Thoughts on 24, Season One

Every time I break my own rule of Never-Compose-A-Blog-Entry-Online, my computer crashes. Thus, you are deprived of a deep, intelligent examination of the television phenomenon 24, which my husband and I began watching this weekend. The highlights were basically as follows:

– Who says the first episode absolutely must be immediately followed by the second? It was a forty-five minute meet-the-characters, these-are-the-environments bite with no cliffhanger.

– We watched six straight hours of 24 on Saturday night, until we hit the end of the two DVDs we had borrowed. Needless to say, as of Monday night, we had the rest of the set in our possession. Damn, this is addictive.

– We’re starting to see how the first eight episodes are nice and tight, operating on the potential reality of ratings not meriting the second half of the season. By episode eight, it is completely possible that all ends can be tied up in two more episodes. Then, things change and become even more complex, presumably because ratings secured the last twelve episodes.

– The only thing better than seeing huge billboards with Keifer Sutherland on them along highways last season is actually sitting in the comfort of my own living room and watching Keifer Sutherland do cool stuff, and being able to select the next episode from the DVD menu to watch him some more.

More good job news: I have been contacted by a woman who took a handful of my courses last fall, who has booked me to do a private seminar for seven women at her home in early April. I’m thrilled that she asked me, and I’m really looking forward to doing it. The only problem? She asked me how much I would charge for such an evening, and I had to admit that I had no idea, and that I’d get back to her. I shouldn’t have been so proud about being able to quote my rate for writing services last weekend; evidently that gets filed under ‘Hubris’, and the universe feels obliged to present me with a situation such as this one to return me to my properly humble state. Normally I’d charge $25 per head for this particular seminar if I taught it in association with the business I usually teach through, but it doesn’t seem fair to apply the same rate, somehow. I want to charge less, but still not sell myself short. (Look, Mum, I can be taught!) I can’t apply the obvious solution — namely, using my writing services hourly rate — because that pretty much equals the average of the per-head fee of my regular seminars, which would mean that I’d be teaching seven people for the price of one.

Grr. My time is money. This was my mantra for a while in January while I worked out that hourly rate, and it looks like I’m going to have to chant it again for a while until I figure this out. Anyone have any ideas? What do companies pay outside specialists to come in and present seminars for their staff – say a three-hour seminar? There’s a huge range of potential fees according to a variety of factors, I know, but anything would help at this point.

In Which She Rages Against The Injustice Of The System

Oh, I’m just livid.

My student loan payment goes through on the first of the month. Since the first of March was on a weekend, it went through on the Monday instead.

Turns out that I was fourteen cents short of my payment. Fourteen cents.

They NSFd me to the tune of $25.

I’m livid because in the past, internal transfers like this have dipped below the zero mark with no penalty, up to about five dollars in the negative. It hasn’t happened with any kind of frequency, because I’m really careful with my loan payments; maybe twice. This time, though, for some reason, for fourteen cents, they decided to penalise me for $25.

Livid, I tell you. Livid.

A Wrinkle In Geography

Just remembered something nifty that tilted my world a bit this weekend.

NDG is currently the playground of a film crew shooting a movie called Wicker Park, as you well know if you’re an NDG resident and have been rerouted, or have been forced to find somewhere else to park because your street has been taken up by Star Suites and generators and eighteen-wheeler rigs stuffed full of equipment. On Friday around five PM, my husband drove me over to the Royal Bank on the corner of Sherbrooke and Hingston so I could cash a cheque and put gas in the car.

Except it wasn’t the corner of Sherbrooke and Hingston when we got there. It was the corner of two other streets. There was a US Postal box on the corner, and a City of Chicago trash bin, and a bunch of US newspaper boxes strewn about. That little triangular park had a new “Keep Chicago’s Parks Clean” sign up. And my bank wasn’t my bank. It had a huge green sign both out front and over the door, and it certainly didn’t say Royal Bank; it had a series of initials instead in gold lettering.

