job done. It's just...they don't make me happy. (I haven't loved fish for decades and the only fish I'll eat is salmon anyhow.)
I spent 1-1/2 hour in the styling chair last night. I'm now freshly colored, all the way to my roots, and enjoying a new hairstyle. (Well, not enjoying. My hair being what it is, it has a complete psychobilly freakout every time I get it cut, but in another 24 hours it should settle down.) He cut off 2-3 inches and then thinned out about 25% of the thickness, if not more.
I bought a new product too, a little squirt bottle of shiny stuff. I spritz it on my hair and I'm all shiny. My hair, when not having a psychobilly freakout, is reasonably shiny already, but I couldn't resist the cute little squirt bottle.
And now...it's Coffee Time!
The circus is coming!
I know this because I'm getting a lot of calls for tickets.
I guess it makes a change from calls from people wondering what AAA charges, but I don't work for the circus. I don't even work for AAA.
I have not, thus far this morning, fielded any calls from people actually wanting to talk to this company, much less anyone interested in me.
Thus ends today's Business Productivity Update.
I did, however, have an accidental donut.
A donut is the sort of thing that happens to me three or four times a year but I was hoping it wouldn't happen while I was on the diet. (It's Buehler's fault. He brought them in.)
Also, I had an egg.
Thus ends today's Diet Update.
In other non-news, last night I watched DS episodes. I've watched half of S3 this week. I fully expect to find my writing batteries charged and running any day now.
Thus ends today's Non-Writing Update.
Yesterday, I drew a hand that actually looked like a hand. This morning I copied a sketch of a row of buildings on a street and it looked like a copy of a sketch of a row of buildings on a street.
Having now grasped a few of the fundamentals of perspective, become vaguely aware of anatomy, drawn numerous flower petals, run in horror from the challenges of massed foliage, dabbled a bit with tone, and pushed a few tentative shadows under objects to experiment with anchoring, I think I'm just about ready to start trying to draw Real Things.
At some point today I will pick out something, stare through it, and then draw where it is not.
This is called, "negative space" and for reasons I'm still not quite sure about, it's considered a vital skill. (If pressed, I might venture that it has something to do with not really knowing the shape of something until you know what shape it is not, but that could be a bit more philosophical than the subject warrants.)
Thus ends today's Drawing Update.
Now that I think about it, that donut was a long time ago. Maybe I should eat something more?
(Stairs climbed thus far today: 96)
It's 7:50 a.m. and not even legally work time. So what's Moe doing here and how did he know the precise second he could walk into my office and catch me sketching again? (More hands. Hands are proving to be a difficult nut to crack.)
It's only 8:25 a.m.! What's the Tweenybopper doing here already? She shouldn't be rolling in for an hour yet. Coffee? Well, yes, I was going to get coffee. Well, okay, I'll walk over with you now. (Drat. I'm having a good hair day, but it's far too early for the BEHM to be there.)
8:53 a.m. Frogmorton is here now. What's up with everyone being early on a Monday morning?
I guess it's going to be one of those weeks. Everyone's showing up bright and early and getting on my nerves.
Ah, well. Buehler is in today. He said not to get used to seeing him, so I guess he'll be leaving again after this week. It's nice to see his bright and shining face, even just temporarily.
Okay, who am I kidding. Even those of us who like our bosses like to have them out from under foot, right? And those of us without enough work to do especially like having our bosses in another location so they can't see how we're spending our time.
So...I guess it's time for my usual boring litany of Things I Did Over The Weekend, right?
I ate lunch on Saturday and did some shopping. (I should just cut-and-paste that in every week.) This week's lunch was P.F.Chang's, where my diet was sabotaged by an inaccurate menu description. (I did not anticipate that "wok-fired" scallops would come battered. They were gorgeous, but high-calorie.) I was Bad on Saturday evening, as well, but I did a lot better (diet-wise) on Sunday. In fact, I restricted my caloric intake to the point where I came close to having not one, but two psychotic episodes in Target.
This week's shopping was the office supply store and Borders where, as usual, I drooled over blah, blah, blah and wound up buying blah, blah.
Drawing books are really expensive. This week's drooling was over the previously mentioned $55 volume. I'm not buying it, but by the time I've fondled it in the store for the next three months, I figure I'll have half the content memorized anyhow.
There was one on sale, an entire "Master Course on Drawing" on sale for $20 but the fool thing was about 400 pages long. I think I'd find that more intimidating than helpful, you know?
I don't aspire to Artistry. I just want to be able to produce a recognizable sketch of a tree or a scenic view of some kind, should the mood strike me. A little perspective, a little work on line, a little practice with tone and texture. My needs are modest, my ambitions humble.
400 pages. I wouldn't work my way through that if I were looking for a career as an artist (although I'm willing to accept that those with Talent or even Genius might find those 400 pages more enthralling than I did).
My Actual Purchases were, of course, MYSA-AS I've come pretty close to completing the various MYSA-AS series I started, so that I can quit bothering about them.
Annoyingly enough, my current favorite series is still in progress. I ask you...what is the point of coming to the party years after everyone else except for the pleasure of knowing that anything I want is going to be instantly available? Sheesh. Anyhow, I found the next book, available from the publisher, so I'm going to go ahead and order it. After that, I'll probably have to wait six months for the next one. I have no idea how fast these things get translated and published here.
Makes me cranky to wait, but everything makes me cranky these days.*
I was somewhat amused to see that various books I read about on-line as being "classics" but out of print in the MYSA-AS arena are now being re-released. I've bought a handful of the ones available. It's rather like reading Classic Slash. Interesting from a historical perspective and really shows you how far the genre has come. Some of the early stuff is really very primitive line drawings. Not that much different than the junk I'm currently turning out (given the differences in subject matter, of course).
In the meantime, now I've had breakfast, my daily bouillon, two of my many vitamins, and my morning coffee. I'm still hungry and I want more caffeine, sure signs that I overindulged on both this past weekend.
This might be a good moment to putter down the road to the office supply store and make a few copies for Buehler. Before those potato chips the Tweenybopper put in the kitchen start talking to me.
Later note: I fell on the way out the door...but only to the quantity of six chips. If that's the biggest Diet Mistake I make this week, I'll be in good shape.
_______________________
* I'm thinking I should switch to taking the HRT first thing in the morning, on an empty stomach. Maybe it will work better. I've got the Hot Flashes pretty much under control, but the mood swings are getting kind of scary. Maybe I'm not absorbing enough of the drug, taking it at night? The packaging doesn't say to take it on an empty stomach, but.... (My doctor says that as long as you haven't eaten for two hours, it counts as an "empty stomach" but there's never a point during the evening at which I haven't eaten for two hours.)
Dieting.
I'm still eating mostly turkey or chicken, with intervals of salmon (but no more than once a week because of the mercury). I ate so much turkey the lasttime around on the diet that I was entirely unable to stand the taste of it for two years after. It's tasting okay this time around but I don't know if that's the turkey or the 300-400 calories of bread-and-butter I'm eating with it. Not, perhaps, the most well-balanced lunch, but tasty.
I could eat a vegetable but there's a limit to how many little pots of food I'm willing to bring in to the office and cook every day. Besides, vegetables are tricky.
They say eat raw vegetables, and orange or leafy green ones, for the beta-carotene. But not carrots because they have too much sugar. Or peas because they have too much sugar and they're not "leafy."
One can hardly gnaw on an acorn squash every day at noon, okay? And I draw the line at raw sweet potatoes. I'm not even sure they're edible and I'm not volunteering to find out. Then there's the green, leafy vegetables. But lettuce doesn't count. Spinach does, but no human being can eat more than 1/2 cup of raw spinach in a day. That just leaves broccoli. None of those other green things count. (Brussels sprouts are not a vegetable. They're an evil communist plot to bring down Western society.)
Anyhow. I did the research and it's physically impossible to get 100% of the daily recommended whatevers from eating. You have to eat pounds and pounds and pounds of vegetables.
