Month: September 2011

Back to the garden party

I had this idea, in the back of my head, that I would get up early this morning to write. But, honestly, it’s an idea I’ve had many times before, and it almost never seems to win out over going back to sleep for another hour.

I suppose there’s always tomorrow to try it again. I’ve been reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird : Some Instructions on Writing and Life, which so far is full of a lot of simple but really good practical advice for writers. It makes a little sad for not having encountered the book except by name before this…but it also makes me want to write, so that’s good.

This afternoon, at work, we had one of our semi-regular “brown bag lunches,” where they invite in a speaker and give everybody shows up to hear the speaker a free lunch. It can be hit or miss sometimes, but today’s talk by NY DJ and author Pete Fornatale was actually pretty entertaining and informative. He talked more about Woodstock than his experience in radio — he’s got a new book on the former — and the presentation maybe got a little away from him near the end — he showed this video in its entirety; Chris Bliss is an impressive juggler, but even if I hadn’t seen the video before, it strayed a little from the topics at hand. But, overall, it was one of the better talks we’ve had.

And hey, free lunch.

Still grinding along

I’ll say this much for going away for a week and a half: it certainly leaves you with plenty of work to do when you return.

It feels like it’s going to be a long week, although not necessarily a bad one. We had cupcakes and ice cream cake for a co-worker’s birthday today, so how bad could it be? And I finished reading Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan, which, if not exactly brilliant, is good fun, smart and entertaining YA steampunk.

I just feel like I haven’t quite adjusted to being back. Part of that’s the change in the weather, not really yet fall but definitely starting to cool down. Though it was at least this cool, if not occasionally cooler, in Canada, it still feels strange to have left New York and found that time has actually continued to move on in my absence. And I still miss a lot about Banff. Admittedly, it’s hard not to miss a lot about it — setting my own schedule, responsible for nothing more than enjoying the scenery and trying to write — but I still haven’t quite shaken the weird disconnect of being back.

I suppose I will, at some point.

Running commentary

Comment spam on the weblog just gets curiouser and curiouser:

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That on a post from September 2004. It’s difficult to see just what “Emily” learned from that. I wasn’t entirely sure it was spam, despite being on a post now seven years old, but a quick search found the same or similar comments scattered across the web.

So, deleted. I’m not your search engine optimization farm, jerk.