I love making to-do lists just for the fun of crossing things off:
- correct student exams
- correct homework assignments
- make dinner
- write reference letter to university for student
- complete a freelance project
- write 2,000 words
Yes, indeed. Satisying goal-attainment at its best. What I've done today more than makes up for my naps and reading mystery novels all week.
I went out to pick up cat food yesterday and came home with fresh challah.
Mmm. Challah. Lightly toasted with lashings of butter, melting all over the fingers.
Mmm.
Oh, I picked up cat food too, because my feline companions don’t appear to appreciate challah the way I do. Butter, yes; challah, no. Philistines.
You know, yesterday started off as such a fantastic day, and in the last couple of hours it went spiralling down in flames. This was made even more irritating by the fact that we were supposed to be celebrating Tal's birthday, and I so desperately wanted to enjoy myself, but events conspired against me. I should have just stayed home.
A lot of the Bad Day-ness revolves around my wretched little smear of a printer and its thirty-dollar ink cartridges which require replacement much, much too often for the amount of printing that I do. It wouldn't be so bad if the printer didn't consume vast quantities of ink for no reason, particularly coloured ink, which I don't use often at all. The printer requires both a functional black and colour cartridge in order to print in black only, for some lame reason, and yesterday not only did my colour cartridge run out, the printer decided to not recognise the new cartridges I put into it.
I will own a new printer by the weekend. The nice man in the independent print shop around the corner told me that many people had problems with this particular model and showed me a Canon printer priced at just under a hundred dollars, which prints faster than the one I've currently got and whose cartridges cost only six dollars. Since I have paid the original price of this printer several times over in ink cartridges alone over the past year I've owned it, I have no problem buying the new printer. One hundred dollars is equal to buying three cartridges for my current printer, after all..
So, please consider this a public apology to everyone whom I didn't speak with last night at the pub. The demise of my printer fouled up three seperate projects all scheduled to be completed just before I left last night. That, plus half an hour looking for a parking space (which always puts me in a foul mood) made me Hel to be with. After such a terrific day, it was a real disappointment.
The good news, though, is that I won ten dollars on a lottery ticket. I feel smug, somehow.
On t!'s recommendation, we watched Minority Report last night instead of tuning into the Oscars. It's an excellent film - it made me jump in two places. Not that jumping is a standard by which I judge films; the exact opposite, actually. It's just that this was well-paced, well-written, and well-acted, with a couple of nifty twists.
Unfortunately, even with a running time of two hours and twenty minutes, all of Minority Report could not safely obscure the Academy Awards completely. When we switched off the DVD, there they were, awarding the interesting stuff: soundtracks, best films, and so forth. I did have to check the website this morning though to discover that Spirited Away won Best Animated Feature. I'm thrilled. Actually, I was impressed with the general level of justice done at this year's Oscars, except for one award: as much as I adored Chicago, it didn't deserve Best Picture.
In general, I had a wonderful weekend, visiting with friends and cooking and achieving an overall state of relaxation. I seem to have finally hit a plateau after nine months of freelancing at home where I can actually relax and not feel guilty about it. Feeling a constant sense of anger due to the guilt inherently attached to inactivity when you walk away from the computer to sit down and read a book is a lousy way to live, let me tell you. It's taken me this long to adjust to working in a non-traditional environment. It's a small victory, but an important one.
We have cable! Woo!
At 9.30 AM Saturday morning, the contractor showed up to flick the switch and give us wiring. I got to see a whole three minutes of ReBoot before I had to leave for an interview and class.
And, after all that angst, the universe had a grand old snicker at our expense by not showing Buffy on YTV Saturday night. The Powers That Be giveth, and The Powers That Be taketh away... (I hear last week's Angel was pre-empted by the war, though, so that's one less new episode I've missed.)
6.20 PM and still no cable. I hear Videotron finally managed to reach a settlement today, so perhaps our assigned cable technician is out whooping it up somewhere.
I'm rationalising again, aren't I.
We finished watching 24 last night. I'm glad they went with the ending they did, because the alternate one was just awful. Overall, I'm impressed, and my only complaint lies with the weak wife/daughter storyline after episode twelve. It's almost as if they said, "Hey, we have the full season go-ahead! Great! Jack can do all this cool stuff in the next ten episodes!" Then after a while they said, "Oh, wait... what are we going to do with the women?" and came up with some lame action that rendered them remarkably unsympathetic.
I have been promised cable today! It's a bit of a pain that Videotron can't be more specific about the installation, other than saying they'll be here sometime between 7.30 AM and 8.00 PM, though.
My posts have become infrequent because, well, there just hasn't been much going on in my head, really. Most of my time is spent sleeping or reading or rearranging that last pile of boxes to look smaller, somehow. I appear to have developed a need for a mid-afternoon nap, which is slightly embarrassing although not surprising after three weeks of sick and insomnia and moving. I think my body has taken the bit between the teeth and is now setting its own sleep-rules, denying my conscious mind of any input. I can't seem to focus on work for any long period of time, and I think I'm undergoing an enforced vacation imposed by psyche and physical body alike.
It's kind of a relief, actually.
I went downtown today to HMV to pick up a couple of recordings to help me out as I practice for orchestra, because I'm getting really frustrated. When I got there, I spent time upstairs in the relaxing classical section, bought the required CDs (three for $20, I feel so smug) then went downstairs to the basement to cast a quick eye over the soundtracks.
They've moved everything around. Again.
