time passes

[jazzfish]

The In-Laws are here. Well, not right at this moment, today they've taken themselves downtown to be touristy for the day. (Which I expect means "from ten 'til about three," but you take what you can get.)

They're not bad people, and they're not related to me by blood so there's not the decades of history. They're just ... people, in my space, requiring my attention, all the time.

We watched Totoro last night, which thrilled Mrs F no end. I am kind of surprised we'd never gotten around to showing it to her before.

---

As of today I am officially officially unemployed. I mean, they stopped letting me go to work a month ago, but as of today the four weeks' pay-in-lieu-of-notice is up. I have one more paycheck coming at the end of the month, and then I am free from the tyranny of regular and sufficient income.

I am of course displeased with how I've spent my sabbatical so far. This speaks less to how I've spent my sabbatical and more to my need to rejigger my expectations of myself so they line up better with what I actually want to do.

---

Also, as of today I have less than a year to go on my 101-in-1001 list. Several of these items are not going to happen; others are merely staggeringly unlikely. Ah well. I plow ahead regardless.

101 in 1001 update (the list)

Completed:
67) Clean the office. 2014-08-10, as a side effect of moving.
82) Determine whether it makes any sense at all to a) buy a place or b) move. Moved 2014-08-11. Buying made little sense even before I got laid off, and is now effectively impossible.
91) Reread Middle-Earth: Hobbit, LotR, Silmarillion. 2014-07-07

In progress:
24) See ten movies at the Vancouver International Film Festival. (5/10) Program acquired for this year.
64) Do thirty pushups at a go. Twenty.
63) Climb the Grouse Grind at least once each summer. (2/3) 2014-09-11, 1:36
70) Dispose of unwanted comics. All that's left are Crow and Hellblazer, and I'm not sure whether those are 'unwanted' as such.
74) Verify and tag my books in LibraryThing. Begun. "LibraryThing at least one shelf per day" is on my daily List.
81) Develop a Five-Year Plan with real numbers in. Five years seems excessive given current circumstances. A nine-month plan exists; will check in again sometime next year.
84) Take a sabbatical from work of at least three months. Ha. In progress, starting 2014-08-26. I guess I can count this one as 'done' on 26 November.
90) Read or purge everything currently on the To Be Read shelf. (14/25) Read Voice of the Whirlwind. Purged At Swim-Two-Birds on account of boredom and irritation. Reading Pontypool Changes Everything but I'm not sure I'll finish it.
92) Reread the oeuvre of John M. Ford. (5/13) Read The Final Reflection. Reread The Princes of the Air.

Comments

[okrablossom]

I plow ahead regardless

Yes! Fall down N times, get up N+1 times.

[jazzfish]

Quite. Although I tend to lose track of whether I'm living through "Tubthumping" or Cake's "The Distance"...

[rbandrews]

I really liked The Final Reflection. What did you think?

[jazzfish]

I thought it was pretty excellent. I also strongly suspect it will benefit from a reread; bits of it flew by too fast for me to catch.

[selki]

One of the best Star Trek original fictions.

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

It's often difficult having additional people in one's personal space even when they're extremely lovely people. That's one problem of visitors. :)

Do you have an idea of how you want to structure your sabbatical time?

[jazzfish]

And these are ... there's nothing wrong with them per se, but... but. Yeah.

Mostly what I have are very vague goals for sabbatical: de-stress, recover from burnout, figure out what it is I actually want to be doing with my life. I certainly hope that turns out to be 'writing' and that de-stressing will make it possible/easier for me to do some of that! But I really don't know.

[reedrover]

What do you think of LibraryThing? What made you choose that offering, and are you pleased with the choice?

[jazzfish]

I went with LT back in, mm, 2006 because it was what was available. I've got most if not all of my non-mass-market-paperbacks in a catalog there. (Not sure why I never put the MMPBs in, but that's on my list of things to do as well.)

I use it exclusively as a catalog, and it works pretty well for that. I have no interest in using it as a social media site, or in reading reviews. If I did I'd probably go with Goodreads and then I would never get anything done.

My usage: entering books by ISBN, futzing with tags, checking to see if I actually have a given book (mostly I know this by heart but it's nice to have confirmation if I'm out somewhere). It looks like there's a lot more functionality there that I'm not using: I'm perfectly happy using tags for everything (to_read, etc) rather than their flags.

[reedrover]

Goodreads is fine for social, but terrible for keeping track of books on shelves. I'm vaguely interested in some kind of library system that would tell me this book is shelved there as well as sorting by type/author/category/publication date. But only vaguely. I have too many hobbies as it is, and certainly don't need another one.

[jazzfish]

Ha, no kidding. I scanned all my books when I first moved to McLean and was unpacking them *all* for pretty much the first time ever. Always meant to go through and check the LT info for each one against the actual physical copy; I think I got through about the Fs before running out of airspeed & altitude on that particular project. But I seem to have some time on my hands these days...

LT is fantastic for sorting by, well, by basically any info contained in the book itself: pub date, author, etc. (I manually change 'pub date' to 'copyright date' because I don't care that I'm looking at the 2003 reprint, I care that the book was published in 1957, or whatever.) And it's got a tagging system so you can easily give them genre or even location tags.

(Minor nit: it has, or at least had, a habit of filing my Ursula K. Le Guin books under "Guin, Ursula K. Le" so I have to manually change those as well.)