Words are inadequate

To do today:

• Eat breakfast (the last of the freezer waffles)
  
• Make a hotel reservation for next year's Gathering (plus a few days earlier so I can catch the solar eclipse on 8 April)
  
• Change sheets (shoulda done yesterday but by the time I got the suitcase etc off the bed I was just Done)
  
• Tidy up from several weeks of Not At Home, incl new games Mostly done.
  
• Vacuum, once the battery recharges from where I turned off the power strip it was attached to
  
• Vacuum again, because after six years the battery is dying and it takes two rounds to get the whole apartment
  
• Launder rugs (after vacuuming, so I can shake them out in the kitchen immediately before vacuuming and not hate everything when I walk in there)
  
• Pick up groceries
  
• RPG stuff
  
• Bike ride?
  
• Start rereading An Unkindness Of Magicians

To do or at least get started on this week:

• A lot of journaling
  
• Some email
  
• Clean bathroom
  
• Contemplate budget
  
• Research into GIS careers
  
• Apply for a tech writer job or two

Good thing I got laid off. Not sure how I'd get this taken care of otherwise. Apparently I am no longer thirty and able to bounce back instantly from travel etc.

(The answer is of course "in pieces in the evenings and mostly next weekend, and be tired/stressed until then." I don't miss most things about living with Emily but having someone to split the "keep the house in working order" burden with was really nice.)

(Also just seeing the name "Emily" in print feels strange and unfamiliar. Yay for healing, or something.)

I got a haircut today. I think the last professional haircut I got was a year or so after I moved to DC in 2006, and it wasn't all that pleasant an experience. Sometime after that Emily offered to snip my split ends, which she did once a year or so until 2017.

This one went pretty well: had a no-nonsense barber, which is the best kind of barber, who was happy to just lop off a couple inches of badly damaged ends and trim up along my neck. I feel a bit better. Gonna be weird trying to wash my hair in the morning, though.

---

Last weekend I drove down from Fort to Vancouver (well, Burnaby, to stay at AirBnZee), and then the next day down to Seattle and back for Orpheus Descending rehearsal. Rehearsal went fine; the ritual/event is this coming weekend and I'm more or less looking forward to it.

On the way back I stopped in Bellingham, which is around halfway between Seattle and Vancouver (well, Burnaby). It's a neat little college town. Kelly lived there for a year when she was in grad school, and I visited her a few times, and then Emily and I used to pop down there two or three times a year. It's got a good music store, and two big used bookstores (I believe one has since closed), and a fantastic ice cream shop, and is just a pleasant downtown to walk around in. On Sunday the pouring rain stopped as I pulled up, and it was all autumnal and crisp and bright-leaves-everywhere and it just felt good to be there.

---

On Monday I finally got around to writing down a list of all the things I want to accomplish while I'm in Vancouver. I understand why I've been feeling so overwhelmed for much of September. I'm used to having maybe a half dozen things hanging out that I feel like I need to do: go grocery shopping, or take out the trash, or whatever. The Vanlist had around twenty items on it. I hadn't realised it was quite that many.

Things have been coming off the list at a greater rate than they've been being re-added, which is helping a lot with the stress.

---

One of the things on the list was to pick up a tenor recorder. Earlier this year I found my old soprano recorder from third grade, and it's been fun to noodle around on. It's a bit shrill, though.

G who's running music for Orpheus has written a simple woodwind theme for Pan, and she's got a nice wooden recorder (and I think she's borrowed a tinwhistle). I mentioned that I was thinking about picking up a tenor, and she sounded pretty happy about having that as a harmony.

It is Large, something like twice the length and three times the diameter of the soprano. My right hand aches a bit trying to stretch to reach all the notes. I do rather like the sound of it, though, when I can convince it to play notes and not squeak at me.

---

I dunno. I'm tired. Maybe it's only four things this time.

We're finally watching Treme, David "The Wire" Simon's series about a poor New Orleans neighborhood in the aftermath of Katrina.

Christ. If that storm had hit just a year earlier, before the 2004 election... well. I doubt I'd be in Vancouver, for one thing.

Also, when John Goodman is one of the least interesting parts of your show, either you have an amazing cast or you are criminally underusing John Goodman.

---

Today:

• Catbox
  
• Call Canada Revenue about missing tax refund Tax return accepted, will finally be processed on Friday.
  
• Write to a random internet person Wrote to TWO random internet people! This is, in fact, more soul-crushing than jobhunting is.
  
• Jobhunt Nothing new available. I did schedule a final interview for Thursday at a place that it would probably not totally suck to work.
  
• Eat a thing Eggs and toast! Of which, one came out fine if v.slightly undercooked, and one overcooked. Still tasty.
  
• Viola
  
• Organize scattered novel brainstorming notes, preferably into something resembling an outline, or at least a structure.

Right. Back on my head.

No motivation this morning. Up til midnight trying to fix my stupid computer. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me it has forgotten how to tell the phone where to sync photos (clicking the [Sync] Photos tab results in endless spinning, and syncing gets a complaint that it can't find the folder to sync photos and then an endless "Waiting for sync to finish" message), on top of its couple-months-old tendency to crash the System Preferences when I try to open either Desktop/Screensaver or Spotlight prefs.

Been needing to get a new battery anyway; this one only holds about two hours of charge. Maybe I can get the genuises to take a look at the system when I bring it in.

I suspect the answer is gonna be "full system restore to old Time Machine backup" again, at best. Don't wanna.

Meanwhile I sit here with a stuffed-up nose and no interest in doing much of anything.