It certainly felt odd to walk up those steps and go inside. It was as if I had crossed some odd teleportation line, or passed through a twist in earth energy between my new apartment and the bank, and landed in Chicago. (Except Chicago is currently experiencing much nicer weather at nine degrees Celcius, as opposed to our minus ten. It’s March tenth; it’s more than time for spring. Damn groundhogs.) Anyways, it makes you wonder if there’s something odd about Sherbrooke Street – if you drive east along it from Cavendish to Hingston, you get Montreal; but if you drive west along it from Decarie at just the precise time on a Friday afternoon, you inexplicably end up in Chicago.

Fanciful, perhaps. Do remember that I worked in a F/SF bookstore for four years, though.

Back On Track

One of the things we have to get used to now in this new kitchen is the electric stove. After using gas for two years, it’s quite the adjustment. This is a brand-new stove, too, so it makes little pops and groans as we break it in, so to speak. It’s fiercely hot, although it takes a while to get there, unlike our previous gas stove, which was poof! hot as soon as you turned it on. Some day I will learn to only bake a single sheet of cookies when I’m trying out a new oven, so I don’t ruin two whole sheets of cookie dough.

The rest were just peachy, though. Mmm.

I’ve been reading up a storm this past week – it’s one way to escape the semi-chaos that still exists around here. (Mind you, ‘chaos’ to us means that we don’t have things up on the walls yet.) I’ve read Robin Hobb’s Golden Fool, which was even better than The Tawny Man; Jenna Starborn by Sharon Shinn, which is billed as a space opera and gothic romance retelling of Jane Eyre; Shatterglass, the final book in a YA fantasy tetrology by Tamora Pierce; and I’ve just reread Silver RavenWolf’s Beneath a Mountain Moon as well. None of them even made it to the “Currently Reading” table at the right. It might have had something to do with my reluctance to sit down at my computer, as overwhelmed as the desk was with piles of stuff as we sorted through boxes.

Speaking of which – all my books are now unpacked! Huzzah! I’ve had to double up all the bottom shelves, which means that a third of my books are hidden behind another row, but tha’s what you get for giving away a bookshelf just before the move. I’m fairly certain that I know where everything is now. (Fairly certain. Not positive, but fairly certain.)

The antibiotics proceed to drag me back from the brink of heart-rending, dramatic death. All hail Pfizer and their 7$-a-tablet pills!

On the work front, it looks like I might have a freelance editing contract for a privately published history, which will be nice; I have to sit down and think about how long it will take me to smooth out, copyedit and generally proofread a 100 page document in order to have a final figure to submit for the proposed budget. If there’s something I hate almost as much as deciding on how much my time is worth, it’s gauging how long it’s going to take me. At least after all that soul-searching a month or so ago, I had a ready answer when I was asked what my rates were.

We’re headed over to the South Shore tonight to my in-laws’ place for dinner, and then the Brier final on a glorious big screen TV. This is good, because the only channel we receive on our TV right now is CBC, and it’s really grainy. I’d rather not have to try to figure out who’s who during a bonspiel like this!

So, slowly but surely, things are getting back on track. I’m feeling more human than I have felt in quite some time now, which is a good thing, no?

Update

More updates for people who believe that we’re dead:

Yes, we now have a phone, but our electricity keeps popping on and off because they’re rewiring the building. I really don’t feel confident about turning the computer on when I can’t predict when the power will next vanish. So, infrequent blogging, even less frequent e-mail.

I went to the doctor yesterday, and I have been officially diagnosed with an infection of the respiratory tract following a nasty bout of the flu. I’m on antibiotics. So, everyone who kept nagging me to go see the doctor can now stop. (It’s okay, I know that you were doing it because you love me.) I even made a follow-up appointment for next Friday. Aren’t I good? (And now poorer as well. Forty-three dollars for a five-day run of antibiotics? This is one of the reasons why I don’t go to the doctor that frequently – I can’t afford it.)

Today I tackle the office area, where the last hold-out of boxes looms. I’m afraid I’m going to have to throw out a lot of sewing stuff – large scraps, old material, etc – and just keep the storage Tupperware of necessities. I hate throwing scraps out. Granted, I haven’t used most of them in three years, but still… it’s the loss of potential that I feel most keenly when I have to do something like this.