And "legumes" which is a fancy way of saying lots of different beans and things that look more like kinds of peas but are good for you. If forced, I can eat a lentil. I cannot be made to like it. I can eat a kidney bean (preferably with a bowl of chili wrapped around it) or a green bean without trouble.
Anyone tries to make me eat a lima bean and there's going to be bloodshed.
And there's something called "hummus" but I've never been sure what it's made of. I suspect some kind of bean but you can't be sure when something's been smushed into a soupy paste. It's non-delicious, though, so it doesn't matter.
Where was I going with this?
Oh. I remember. I did learn that, short of injecting a syringe full of lard into your heart, there are few more sure-fire routes to high cholesterol, clogged arteries, and heart disease than eating refried beans. I don't really like them, so that's okay. I eat moderate servings of black beans, instead.
I learned that that brown rice is preferable to any other starch. I adore brown rice. In fact, I'm going out tomorrow and eating a heaping helping, garnished with massive amounts of Chinese food. As I lean back in my chair and surreptitiously unfasten the snap on my jeans, I'll think smugly about how healthy I am.
I also learned that when health food nuts talk about "whole grain" breads, what they really mean is whole-grain rye bread, a substance more akin to fiberboard than food.
I know, I'm babbling. Now that Moe has broken into the sanctuary of my sketchbook, I'm too self-conscious to practice drawing any more. And I'm sick to death of playing Hearts. (Anyhow, those programmed players cheat.) That leaves me with nothing to do but bother you.
I figured it out and I've taken 17 vacation days so far this year. I don't know how many I should take (this company is pretty flexible about that kind of thing) but even figuring an optimistic 3 weeks entitlement, I've gone a bit over.
It's my nightmare come true...it's only August and I'm not entitled to take any more time off for the next 4-1/2 months. When Buehler gets back on Monday, I think I'll suggest taking a couple more unpaid days.
I like getting paid, but I really like not working.
Messing around, thinking about work occasionally but not actually doing much.
I had a little episode of road rage on the way home Wednesday night. Nothing extreme, but enough, I decided to justify stopping to spend a little money on the way home. (Why is it that every time I go to read a book series, I wind up searching the planet for Book 3?) A mere $24.00 later, I was happy again. You don't realize how much of your life revolves around shopping and eating until you go on a diet and a program of Fiscal Austerity at the same time.
Haven't done any writing for a few days. Not since the (ahem) Little Episode on Monday. I thought it might be wiser to let those associations fade away before I approach that poor story again.
I've been frittering away the work hours practicing my sketching instead. Hands, I should mention, are very difficult. (This book offers an odd selection of things to work on, but that may be because the primary focus is perspective. So, they offer feet and hands but no other body parts. Feet are simple...you just put shoes on them. Hands are another story entirely.)
The R. C. provided a picture she'd like turned into a sketch, which is very flattering of her, if wildly optimistic. I did a quick trial and estimate that I might, might be able to produce a reasonable...well, recognizable anyhow, facsimile of that picture in two or three months. Maybe. There's a lot of amorphous vegetation that I haven't figured out how to handle yet.
Still. It's not like I had anything else I was dying to draw, is it? At least now I have a place to focus. I can learn to draw the disparate elements of the picture individually, then try to learn to put them together. (Overlapping things is a whole 'nother problem.) Today I brought in my instructions on "texturing". Not exciting stuff, but necessary.
Once I'd worked my way through the one drawing book that I liked, I just went on-line and searched for how-to stuff on sketching and drawing. I printed out a bunch of stuff. I love the internet.
Okay...enough about that.
Because this is the Year Of Doing Things Different*, the R.C. and I are signing up for Open University classes this fall.
She had her first one last night, a class on diet and nutrition and women's bodies and depression (or something like that).
One thing you have to do, going into a class like that, is remember that everyone has their axe to grind and their pet project to promote. This bunch was down on refined sugar (well, who isn't?) and big on Cave Fare. That is, at least one of them thought the problem with modern diets was that we aren't eating the way cavemen did. All raw foods and not much of them.
That fact that we don't all have the resources to bring down our own mastodons three times a day doesn't seem to have entered into the discussion, although they did advise shopping at health food stores and eating all natural, organic type of stuff. Which I agree with up to a point, but not everyone can afford to pay the premium for organic food.
It's all very well for people who can afford it to get all pretentious about eating "natural" food (as though the environment it was raised in is somehow unconnected from the rest of our polluted planet) I guess. And for those of us who have a Whole Foods opening across the street from where we live in a month. I think it's important for us to remember, though, that the several billion people living on this planet can't be fed using hunter-gatherer techniques.
Whatever.
(Also, they don't approve of modern food processes because pesticides and antibiotics aren't how the cave men ate. I think it's important to establish at this point that I'm not eating wormy apples or buggy tomatoes, no matter what some prehistoric woman was prepared to tolerate in her diet. And that's final.)
Granted I accept that we, as a society, tend to over-eat, but not everyone is capable of digesting seven or eight cups of raw fruits and vegetables in a day, you know? For those of us concerned because today's produce isn't as vitamin-filled as the stuff our ancestors ate (the worms add protein, I guess) this woman offered a handy-dandy pill with all of the nutrients necessary to replace a full day's vegetable and fruit allotment.
No word on what cave men thought about taking pills and no information on whether or not your body can actually absorb 100% of your day's nutrition at one go or not.
The same group offers consultations on nutrition and menopause. All about natural "equivalents" for HRT and stuff.
The first person who tries to take my hormone pills away is getting a psychotic episode in the face.
The R.C. was more adventurous in her class choices than I was. She signed up for a lot of self-improvements sorts of things.
Me, I spent five years working at a company who considered every employee a fixer-upper project in process and even though that was ten years ago, I'm still pretty much over it. (Yeah, I learned a lot, worked through many of my 'issues' and came out the other side a better, more productive employee, but there's a limit even to my narcissism and five years pondering the constantly fluctuating state of my own navel was enough.)
I looked at all the courses that might actually help me in the job market (assuming unemployment visits me again) but they all looked too much like work.
I pondered, long and hard, over a writing class, but as the R.C. pointed out, every time I sit down to learn about writing, I write less (and worse). Now that I'm pretty much done with the politiblogging thing, as a daily obsession, I'm hoping the old creative juices start to flow back into story-writing tracks.
In the meantime, I'm not putting any pressure on myself. Which is why the drawing binge. It's tangentially creative, but not connected to writing. I suck at it and I'm okay with that, so there's no pressure to blossom into the next Rembrandt. The tools are minimal, all I need is a pencil, an eraser, and a bit of paper. I can play with it at work or wherever I am.
Today, for instance, we began by trying to copy a sketch of a cat. My first effort looked unsettling like Yoda tripping on a couple of tabs. My second effort, the same, but with indigestion added. By #4, I'd graduated to "Yoda in a police line-up" but my fifth effort bore, if you squinted and tilted your head a bit, a distinct resemblance to a cat. I considered this a triumph.
Okay...and now I'm humiliated.
Moe strolled into the office to ask about Work Stuff and the sketchbook was open on my desk. He looked at the drawings!
Now I need a new hobby.
______________________________________
* We occasionally tend toward Theme Years. Once, we had Year Of Public Transportation, for instance. We had Year Of Getting Thinner when we went on the diet. Talked about nothing for six months except the food we weren't eating. Personally, I'd like to try Year Of Gourmet Dining, but the R.C.'s non-caveman body is suspicious of new and strange foods and anyhow there's this whole diet thing again.
Let's all take a moment to remember The King on the anniversary of his death.
. . . .
Done?
Today is going much better than yesterday. Of course, I haven't been repeating yesterday's mistakes. For instance, I made no attempt to write this morning, so no one was able to interrupt me and piss me off. (Okay, truth is I had a training meeting that started at 8 and went to 9:30, so I didn't have any opportunity to write. But the principle is the same. I wasn't trying to enjoy myself, so it wasn't possible for anyone to interfere with that attempt, so I've no reason to be bitter at my co-workers.)