Today I will:

• Stop beating myself up for not managing to fix my stupid computer
  
• Get up off this couch WIKTORY
  
• Exercise while rewatching two episodes of Better Off Ted
  
• Practice the viola for at least an hour (two sessions)
  
• Knock at least one thing off the "things to revise in story" list, either by doing or by saying "nope not gonna do that"
  
• Email Jenn, cripes how did it get to be Friday already, I blame the stupid not-quite-sick
  
• Meet uilos downtown for fishes and Holst

Looks like a full day for no motivation.

---

( 101 in 1001 update )

Things what I need to do before Monday:
1) REST API documentation for work
2) Finish packing / deconstructing the office
3) Finish 'Blood on her hands' for writing group

#1 is stupid and I hate it. Okay, so actually it's just boring where it's not incomprehensible, but still. Bleh.

#2 is at the part where the last ten percent of the project takes the other ninety percent of the time.

#3 is ... um. I know how it starts and I know how I expect it to end but there's that whole middle part where it goes from A to C both plot-wise and emotional-arc-wise that I don't know how I'm gonna hack. Story of my life.

Some people give themselves treats for Xmas. Me, I give myself a list of things to do. The idea is that a) a concrete and wide-ranging list of 101 items, b) a not terribly restrictive but still somewhat limiting timeframe of 1001 days, and c) public accountability can all combine to form a sort of Voltron of extrinsic motivating factors, since I'm not doing so hot with intrinsic motivation lately (or ever, really).

Note that 101 tasks in 1001 days works out to roughly three tasks per month, on average.

101 in 1001: 2012/12/25-2015/09/22
Completed: 55
Ongoing / partial: 6
Abandoned: 5

( lengthy list below )

Okay, so, maybe putting a todo list out for public shaming accountability will actually motivate me to get some of it done.

THINGS WHAT I'D LIKE TO SEE THE BACK OF BY THE END OF THIS COMING WEEK: a nonexhaustive list

• Write SW back (this should be shortish)
  
• Write K-- back (not that one. a different one. one who likely deserves an adjective.)
  
• Write JSL back
  
• Get clarification from the immigration lawyer on some immigration stuff
  
• Other assorted email
  
• Finish writing about Burn Notice for DW (currently ~2/3 done)
  
• Finish writing a review of Rolling Freight (currently ~1/2 done)
  
• Resubmit Bookwyrms, possibly with a touch of revision but if not that's okay
  
• Make a dentist appointment already, what were you thinking letting it go this long, the last time you did that you needed three fillings and a root canal
  
• Sort out the plot threads for the Thursday Technoir game because dear gord there are a lot of them now

THINGS WHAT IT'D BE NEAT TO GET STARTED ON THIS WEEK: also a nonexhaustive list

• Hey, weren't you going to try to finish up that space story by Readercon? Might want to get on that.
  
• Gather immigration stuff for the immigration lawyer
  
• Get moving on the "contact at least one promising new person each week" plan

THINGS WHAT I WANT TO DO IN THE NEARISH FUTURE: yet another nonexhaustive list

• Look into using OmniFocus or other useful listmaking software
  
• Do something with all those workshop comments on Memory, including doubling its length, and send it out
  
• Make Scrivener's RTF export export properly
  
• Have an intensive brainstorming session for "Blood on Her Hands and a Stone at Her Throat" / "The King of Scots with All His Power" (which may or not be the same story)
  
• Hunt up a local writers' group
  
• See about getting involved in REDACTED
  
• Maybe make a real doctor's appointment
  
• Figure out some sort of exercise (run? swim?) that can be done 3x/week

That's... a nontrivial amount of stuff, even if some of it isn't so scary really. Still. Eep.

No time like the present, I guess.

Things to do, some of which may be done today:

0) Put in another 2-3 hours of Work to make up for the completely wasted afternoon on Thursday[1].

1) Write an intro email to VP listserv.

2) Write a review of Eleanor Arnason's A Woman of the Iron People for the Medialog and submit it to SF Mistressworks.

3) Write about Harmony and Rocket Girls for the Medialog.

[spoiler: I liked all three of the above, in different ways and for different reasons.]

4) Contact my parents, via email or phone.

5) Write some postcards, now that I have some and the mail strike lockout is over.

6) Email various people to whom I owe email.

7) Email locals in an attempt to create a local social network.

8) Start writing the next story, for which I have a potential title ("Southbound"?) and a vague idea.

... wow, that looks like a lot of words. Better get started.

---

[1] Thursday from 11:30 was supposed to be "walk to celebratory crepe lunch, pick up a smart from the smart carshare, drop uilos at Waterfront Station to sort out some ZipCar stupidity, drive back to the vicinity of home, talk to the bank about a wire transfer and credit limit, go home having taken at most a couple hours for this, and finish the workday." I hadn't reckoned with Vancouver being the least car-friendly city I've ever encountered. Unlabeled one-way streets and no left turns off Georgia meant I had both unexpected death-defying incidents and an unexpected trip through Stanley Park and across the Lions Gate bridge, which was very pretty but not really something I wanted to be paying $0.35/minute to see twice. Nor had I reckoned with the left hand/right hand ignorance of Vancity Credit Union and Vancity Visa. Five hours and an extra trip on foot to the bank later, I get to wait 'til Monday to see if the credit limit's been sorted, because everything was closed on Friday for Canada Day. At which point I gave up on the rest of the day.

I like to think of 2006 as the year when I started making smaller mistakes. Highlights include departing Blacksburg, having my own place, fitting into my high school class ring, and being more honest in my dealings with myself and other people. The low points aren't worth dwelling on. That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.

Holiday madness is over, I'm back at work, and my schedule is likely to remain undisrupted for the foreseeable future. Sounds like a good time to make sweeping pronouncements about what I'll do to improve my life.

( Resolved: )