I Call A Do-Over

Well. Wasn’t that not fun.

You know, I really, really don’t want to go into detail, but that was the worst move I’ve ever been involved in. Being ill and missing three key people from our standard moving team which resulted in not all our stuff getting here was a large part of it, but the icing on the cake was having our phone line at the old place disconnected before 7 AM on March 1, and not having a phone line at all in the new place until 11 AM on March 4. Yes, that’s today. Gods bless the cheerful, accomplished and all-round-nice-guy Gilles Lavallee who came to double-check on the wiring after the first Bell technician came by yesterday and pronounced our entire apartment’s phone wiring dead, with the necessity of installing completely new wiring from the bottom up. Gilles found the sole live wire in the whole nest of ancient phone wires and reconnected us to the world.

I relapsed into bed with coughing and fever yesterday afternoon, and that’s where I’m headed again right after I take a warm bath. For those who are curious, having seen the three square feet we had to move around in here immediately post-move on Saturday afternoon, the place is three-quarters unpacked. Yes, I am a goddess. (Okay, the drive to restore order to my life probably contributed to my collapse again yesterday, but damn it, at least I have living space now.) This is officially a beautiful apartment. It will be even more beautiful without the pile of boxes in the dining room/office area, and when I have somewhere to put knives, forks, and spoons in the kitchen.

Okay. We’re here. That’s all I really needed to tell you. And that we didn’t have a phone for three days, so it’s not that we were ignoring you, we just, well, didn’t hear the phone ring. Not being connected and all.

Sigh. I’m going to take that bath now. And a handful of Advil, because I’m out of my wonder syrup that lets me sleep and not have a headache and stop coughing.

Insomnia: Good For Catching Up On Reading

One thing that insomnia and being so sick for the past week has given me is lots of time to read. I finally finished The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell; I also finally finished Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. Both are excellent books, they just took me a lot longer to read than I expected. Both were loans from other people, too, so I really felt bad. Both were really densely written, which contributed to the long read. Perdido Street Station was nasty and dark and so damn well written that I will willingly plunge into The Scar once winter is officially over and I no longer feel like brooding, moping, or otherwise indulging in winter-connected depression. (There should be a warning label on Mieville’s books that reads, ‘Caution – Do Not Read During SAD Season If You Are Prone To Moodiness’.) As for Cornwell, I really, really have to be in a particular mood to read his work: namely, in a mood to appreciate logic and war maneuvers while simultaneously being actively interested in Arthurian characters. That’s a rather rare mood for me.

I also read an advance copy of Kiss of Shadows by Laurell K Hamilton that’s been sitting on my shelf since, um, mid 2000 or something. Anyway, it’s highly ironic that it was an advance copy, because not only has the book itself been released in hardcover in the meantime, but also in paperback, and the sequel was released in hardcover with its paperback publication imminent, as well. (March 4, as a matter of fact, so if nothing in my collection appeals to me when I start hunting for something new to read, I know what I’ll be buying.)

I picked up Dianne Day’s Strange Files of Fremont Jones Wednesday night when I was wide awake, and it was good. So’s the sequel, Fire and Fog, which I finished today while taking a break from packing. Nice little historical crime books, with your standard independent female protagonist. I have a third in my possession, but like other crime series that my mother sends to me once she’s read them, it appears to be missing a few books in-between. Mum picks some up at the shop and reads others through the library, so when I get the series they often look a bit like Swiss cheese – you know, volume 1, 2, 4, 7 and 8. Insisting on reading books in sequence is one of those delightful character traits that make me so lovable, so I’ll be hunting through second-hand shops for these ones. (A day’s read contained within a light crime novel is not worth the $10 purchased new, in my not-so-humble opinion. And it’s my blog, after all, so my opinion doesn’t have to be concerned about humilty, now, does it.)

I have an entire box devoted to Books Which I Have Not Yet Read, so I don’t have to go hunting once we’re in the new apartment. So very clever of me. Probably pointless, though, since as I unpack I look through my books, and I will likely find dozens I suddenly must re-read immediately.

Apparently it’s gearing up to be a lovely day tomorrow, with a high of +2 degrees. That’s reassuring.