It didn't used to be that I judged the success of a day by the amount of time I spent not spent clenched with rage but I'm learning.
Tuesday? So far, so good. No sign of hormone-induced psychosis. A very good day.
I tell you what. I didn't snag this hormone prescription a minute too soon. A few more days like yesterday and I'd have left me.
Sigh. Of course, now that I've decided not to give the world the chance to dump on me by trying to use my work hours for something productive, I'm amazingly bored.
. . . .
I walked over and had coffee. I didn't get to see the Brown-Eyed Handsome Man (BEHM, for future referenc, even though that looks perilously close to SF's "Bug-Eyed Monster" acronym, and he's anything but) today. Must remember to go over promptly at 9:00 tomorrow. He's there at 9:00.
. . . .
Okay, that was at 10:30 and it's now 1:30. Believe it or not, I actually did a bit of work in the interval!
Now I'm having lunch, which is anything but exciting but is one of the more important steps in our new program of Non-Psychotic Days. Today's lunch: 3 oz broiled chicken, 1/2 potato, 2 cups salad w/l0-cal, non-fat Italian dressing, 1 cup bouillon. The bouillon is supposed to keep my sodium levels under control. (Technically this is a low-sodium diet, as well as being low-carb.) I have self-diagnosed a sodium imbalance as the cause of yesterday's little problem.
Okay, so that's boring.
What else is going on? Blister-Pak, the new Project Head on the client side called to ask what progress we've made on the three offices he approved last week. I, of course, have documentation to show that I attempted to contact my two offices twice each last week and once so far this week, without receiving a response.
The third office went straight onto Bossyboots' desk and there is, of course, no documentation to show he ever did anything with it. I sent him an e-mail and he claimed he'd contacted them but the way I was raised was that work that isn't documented didn't get done.
Also, he wanted to talk to Buehler who is on vacation and when I called Buehler he said he wasn't letting Blister-Pak ruin his day and he made me call back and claim I couldn't find him.
This kind of merry-go-round is one of the reasons I gave up being a secretary 15 years ago.
Whatever.
Bored of that now.
I'm going to have to give up and spend two hours playing Hearts, aren't I?
I don't usually pass along links from lunatic sites I get hits from, but this one has eaten my heart and destroyed my soul.
www . dkcoffee . com / coffeeenema / <--I think the name says it all, no need to go and look.
I long for a world not populated by scary lunatics....
But if I get one more hit from someone looking for *x*cution chamb*r fanfic, I may go ahead and kill myself anyhow.
Over lunch on Saturday, someone pointed out to me that I live within three miles of the store with the largest selection of MYSA-AS in the city.
Fine lot of good that does me now. I'm on a Frugality Binge and anyhow, as I think I mentioned before, I've gone off that stuff because of discovering that it's quite routine for authors to go batshit-crazy in the middle of a series. (No one had anything to recommend as something good to read. Something without the batshit-crazy element.) I don't need to pay money for that. I can read fanfic.
[Still. I'm making mental notes of the stores with the best selections in my area. There are tentative plans for Rapunzel to come to Denver for a visit next spring or summer. I figure finding "her kind of store" will be a key component in making sure she has a good time.
I'm not entirely certain what you do with an 18 year-old. When I was 18, I was deliriously happy with a book and a quiet corner to sit in. (Or, you know, a bar and a lot of attractive young men, but I digress and anyhow there will be none of that sort of thing.) She seems to be much the same, reading-wise, but our dingy, overcrowded apartment is hardly going to be a thrilling place for her to hang out in for too long.
We can shop. Eat. Maybe we'll go to the mountains one day. If she's here over the weekend, we could take the Summer Ski Train up to Winter Park. We can go to Tattered Cover (always a good destination for a Reader.) Maybe there will be something decent on stage when she's here. Summer isn't high tide for the theatre (Phantom or Les Mis or Beauty and the Beast won't be in town), but they do some decent smaller productions at DCPA. I'll worry about that next year.]
Another Saturday discovery? The "re-mix" is new since I last paid attention to fandom.
I understand it's now accepted to take someone else's story and "re-mix" it or re-write it. I didn't quite gather if this is done with the knowledge and consent of the original author or not, and whether or not you just do it or there has to be some kind of organized...I don't know...competition or challenge around it, but I didn't ask.
I also didn't gather that this was primarily in use when, as happens, some incompetent pretence for a writer mangles a good idea. Apparently it's just when you like someone else's story but you wanted a different element or you wanted things to take a different turn at some point.
Fanfic of fanfic sort of thing.
Having given up on interpretation of canon, fandom is now cannibalizing itself.
Has we really become this sterile, this impotent?
A few short years from now, will fandom soar phoenix-like from the ashes of its own implosion or will the fallout of this narcissistic gluttony leave it as roadkill upon the creative highway?
(Sometimes you have to let semantics go in favor of just giving some new words an airing. My only regret is that I was unable to work "pursuant" into that little rant. I never feel like I've really enjoyed my vocabulary until I can make something pursuant.)
It's possible that I'm reading too much into what was, after all, a casual part of a casual conversation. And that, you know, being hard up for something to talk about, I'm making a minefield out of a minnow.
I let good manners go as well, but I did say I'm in a really crappy mood.
The sad thing is that I'd really pretty much made up my mind to quit smoking a week ago. Now, with these psychotic mood swings, I'm sort of afraid to.
In other non-news, I managed several sketches over the weekend that did not look like the product of a brain suffering from demonic possession. At this point, that's about as much as I can hope for. If I keep making this kind of astounding progress, in a few short weeks I'll be ready to move from copying sketches in books to looking at Real Things and attempting to copy them!
I'm signing up for a class, but it doesn't start until September.
Two more hours before I can bail on this vale o'tears. I have an 8:00 training tomorrow morning.
Let's hope the day goes better than this one has.
After the entire freaking world got on my nerves from 8:00 - 11:00 this morning, the instant the urge and ability to write left me, the office went dead quiet and the last four hours have been several days long.
Ahhh...the joys of employment. Count Monday morning among them. (Not.)
Still. Looks like it's going to be a lovely, sunny day, and that counts for something. Nice to see the sunshine again.
Not that I'm complaining about our recent spell of cool weather. Given a choice between temperatures over 100 and temperatures in the 60s, I'll take the 60s every time.
This morning's scamper over to Starbucks netted me one of my favorite sights. There's a man (yes, a brown-eyed, handsome man) I see over there pretty much every time I walk in their door at or almost precisely at 9:00. I always notice him. And I notice him noticing me back, which is nice. On a day like today when I just threw something on and dashed into the office, I always regret not having taken more time with my appearance. (OTOH, he's certainly not seeing me only at my best. And he's still noticing....)
And, of course, Buehler's out of town for this whole week, which means I'm at leisure to arrange my schedule my won way.
So, this morning I came in determined, determined not to just laze another day away. I opened up one of my story files and got right to work. Before I knew where I was, I'd written 1,500 words.
Contemplated them. Deleted 1,300. Contemplated what I had left. Deleted 600 from the previous text. Contemplated the remaining 1,000 words. 600 of them may have to go.
Or, not. I could find a way to make it happen. (I always hope that. In vain 90% of the time, but whatever.)
When I get to the point where I'm deleting two word for every word I write, I know it's time to give it a rest.
I have to say, I know I've only been on it for the past three weeks, but the HRT doesn't seem to be doing much for my mood swings. I was in a good mood when I arrived this morning. I was writing and sort of enjoying myself. Now I'm all bitter and stuff. I'm not sure why I'm risking half a dozen dread diseases and side-effects, if the stupid meds aren't going to work any better than this. I'm not one of those women who ever suffered badly from PMS. I've never really developed coping mechanisms to deal with random bouts of homicidal mania.