It made me grumpy, although the terrible, awful, horrible music they were playing might have had something to do with that as well. Then, I thought I'd check on the new DVDs releases, since it's been forever since I've been in HMV, but the massive DVD section had somehow shrunk to a measly two displays and that little room once devoted to film is now acid. I walked around it in disbelief - what, had they decided to stop selling DVDs or something? - and finally went back upstairs to the main level, where I discovered that they had moved the DVD section there, so unsuspecting clients walk right smack into the stuff (unless, of course, you avoid the main floor like the plague, as I do, and head right upstairs for jazz and classical.). I walked through it to get my bearings and saw way, way too many movies I wanted to own in among the 2-for-$30 stickers. I was trying to decide which two to whittle my vast list down to when I realised my folly and made my escape into the clear cold morning. If I trip across a couple of hundred dollars, I know where I'm going.
I'll just have to bring a guide with me, because they no doubt will have hidden what I want from me between now and then.
Urk. When I wasn't looking, the Owlyblog's counter passed 10K. How did that happen?
My commentary on Oscar-nominated Lilo & Stitch has been officially web-published, and is up over at the fps site! It's a five-fold project that looks at all the films nominated for Best Animated Feature Film category this year, each film examined by a different writer in a different light. The project centres around how each Oscar-nominated film stands for something within the animation industry, as opposed to "reviewing" or commenting on "Oscar-worthiness". It was a really interesting exercise, and I enjoyed it a lot. I thank all the gods out there that Emru responded to the cry of "Who edits the editor?", so that errors could be corrected and things flowed better. I can fix other people's writing, but I'm always too involved with my own abstracts and thesis statements to do a final polish on my own work, because I know what I was trying to say all along.
By the way, do you think spring's finally catching up with the calendar? Winter's only got another three days, after all.
And now, to put aside personal pride, and wallow in shame.
I have completely lost track of the date and the days of the week, and therefore I missed Talyesin's birthday.
Mea culpa, big brother. So...
I promise to grovel more later. Maybe at Hurley's, so we can all buy you copious amounts of alcohol over a long period of time, while still drinking responsibly.
Ever feel like you're racing to catch up with everyone else's opinion of you?
I do, all the time. Skippy got me thinking about it this morning. Some of it is, "Why do they like hanging around with me so much?", and some of it is, "I can't possibly charge that much for my time."
My husband sat me down last night, took my hands, and said, "Darling, I want to tell you something, and you have to promise to listen. You're an awesome, awesome person. Far more awesome than you believe yourself to be. You can perceive the awesome in others, so why can't you perceive it in yourself?"
Well, it's embarrassing. As kids, we were mostly taught that to accept a compliment was to be selfish. It's more modest to demur, to protest politely. We were also schooled to believe that pride was a bad thing. So if you were good at something, you weren't allowed to appreciate your skill, or to even really have fun at it in case you made other people feel bad.
Then, of course, there was the geek factor. If you enjoyed reading, liked to be alone, had any interest in music other than the mainstream, films other than action or comedy, or technology other than a phone and a vending machine, you were uncool, and you resorted to lurking and not calling attention to yourself.
What has all that socialisation produced? A generation of people who have difficulty understanding that they're cool people. What, me deserve something? (Praise, money, social interest, whatever?) No, no. Please, stop. It's not just that you're embarrassing me, you're actually making me uncomfortable and self-conscious because like so many others, I can't truly understand why you think I'm so great.
Argh. Scores of us are out there. Scads. Bushels.
It's probably all connected to how incredibly bad some of us are at selling ourselves. Almost everyone I know hates writing a cover letter for a CV, because it feels like exactly that: selling yourself.
A healthy dose of pride in the self is a good thing. Now, if I could just cultivate it...
The skies darkened; I looked out a window.
It's snowing. Again.
I've been meaning to post this for a few days now:
Tom Stoppard is adapting a script for Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass for New Line Cinema.
How cool is that?
(If you're as cooled out by this as I was, and you're wondering how on earth they're going to pull it off, there's a rather amusing 'what-if' scene about the pitch etc here. And the fan site Bridge To The Stars is pretty decent all around.)
I'm a geek, which is hardly news to you. I'm a geek who has actually built starship models in the past. Nothing recently, alas (although I have a Lego X-Wing in a chest just awaiting the day I throw off the covers and know deep in my bones that it's a Star Wars Lego day and nothing can stop me!), because I just don't have the time or space these days. My Excelsior and X-Wing models have survived three moves in the past seven years, and have always been on top of my bookshelves or on windowsills somewhere in my apartment.
Well, during this move, they finally broke. Not into little bits, either - big breaks that really can't be fixed without a lot of epoxy, prayers, and about five hands to hold it as it dries. So the Excelsior got tossed last week, and this week when I came across my poor shattered X-Wing, I sighed, said good-bye, and placed it right on top of the box I've been using to collect further rubbish.
Well, yesterday as I worked on my article about Disney's use of SF in Lilo & Stitch (yes, I'll let you know when it's published on the fps site - remember fps from its print days?), my little black kitten was sitting on the desk, watching me. I was vaguely aware of her presence -- one cannot ignore relentless cuteness -- but I suddenly snapped into reality when I heard a soft grinding noise. I glanced sideways and saw Nix, her amber eyes on mine, dreamily chewing on an S-foil, with the occasional delicate nibble on an engine casing.
I yelped and waved my hands, and she leapt away, startled. Then I realised that my fierce protection was unwarranted, since it was in the garbage anyway, and I began to laugh. I could almost hear her wail as she streaked under the dining room table: "It's only a little more carbon scoring, Mummy, and you did such a wonderful job on the carbon scoring...."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.