My roommate has taken to hiding in the other room 90% of the time. Not that I blame her.
I'm starting to wonder if it might not be a good idea to accept Coco's job offer. Maybe I'd be better off if I were alone four days out of five, you know?
When I am rich, I'm going to hire someone to fish the seeds out of my watermelon for me.
It's me again. Still here. Still with nothing much to do.
Yeah, I brought the story file in, but I haven't touched it. This morning I spent 1-1/2 playing Cubis. Then I walked over for coffee. Then I practiced sketching for three hours. I'm not getting any better. I think it's time I went ahead and signed up for a class.
I mean, sure, had I any ambition to draw nothing but weirdly proportioned aliens and unlikely shaped trees, I'd be doing well, but I don't so I can't say that I am.
I have, with much effort, almost learned how to put hair on a head and even to get the features in the right place, proportionately. Unfortunately, what little skill I've developed stops at the neckline. My last sketch bears an uncanny resemblance to a Frenchman wearing a cat costume.
Maybe I'll go back to rectangles. I was getting pretty good at those. Those and vanishing points. I could sketch nothing but empty city streets with nice, rectangular buildings.
Yeah, I could be writing. I keep telling myself...open the story file and get at it, you lazy bum! But I don't listen. I never listen. (Damned kids today.)
Buehler called in. He's celebrating his vacation by getting sick. Poor thing. I feel very sorry for him today.
I like Buehler, I really do. Not the least because he told me to be sure and get up and go home early today since there's nothing to do. (And I didn't even tell him I came in at 7:30!)
I've been debating just when I should leave, but I can't make up my mind. Can't leave too early, because I have to give Extension 17 his paycheck and I know that the second I pay him, he'll just leave. Technically I should give it to him at 4:00, but maybe I'll stretch a point and make it 3:30 this week.
Yawn. In the meantime, maybe I should go ahead and have lunch? That might perk up my brain enough to get me writing, anyhow.
Later: Blew that. Instead of going out for a decent lunch, I ate an entire package of beef jerky, which will probably make me sick. (Well, no, it won't. Nothing makes me sick. But it should.) I'll be spending the rest of the weekend eating fish and turkey to make up for that little excess. I hate fish.
Oh, and I've decided to leave at 3:00.
So, this morning I brought a sketch pad and pencils and erasers and my smallest sketching book.
And my walkman.
And a book on tape.
And my story file on CD-Rom.
My bag looks like I was packing for a long weekend, not an eight-hour workday.
In fact, I was so busy packing things with which to wile away the work hours that I forgot to pack any lunch. Ah well. It's not like I'll be too busy to go out and get some.
I binged on junk food last night, to the detriment of my diet, so I'm already starving this morning. I had 8 lbs to lose and I've lost three. It was a dumb time to sabotage myself, but I'm determined to get back on track. So, I'm eating yogurt and thinking bitter thoughts about being the kind of person with no self-control whatsoever. (On the plus side, we stopped by the Russell Stover store yesterday evening and I did not buy the world's most delicious-looking dark chocolate truffles. So, you know, I'm not entirely a waste of time.)
I've already made three work-related calls today (I'm such a slogger). There might be one or two more I can make, but I'm going to pace myself. Wouldn't want to become giddy with all of the excitement.
And now...it's time for a coffee run.
So...what else is new since yesterday?
Not much, I'm afraid. In fact, not buying a truffle is probably the most exciting thing I've done since yesterday.
Okay, then Buehler comes in and he's feeling sick and he asks me if I'll do him a hu-u-u-ge favor. And he hands me $20 and asks me to walk across the street and get him a coffee and a sandwich and, while I’m there, pick up anything I want for myself.
I don't think I can abandon him. He's so nice! (Not that I need someone to buy me lunch, I can afford to buy lunch, but it's so thoughtful, you know?)
Except now I ate lunch at 11:00, when I normally eat at 1:30, and I have no idea how I'm going to make it through the rest of the day. At the moment, I'm eating a carefully measured portion of brazil nuts and hoping for the best.
And the MountainMan was here today. If I work from home, I won't get to see the MountainMan every two weeks. Granted, that would be better for my butt and my mouth (I chipped a tooth on the peanut brittle I bought today) but it's part of the rhythm of office life.
Another advantage to this place is that I do have dental coverage. Since I'm afraid to go to the dentist, I haven't taken advantage of it, but I know I need to. What if they want to give me fake teeth? I'd be so embarrassed. (I have dreadful teeth. The R.C. works hard to take care of hers, but I've never done that, and now I'm paying the price.) I'm too young to be toothless!
I just got a voicemail from a prospective client wondering why we've been blowing her off for the past three months. I'm running out of ways to explain to people why I haven't done the follow-ups I promised to do. It's very frustrating, because I can't just come out and say that the client paying for the project put a 'hold' on it. At the same time, I resent being made to look this sloppy and unprofessional.
Lessee...what else has happened in the last couple of hours? I sent a couple of e-mails and made a couple of calls. I'm not by any stretch of the imagination busy but I've had enough going on that it's a nice surprise to realize it's already 2:00.
I could make two more phone calls, but then I wouldn't have anything fun to do tomorrow.
Color me so surprised...the IT guys said they'd upgrade my PC to Windows XP while I was out yesterday and they actually did it! I can't remember the last time an IT thing happened on schedule.
Granted, there are a few small weirdnesses. For some reason, the icons on the Quickstart taskbar are all messed up. Excel has the icon for Hell's Own Software. Word has the icon for PSP. IE has the icon for Desktop Explorer, Desktop Explorer has the icon for Excel, and "show desktop" has the icon for Microsoft Access, which I don't think is even loaded on this computer. No doubt I'll get used to it.
(It's also likely to cause me much amusement on those rare occasions other people try to use my computer. Between that and the fact that I've typed so much I've worn the letters off some of the keys....) (People always marvel that you can find the letter 'e' even if you've worn off the label. You'd think that the advent of the internet would encourage the spread of touch-typing, wouldn't you?)
Lemme see...what else? On my Unpaid Day Off, I did very little. I mean, after oversleeping and being late for my 8:30 a.m. training session, the day was kind of disorganized. I read. Stared at my story file and realized I need to watch still more episodes. Ate some yogurt. Read some more. Made my bed. Read a different book for a while. Ate more yogurt. Bathed.
I'm not quite certain how I managed to spend an entire day at those things (well, besides the reading), but I did. Eventually I had to start pulling myself together to go meet with Coco. I hadn't seen her in months, so it was good to get to spend a couple of hours yattering with her.
She's been having any number of chaotic adventures since we last met (which explains why I hadn't heard from her) from her husband having a car accident while on safari in Africa (and being airlifted to a hospital in another city, leaving her 12 year-old daughter alone at the resort) to buying a new house.
She offered to hire me again. Sigh. I don't know what to do. I'd like to be loyal to Buehler who, I know, would like me to be here when things start to break again, but I'm so bored. And I'm a bit worried about the future. I mean...what if things don't start to break?
I have a certain liking for a job where my boss travels a lot, and I pretty much come and go as I want. And Buehler did start a 401k and he's making a couple of percentage points of matching contributions for both me and Sassy, which is a pretty impressive commitment from a company that only employs five people.
But I love working with Coco and it would be a very interesting project. It would be something I've never done before, which is both exciting and scary. And I'd be working from home 3-4 days a week.
I'm not sure if that's a plus or a minus, you know? I've worked from home before. In some ways, it's very stullifying. I'm not the world's most social person, but sitting alone in my apartment all day isn't stimulating, even if I am working. (I do work when I'm 'working from home' though. My worth ethic isn't that sad. In fact, that's another part of the problem. I have trouble stopping. The last time I worked from home, I found myself working at 9:00 at night a lot of the time, just because unfinished projects preyed on my nerves. There's an advantage in being able to stand up at 5:00 and leave your work behind.)
On the plus side, I'd save an hour a day or more, not having to make my current commute. I'd save on clothes, gasoline, wear-and-tear on my car, and the money I currently spend eating out for lunch three times a week. (I wouldn't save on coffee. I do live across the street from a Starbucks, so I wouldn't have to give that up.)
Working from home is very Green, which I like.
On the minus side, the R.C. doesn't like the idea. I don't blame her. On those occasions she takes a day off, she really doesn't want me underfoot constantly, even if I am in the other room, working. If we had a larger place, like a townhouse, where we were more spread out, it might not be so much of a problem.
But, enough of that, since I'm aware that it's of real interest to almost no one but myself.
I practiced my sketching some more last night. I got bored with rectangles and cones and moved on to heads. I'm appalling at profile. The shapes of the heads are never right.
The R.C. is mystified as to why I started with cartoons, although I have two exceptionally good reasons for having done so.
#1 - That's the drawing book that was on sale. The other one I wanted, the non-cartoon one, was $55. This one was $6.
#2 - You have to learn to draw the shapes of things. The advantage of cartoons is that they're mostly line. You have to master these lines before you can draw anything more ambitious, so why not just focus on them?
A third reason is that my efforts look like cartoons anyhow. This way I can pretend it's on purpose.
From my perspective, this is a good hobby. All I need is a pencil, a piece of paper, and my $6 book and I can sit quietly, peacefully in a corner, amusing myself for hours. For some inexplicable reason, it bothers the R.C. She's asked me about ten times why I'm doing it. (And I'm thinking...like any of my other hobbies have ever had a point to them? When I spent three months obsessively solving logic puzzles, was that somehow a more sensible hobby?)
Anyhow, it's very interesting since, as I've said before, I'm not really a "visual" person. I find myself studying trees as I drive to work. Looking at traffic lights. Watching the way people move when they walk down the street. I almost never really look at things. Now I'm having to look.
Gives me something to do during my commute.
So...what else? I've gone off the whole MYSA-AS thing a bit. I finally read the rest of the "Gravit___n" series and realized that the author/artist went completely batshit-crazy for several books in the middle of the series. Not only did the drawing get worse in every book, the story changed out of recognition. I knew it was going to get stupid when the author/artist brought in the giant flying panda that seemed equipped to start WWIII but it got worse than I'd anticipated. (I wondered several times if those books were even being drawn/written by the same person.)
Plus which, I have to say I was appalled at how the 'hero' seemed to be getting younger and younger. In the first book, he was almost as tall as the love interest character, and not much shorter than his best friend, and they were both 17/18ish. As the series went on, he got shorter and somehow younger, until most of the drawings made him look ten years old. Kinda' squicky.
The final volume was a reasonably satisfying wind-up to the main story arc. It's a pity that the mood of the story had been destroyed by those intervening volumes of batshit-craziness. That series started out as something very promising.
(Awww.... Moe came in and looked at my XP and fixed the icon-weirdness. I was kind of enjoying it.)
You see? I need a new job, don't I? I just sat down to kill a little time this morning and I've already written two pages full of absolutely nothing.
Of all the times for me to burn out on politi-blogging.... Tomorrow, Buehler is out of town. I'm bringing my story file.
8:45 a.m. You're annoying, okay, Frogmorton? If you can't help me with my computer problems, then you can't. I'm okay with that. But you knew you couldn't help. You said so, up front. Why, then, did you waste 40 minutes of my time proving it to me before you referred the problem to Moe?
Also? Stop talking to me every time you see me. I put that flower vase next to my computer so that everyone walking in the front door of our office didn't catch my eye and feel compelled to chat with me. If I want to talk with you, I'll come and find you. Until then, leave me alone.
Granted, I'm not that busy at the moment, but I'm still not a receptionist.
Or a morning person.
10:58 a.m. Keerist, it's happening every time I open my mouth these days. I'm turning into my mother. And not in a good, floor-so-clean-you-can-eat-off-of-it way, either. Every time I hear myself talking and wonder if it's me or my mother, I want to run out and get a personality transplant. (Don't get me wrong. I love my mother. I just don't want to be her.)
1:38 p.m. I just got off the phone from a 1-1/2 hour training call. I'm okay with the fact that it took 48 minutes to actually get her connected to the training program. I'm okay, really I am, with the fact that this woman forgot everything I said last week. I'm okay with the fact that she got confused because she didn't click where I told her to click and kept having to go backwards. I'm okay with the fact that she was so busy clicking on things she wasn't listening to anything I said.
Totally. Okay.
1:46 p.m. And I'm equally okay with hearing Buehler tell someone on the phone that he doesn't have anyone on staff who can write, so he's having to write the web pages himself.
Snarl.
It's a sad day when the only person not getting on my nerves is Bossyboots. (That could change if he doesn't get that DC office up and running before I'm scheduled to train them at 8:30 tomorrow morning.
1:55 p.m. Today's lunch is grilled chicken, as it usually is when I'm On The Diet. I overcooked the chicken (I usually do) so it's tough as an old boot.
I have to eat it, though. Owing to some kind of inexplicable brain failure, it's the only thing I brought with me for lunch today. At home I have salad, three kinds of fruit, rice, and potatoes. I brought none of these things. So, I'm eating tough chicken and drinking a bottle of orange juice I found in the refrigerator. If my palate needs additional thrills later, I have ranch-flavored soy crisps.
In today's other excitement, the Hell's Own Software client went mad and approved three new offices for installation today. One of them (ready to install) went straight to Bossyboots but the other two have to go through my procedures first. It was very exciting. I had to make two phone calls before noon today!
I am so underemployed.
Sorry I'm all Dramaqueen Girl at the moment. They're going to upgrade my work PC to XP while I'm out of the office tomorrow. I'm scoping around, making sure I don't have any personal files (or irreplaceable files) on it before I go. I'll have to delete all of the personal bookmarks I keep on this computer.
I'm already in mourning for readbookonline.net and classic-literature.co.uk. I'll probably never again read the reviews of the new Don Quixote translation and fight the temptation to order the book. If I don't have ALDaily bookmarked, how will I be led to articles like this one? (I mean, how can you not love a site that has a Nota Bene section?)
How else can I remember I'm in the middle of Chapter 52 of Roughing It without my bookmark?
Will I ever sit down and read electronic versions of Dickens' works if I don't have the bookmark in front of me?
I keep very few personal bookmarks at work, but they're each valuable to me. (Okay, yes, I backed up my bookmarks. I miss them anyhow.)
2:32 p.m. Sigh. I went down and got today's mail. Looks like that's the end of today's Work-Related Excitement.
For the record, the combination of orange juice and chicken is not nummy-delicious.
3:24 p.m. I stopped to read part of Lady Susan, just for sentimentality.
And to kill time, of course. Beginning Thursday (when Buehler will be out of town for 7 work-days) I may be forced to start writing at work again. Either that, or face the possibility of going completely stir-crazy, sitting here with nothing to do.
Today's excitement...filing! It's a sign of how bored I am that sorting and filing a small armload of folders gave me such a lift. I made as much work out of the project as possible, too. I spread them out, sorted them into categories, and figured out a filing system that required me to reorganize two file cabinets. Two and a half hours taken care of.
I need to take our rent check up to the property manager office and mail a letter, but I'm trying to space out the thrills. Wouldn't want to peak too early in the day.
Now I'm eating today's second yogurt and munching on soy crisps, pretending I'm eating lunch. (I had intended to go out for lunch, but it's raining and I didn't bring an umbrella.) Soy crisps and yogurt are better for my diet anyhow.
Buehler's out of the office today, so at least I don't even have to be pretending to work. When he called to suggest the filing project this morning, he said when I was done I should just pull out my knitting and relax. I take that as tacit permission to do whatever I feel like doing. (It's a sign of how bored he knows I am that he let me tidy up any of his files. The last two times I suggested doing it, he offered to fire me.)
He's out of the office tomorrow, too. However, owing to the fact that I just volunteered to cut my hours back 1 day a week (until this financial crunch is over), I'm taking the day off myself. Next week I have Tuesday off. Except for the 8:30 meeting I already had scheduled. Which means I'm "off" but I can't really sleep in. Which is probably a good thing, because I'll get more done.
I rather wish I had a book (or a story file) with me, but I don't. This is one of those moments when it would be key to have a jump or flash or pin drive, so you could carry story files around with you, isn't it? Oh! I have one! What a pity I was too lame to remember to learn to use it.
I do have pencil and paper. And I just happen to have brought the Book Of Amazing Rectangles with me. Heh. Heh. Heh. It's not that I was already prepared to goof off all day, you understand. It's just that.... Okay, I was already prepared to goof off all day.
Today's lesson: Foreshortening. It's all about perspective and scale. I mean, some of the lessons are a bit odd. Like, there's this really complicated way to draw an oval. Seems to me it would be easier just to draw an oval, but I can see that if you're doing a still-life or something, where an oval shape is front-and-center of your drawing, you'd want it to be accurate. I like the idea of breaking everything down into squares, rectangles, circles, and ovals, though. With those four shapes, and a handle of perspective and scale, I'll be ready to...well, nothing. I have no intention of doing anything with this skill, any more than I did the last three times I practiced it. I'm just amusing myself.
On the other hand, there are worse ways to spend a cool, rainy Thursday in the office. I spent a little time today banning IPs from my blogs again. Some company in NY has slammed me for 1300+ hits already this month. Pisses me off. And if I could find a way to ban entire countries, Colombia would be #1 on my list, with Germany and Romania coming up fast. I use a combination of four methods to kill spam and I've got it locked down pretty well. The only thing I can't prevent is a lot of garbage in my "latest visitors" log, but I seem to be doing better. All I can do is block the pings...I can't keep them from trying.
Actually, what with the Actual Work I did earlier, and then the eating of lunch and now the writing of the blog, I've managed to fill most of my day. It's almost 2:00. I'm fairly excited about this. Only three hours until I get a long weekend!
(I got permission, in the comments section, to yatter on about Fraser and RayK as much as I want. Which didn't surprise me. But, FYI, I've decided not to at this point. I'm moving along on this story reasonably well. I don't want to either jinx it or talk it to death, you know?)
I'm still pondering the whole MYSA-AS thing, but I don't have any startling conclusions. I've looked at most of the new books I bought, even though I haven't had time to read all of them thoroughly.
Seems to be like almost any genre of fiction. There are things being sold that surprise you.
There are people whose story-telling ability doesn't rise much above that of the average (and not in a good way) fanfic story.
There are people whose drawing ability seems to vary wildly from one panel to the next. (I understand from the author's notes that there's sometimes a "team" of people working on the graphics, but surely that can't explain why some panels look remarkably like the drawings that I, with a dozen hours of "practice" under my belt, am producing.)
There's too much non-con (okay, that's my squick, but this is my blog) or borderline non-con stuff and when it is consensual, it's not always clearly laid out that way.
Avoiding complete titles to stay below the radar of fandom, let me mention that the "Gravit___n" series was mentioned to me. I looked at it in the bookstore and decided it did look like something I'd like to read.
Upon getting into it, I find borderline non-con, actual non-con in the form of a gang-bang r*pe scene (from which the victim recovers instantly with no aftereffects), a storyline that tears along like an out-of-control freight train for no sensible reason, very uneven drawing, and an almost inconceivable lack of depth and nuance in the primary protagonist. At one point his lover advises the guy to get some ritalin. Me, I would have suggested prozac. And maybe some heavy-duty therapy. (Even before the gang-bang.)
Also? The thing about drawing a character looking like a two year-old, to indicate he/she is acting immature? Such a squick when they're in a sexual relationship with another character. Just gross. When, in the series under discussion, the "hero" was suddenly pictured as a toddler, hanging desperately from his lover's arm? So. Grossed. Out.
Don't get me wrong. The series is very compelling, but not for the character of the "hero" of the story. It's actually the lover and his familial/business/etc. ramifications that make the story work.
Oddly, the whole half-morphing into an animal thing doesn't bother me half as much. It's also used to illustrate emotion (or to hint at motives), but it doesn't squick me.
And I find the reading back-to-front, right-to-left fun and interesting, although that could be my dyslexia kicking in. One series I bought turned out to be laid out like a "regular" book and that annoyed me.
I get lost in "action" scenes sometimes. Remember how Batman (60s era) filled the screen with POW! SOCK! WHAM! sometimes? Some MYSA-AS books offer a panel like that with no indicator of precisely what happened or who done what to who. While I'm irrationally entertained to see, in the next panel, a character with a bandaged X on his head, to indicate he got smacked, sometimes these "action" scenes go on for three or four panels. You never know quite what's happening or who is involved. I don't quite see the point. I've studied a few of those panels and it's not like the visual being presented is particularly creative or important. Why bother? Without even the corner of a face or the shadow of a fist, what am I supposed to understand from these?
But there's a lovely freedom in the graphics. Sometimes things are "boxed" the way I'm used to seeing them from the funnies in the daily paper. Sometimes a panel is laid over a larger, unframed drawing. Sometimes there are bits of drawings at the bottoms or sides of panels.
There's a confusing freedom in the text. How am I supposed to read text placed outside of any graphic? What about text that falls outside the "speech balloons"? Am I supposed to understand when I'm reading a character's thoughts and when they're speaking aloud? Because I don't. And sometimes there's an exchange of sentences between two characters (in a different lettering style) that doesn't seem to belong to the story at all. Do I assume the characters are muttering these things at each other or do I assume the author/artist was just having a little fun?
Possibly I'm over-thinking the whole thing. I tend to do that.
Especially when I have too much time on my hands. I finished my beta-testing two hours ago. Now I'm back to Nothing To Do.
Oh, well. Count your blessings. I could be going on and on and one about RayK and Fraser again, and we've all already been through all of that. At least this is a new topic. (Anyone complains and I really will start posting endlessly on the wonderful rectangles I'm learning to draw.)
Everybody hump!
Okay, not really that funny.
I actually had RayK and Fraser in mind. I didn't watch any more episodes last night, but they're on my mind anyhow. And not in the "humping" sense, either. Not really. I'm working out their orbit in one part of my story.
When I rolled into the office at 7:45 this morning, Buehler was already here. Spooky. He normally shows up around 9:00 or 9:30. It's very unsettling to have him here so early in the day. I normally start off my day by checking my personal e-mail (which seems to be working normally again) and surfing the news to see what's new in the world. Makes me self-conscious to have him sitting there. (And grateful I was on time.)
I worked on my ban/block lists again for a while last night before it occurred to me that some people are no doubt visiting one of my blogs for legitimate reasons. It's possible that getting a lot of traffic doesn't automatically mean spammers. But! I'm absolutely thrilled to say, it's the third of the month and so far I've held the referral spam down to five hits, on each blog! I don't doubt that after the Great Reinstall the other night, I've forgotten to block someone, so I'll get nailed sometime this month, but not so far. (Sometimes momentary triumphs are all you get.)
Dammit. I went to get coffee and forgot to close this document. I don't suppose anyone looked at it, but still. I'm getting frighteningly absent-minded.
In theory, I'm still plugging away at beta-testing BelleCall, the case program we're designing for the Belles. Or, I should say, I'm beta-testing it again. When someone tells me to "take a look" at a piece of software, the way Buehler did last week, I assume it's already been tested thoroughly and that I'm doing to sort of second-stage beta or something.
It's my failing that I consistently fail to remember that, around here, "take a look at it" means that I'm probably the first person besides the designer to lay eyes on it. So, instead of the brief (6 hour) look I took at it the other day, today I'm trying to break it. I've already found over a dozen new things. I was very sloppy last week.
One piece of exceptionally good news is that, less than two weeks after I started it, the WonderDrug has just about eliminated my I.C. symptoms. I do still have little (ahem) 'episodes' but nothing like the scale of what was happening before. I'm sleeping better and my energy level is back up, too. Sure is nice not to be 'flashing' fifteen or twenty times a day, I promise you. (Okay, it might not have been twenty. I'm prone to exaggeration when I'm not lying, but it sure felt like it.)
I did some drawing last night. Actually, I put in another two or three hours. A new hobby takes a lot of practice.
(I swear, learning to write was a lot easier.) (Of course, I just shoved things onto the page and counted on my beta readers to help me fix my biggest problems, back when I was starting out.) (Then I gave up on improving.) (Then I stopped writing.) (Then I started again, focused on trying to write well, and crashed and burned.) (Now I'm dabbling. The instant I feel a desire to "do it better" come over me, I close the computer file and do something else for a while.)
I can draw three-dimensional rectangles now if I have the book with the instructions. Without the book, I still don't get the perspective right.
Last night I branched out into houses. A house is a three-dimensional rectangle with a roof. So far I'm not having success at roofs. My first attempt...the roof looked like it belonged to a house in Flatland. Actually, some distorted version of Flatland.
I may switch and work on interiors for a while, instead. Furniture is an interesting problem. Also, scale. I tried an interior last night and wound up with 22 foot ceilings, a 17 foot tall door, and a 2 foot tall couch.
I brought a drawing pad and one of the books on perspective with me to work today, but more out of obsession than out of any belief that I could find a quiet corner to each lunch and work on these things.
(Removed - a lot of really boring stuff. You can thank me later.)
I'll bet you'll be almost as glad as me when I finally start having some work to do.
The day has improved a tad. My boss wanted to split a turkey sandwich for lunch. That means today's 2 oz chicken, 3 baby carrots, and apple will still be available to excite me at suppertime. Oh, joy.
I almost forgot. I promised details on the Great Pen Theft of '05, didn't I? McSwain! Likes pens almost as much as I do.
Okay, True Confessions time.
I stole two pens, but I think one of them may have originally been mine. It's a Bic Zebra Razor-Point and I don't know of anyone in this office but me who buys their own (disposable) pens. The supply shelf never has anything more exciting than Bic stick pens. (The kind that blob, leak, and skip.)
The other is a more expensive pen, the refillable type. It's brushed steel with a gold-colored center band and a gold clip. If I use a magnifying glass, I can read, "Inoxcrom Spain" written around the gold-colored band and the refill barrel inside is the same brand. You twist it to get the point to come out and it has a solid, weighty feel in my hand. The website is rather annoyingly full of java scripts instead of information, all I can gather is that the pens are "modestly" priced, but whatever.
I may or may not keep it. It feels lovely to hold it, but it's not that exciting to write with. Ecologically I know I should use refillable pens, but I rarely do. My pen mood changes. Sometimes I want a very smooth point. Sometimes I enjoy a tip that gives me some resistance against the paper. Sometimes I want a very broad stroke. Other times I prefer a wire-thin line of ink. It's easier to switch around if I use throw-away pens.
Anyhow. Yesterday, I figured I was scoring stealing such a nice pen. Today I'm lukewarm about it. (But still excited about the Razor-Point.)
Right about there, I stopped caring about pens. Sure, I'm desperate for a way to fill the hours between eight and five, but even for me, there has to be a limit.
Last night? I finally got a couple of DS episodes watched. It's a much more intimate experience, watching a show on my laptop, using headphones. I find that I do actually watch. And I see some very fun things. I mean, sometimes I forget just how possessive RayK is of Fraser, you know? And how jealous.
Today, I'm all mmmm and thinking about how RayK tends to climb in between Fraser and whoever he's talking to. RayK does everything but shout, "Dammit! Cuddle me!" Doesn't he?
My horoscope advises me to put on headphones and retreat from the world this evening, so I guess I'll be watching more episodes. (Unless I decide that defying my horoscope is the wise thing to do, in which case I'll practice drawing more rectangles.)
I also need to get out that "flash drive" thing someone gave me and figure out how to use it.
Our network is running like molasses, there's some weird problem with my (personal) e-mail and I can't get in and read it, thanks to my lack of diligence in checking Snopes.com, I just discovered that I got caught, again, posting an "urban legend" as truth, and in general it's not starting out to be a banner day.
The good news is that I got my alarm clock reset last night so that it goes off at 6:30, instead of 7:30. So I was on time to work today.
The bad news is that I sat up until nearly midnight, fighting comment/referrer spam, so I'm a little tired.
Software drives me bonkers. It works just fine for a while, then one day it starts giving you fits and there's no understanding why.
The I.E. on my work computer has taken to giving me messages about script errors and no matter how often I check to make sure the boxes saying, "don't do that" are checked (they are), I can't make it stop.
And things that used to display in java on my machine aren't displaying any more...although, naturally, advertisements all over the internet continue to jump, flash, scroll, and generally annoy me.
My MT-Blacklist (on my blog) went bonkers last night. It was limiting the number of changes I could make at one go and I had to close my browser window and log-in again from scratch between every change. It appears that 3,500 entries was too many.
I deleted the entire list and reinstalled it. I also condensed a lot of the various strings to single words. I shrank the list down by over a third, which should make commenting go a bit faster. If you get a message saying you've used a bad word, just type it with spaces or choose a different word.
I hate to be reduced to banning simple words like dr*gs, p*lls, p*rn, or p*n*s, which we all know are in common use on this blog, but I will if I have to.* This is another time when my tendency to create weird and unlikely acronyms for things I discuss frequently might come in handy.
Scanning my referral logs, I discovered I was getting hits from some swinger. It's really none of my concern (or interest) if his wife is happy with his hobby but I don't need his traffic. I banned him. I also found a few, I assume, start-up companies fishing for traffic. Banned. There's a web-hosting company in France I'm tempted to ban. They seem to host most of my "hits" which, since I can't possibly be that popular in France, might mean they're either spawning or routing spam. I view them with dark suspicion, but I haven't taken action against them yet. (Those of you in the cult o'LJ don't seem to have this problem. I wonder what they use?)
I use MT-Blacklist to ban comment and ping spam. I have trackbacks turned off. I've added a string (Perl?) to my htaccess file to kill referrer spam. It isn't that I'm not trying to help the world o'blog be spam-free, it's just that no human being can keep up with it.
Especially a human being who doesn't understand how to code things. There's a complicated set of instructions for clearing your MT-Blacklist log. I'd like to do that. I'm sure, with the amount of work my Blacklist is doing, the log is huge. But I only understood about one out of every three words in the instructions.
At some point, dumb luck and crossing your fingers just isn't enough, you know? You have to actually know what you're doing.
My next (scary) idea is that I should upgrade my version of MT. I read the support forums and I didn't understand the problems people ran into, much less the solutions, so I don't think I'll attack that this week. I'd just hire someone to do it...but I already paid $400/blog to have these two blogs designed, then I had to pay someone else $400 to recode one of them because it wasn't working right and the original person wasn't responding to my requests. I hate to fork out yet another $400 for someone to upgrade the code in both of them, you know? I just paid my annual hosting fee and the leasing on both of the domain names.
People who accuse fans, fandom, and fan-writers of free-loading have no idea. If I had back all of the money I've spend on fandom over the years, I wouldn't be sweating my retirement quite as much. (I mean, if I'd invested this money across the years, instead of spending it.)
(More about the Great Pen Theft of '05 later today.)
__________________________________
* I'd miss p*n*s. It's a cute little word, isn't it? Short and funny. Not unfriendly, but a bit shy, maybe. Heh. And the day the spammers start using "pr0n" instead of "p*rn", we'll all be crying.
I see from a cursory review of this blog that I have not actually inflicted the minutia of last week's household accomplishments upon you!
(Just in time...sanity kicks in. Not even I find the prospect of listening to me whine because a bathroom floor cleaned on Monday needs to be cleaned again on Sunday enticing. And while I have, indeed, installed the World's Most Beautimous Shelf Paper in the kitchen, I can't think that the state of my drawers is really of earth-shaking importance. My satisfaction at being able to trot back and forth between the bedroom and the living room without tripping over anything can be of no interest to anyone but myself, either.)
A friend came by to visit the apartment early last week and commented on how the neighborhood has declined since she met me. I know that, but I'm far too lazy to move. Occasionally the idea of having 1-1/2 or 2 times the space almost seduces me, but in the end, sheer inertia keeps me in place.
Sigh. It's 3:30. I've made it through most of the day.
I finally demanded that Buehler produce some work for me to do. At the moment, he doesn't have anything but some financial stuff I can help with. I ceased balancing my checkbook in 1993, not because I’m lazy, but because I'm hopeless with even the simplest math. Still. It will help fill the hours, right? And, like most "administrative" work, it's mostly making copies and mailing stuff and filing. It's probably better that Buehler pays me to do this than that he continues to pay the part-time person he hired. He might start wondering if he could do without me, you know?
That may and/or may not be a proper use of "notwithstanding" but I don't care. It's a good word. Not as good as pursuant, which is the best word, but a good word.
I also suspect that it's redundant to type, "and/or" but whatever.
It's a reflection of how bored I am that these things are starting to worry me.
Kormantic assures me that she's been working on a particular story for over a year, making my DS effort a non-starter in the slow-moving department, but I strongly suspect that when she completes her effort, it will be longer and have more, you know, actual story in it than my stuff tends to. Still, I appreciate the support.
Another sales person just ignored the "no soliciting" sign on our door. I guess this guy figured it was okay because he was buying, not selling, but we don't actually sell our used office equipment and supplies to people who walk in the door and ask for it, so he can go be weird somewhere else.
Boredom also makes me cranky.
I sent Coco an e-mail and finally heard back from her today. We're going to get together after work next week. It will be fun to get caught up, I haven't seen her in four months. Much as I like Buehler...and much as I dread the prospect of yet another start-up company that won't last a year, I may ask her if they're hiring.
Of course, it would be a pity to leave now. Buehler is going to be out for most of August. No point in changing jobs when I can goof off without disturbing anyone, right?
I mean, in terms of Recent Cool Purchases, I bought a roll of Post-It paper. A roll. It's way cool. It's about 10 inches wide and about 10 yards long. I can rip off a huge section and use it as a kind of "desk blotter" to doodle on. Or write on an oversized chunk and stick it on the back of the front door at home to remind me of things. Or tear off a small strip and hide it under my keyboard, using it to practice sketching on when no one is looking. Imagine the fun I could have!
Some people, you say of them, "they're a child at heart." Me, I'm just immature.
I stole a pen today.
I mean, I didn't steal steal it. I haven't carried it out of the office or anything. But it's a neato pen and I found it on the supply shelves, so I smuggled it to my desk. (Why 'smuggled'? Don't ask me. If anyone wanted it, it wouldn't have been on the supply shelves. Maybe I'm just trying to add drama to my drab existence.)
In terms of excitement since my last update five hours ago, that's pretty much it.
Monday. Bleh.
I don't normally mind Monday but facing another week of nothing-much-to-do does not excite me.
So...the weekend. Those of you who care about cleanliness will be happy to know I got through almost 100% of my chores. From dusting the ceiling fan blades to vacuuming the floors, I checked off everything on my list.
In other news, the R.C. returned from her business trip Saturday about noon, so we decided to go out to eat.
This week's selection was PFChang. While we fully intend to start exploring some new restaurants, the day someone returns from a five-day business trip isn't really the time to get experimental with food.
Everyone knows PFChang so I won't go on and on. I will say that anyone who hasn't ordered the Mongolian Beef and/or the Lettuce Wraps (on the appetizer menu, but plenty big enough to eat for a main course) is missing a good bet. It's one of those restaurants that has so many great dishes I always want to try something new when I go there...but if I don't order the Lettuce Wraps, I kick myself for three days afterwards. The R.C. always orders the Mongolian Beef.
After that, we took a postprandial stroll through Borders where I spent cough-cough on an armload of new MYSA-AS books. Just research, you understand. (Am I actually still fooling anyone?)
Fiscal Austerity took a backseat to Shopping Mania for a brief thirty minutes, during which the R.C. and I each spent an amount equal to five...or six...times our new Saturday Spending allotment.
If I were a stronger person, I'd feel badly about that loss of self-control. The whole Austerity thing lasted one weekend in a row. Sigh. And I knew I was blowing it, even as I shopped. At any moment I could have called a halt. Instead, I kept running to find the R.C. in the store, counting up how much she'd spent, and running back to the MYSA-AS shelves and grabbing three or four more books.
Assuming that my friends reading this share my (previous) indifference to the whole MYSA-AS thing, I won't bore you with a list of what I bought. (Besides, I don't remember all of the titles.) I now have books by over half a dozen different authors, so I have that many different drawing styles to examine.
This is good, because we topped off Saturday's Shopping Mania with a Sunday trip to a local craft store where I spent cough-cough on drawing supplies. Not quite as much as I'd spent on books on Saturday, but darned close. This included two books, both of which had sections on "perspective," something I have need of learning.
And I used those supplies. When I got home, I sat down at my little table and spent about three hours playing working with my new toys supplies. Much to the R.C.'s boredom, I kept demanding that she admire my beautiful cone or the great perspective I'd managed on a rectangular block. Eventually I graduated to buildings (rectangular ones) and at one daring moment, I took a shot at three-point perspective. As long as I have a ruler, and my forms for tracing shapes, I do okay. (Not cheating. According to the books, everyone uses them. At least, at first.)
The R.C. was kind enough to approve of the various people-shaped bits I did last week, though. The books do offer to teach you to draw people, but I decided I'm not ready for that yet. You need to learn to crawl before you can boogie, after all.
Besides, I see myself as more of a rectangular buildings kind of person. After practice, I may graduate to more exotic (rectangular) buildings and I drew a few tables (rectangular) that weren't bad. Next weekend, I may get all brave and attack some circular things.
I re-read the "fall classes" catalog mentioned previously. Typically, I've procrastinated for so long that I already missed one of the classes I wanted to take. Another one starts Wednesday evening. I was going to bring the catalog with me today so I could sign up for that one, but owing to having set my alarm to go off a full hour later than it needs to go off to get me to work on time, I was a bit rushed this morning.
Anyhow, I was so entertained playing experimenting with all of that that I didn't even manage to get all of the books I'd bought read. That's very unusual for me, and further confirms my suspicion that it's the drawing I'm most interested in.
I also (brace yourselves) worked on the DS story a bit Saturday morning. Since I did not find time to watch any episodes last week, it's still moving slowly, but by gosh it is moving. Tonight I am going to watch episodes, though. It's silly to keep this story dragging on for months just because I never get around to picking up a DVD that's sitting on a shelf six feet away from me. I think it's a reasonably interesting premise and there's plenty of scope for stupid things to happen, so I need to just get on with it.
So...what else? I went to the grocery store yesterday and managed not to buy a cart full of junk food. As of today, I'm officially Back On The Diet. Nothing like going in for your annual physical and seeing that ugly number on the doctor's office scales for a little motivation.
Today's breakfast: yogurt.
Today's coffee: Americano (no milk, 17 calories).
Today's lunch will be: roasted chicken, 1 serving bread, 1/4 cup carrot sticks.
Tonight's dinner will be: roasted chicken, 1 small boiled potato, 1/4 cup grapes.
Sigh. Six hours and fifty-nine minutes until I can go home.
It's going to be a long day. I feel like blogging to kill the time, but I'll spare you. (Besides, if I sit here typing madly for three or four hours, eventually Buehler asks what I'm doing. He knows I don't have any work to do.)
Posted by AnneZook at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)