work

Sunday

I wish I could say I spent no more time working from home this afternoon, but that would be a lie. I spent a couple of hours before dinner summarizing some more of this large report I’m not going to get a chance to work on tomorrow.

Before that, though, I did get to go to do the Sunday crossword, watch some Babylon 5, and go to my Sunday writing group. So there’s that.

The radio was playing that old familiar song, the one that she had always liked, and Albert switched it off. I won’t remember doing that, he thought. I won’t remember standing here, thinking this, and then I won’t remember the song, or the radio, or even, eventually, her. All of this, every last moment of this, will be gone. If Margaret was there now, he’d want to tell her this, force her to remember for him, but it was that kind of thing that had made her leave in the first place. When she’d left, all he’d had to turn to was his work, and that was why was here, now, and why in ten minutes from now he wouldn’t be. In ten minutes — no, Albert looked at the clock, saw it was now only eight — there would be someone else standing here, someone other than Albert. The computer would no longer tell him what that new personality would be like, not since Albert had forgotten his access codes, but he could already feel it reaching into the darker corners of his brain, taking up residence. The Albert that he was, standing here now, wondering who had turned off the radio, that man was being rewritten. Why had he done this again? There had been a reason, he was sure of it. National security? To get back at Margaret? He wished Margaret was here now to tell him what that reason was, or at least to get him back into the computer using her own access codes. Everything had gotten hazy since Margaret had left.

It was cold in here, standing by the window. There was snow on the ground outside. Albert was tempted to call it frigid, but that didn’t sound like the right word. He wished he could think of the right word. It was difficult to think ever since somebody had turned off the radio.

“Because we focused on the snake, we missed the scorpion,” he thought, wondering why. Were those the new thoughts or the old, the buds of spring pushing up from the earth or the last of the autumn leaves to fall from the tree? He didn’t think he’d been a poet, and that had the ring of poetry to it. But then again, what he thought, and what he was, had been narrowing to a fine point over the last couple of days. And in just ten minutes — or was it five? — all of that would be gone. Albert just hoped whoever he was becoming was someone good.

And that was Sunday.

Saturday

I had my yearly performance review at work yesterday, and while I was a little nervous about it — those “where do you see yourself in x-number of years?” questions are always a little tough — I think it went well. I’m looking forward to 2014, even if the next couple of months are going to involve a lot of work.

I spent about four hours doing some of that work today, actually, which is not exactly how I wanted to spend my weekend. But I’m losing Monday, since I’ll be at a conference for work, and this review report really needs to have been finished weeks ago. The closer I can get it to finished, the better.

It wasn’t all fun and work games, though. Yesterday I finished reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake, which just made me sad all over again that he’s no longer with us. And today I finished Are You Mother? by Alison Bechdel, which made me want to re-read her earlier book about her father, Fun Home. This “comic drama” is very good, too, although there’s a lot of distancing with all the talk of D.W. Winnicott and Virginia Woolf, maybe by design. In some ways, it’s a book about psychoanalysis as much as it’s a book about Bechdel’s psychoanalysis and her relationship with her mother. I liked it, but I seem to remember liking Fun Home a lot more.

Although I really do like that this is now the status of my Goodreads reading challenge:

Screenshot 2014-01-11 at 11.37.33 PM

Finally, this evening I watched Ultraviolet, which is maybe the worst movie I have ever seen. (And I saw Jonah Hex only two weeks ago.) It’s such a ridiculous mess of a movie that it’s painful to watch, and it’s a regret I’ll take with me to my grave. To make it worse, I watched it on Crackle, who kept interrupting the movie with the same three or four advertisements — all of them terrible — and making the experience just that much worse.

Wednesday

It was a little warmer today, in that I didn’t necessarily feel like the Earth was actively trying to kill me with cold. Even the lows today were actually in the (low) double digits, and it could even get back up into the fifties by the weekend. (By which of course I mean lots of poodle skirts, malt shops, and Arthur Fonzarelli. Weather is weird.)

Anyway, it was otherwise a pretty ordinary day. I realized, midway through the afternoon when I reached up to scratch the back of my neck, that I’d been wearing my sweater inside-out all day. I was naturally nervous about reaching down to scratch my knee later on. I spent the rest of the day pulling together a report, though unfortunately only the one that really needs to get done, not the report that really really needs to get done. That second report is longer, and I’m still waiting on a couple of reviewers to disappoint me by failing to deliver their reviews despite promising to do so.

Oh, and I wrote this, which by several metrics is the most popular thing I’ve ever written on Twitter:

I was also going to wish “Elvish” a happy birthday, but I couldn’t figure out the right runes for “Love Me Tender.”

Polar vortex

It got very cold today, although how much of that was due to the so-called polar vortex I really couldn’t say. All I know is, it never got warmer than ten degrees today.

But at least our little bug problem at the office seems to have been taken care of.

Meanwhile, I finished reading the young adult novel All the Lovely Bad Ones by Mary Downing Hahn. It was a Christmas present, not one I would have chosen for myself, but…well, here’s what I wrote over on Goodreads:

If I had discovered the book, or one like it, some thirty years ago, when I was squarely in its young-reader audience, I think I might have liked it better. And yet it’s not exactly exciting or engaging by those standards, nor especially scary, at least not once it becomes apparent that it’s going to follow a very predictable route. It’s a quick read, however, and while there’s little to no character development, the characters themselves are likable enough.

And that was Tuesday.

Monday

Almost all of the snow that was left melted today, which I discovered with some surprise when I finally went outside this evening to walk the dog. I didn’t need the heavy boots I’d put on, although I definitely still needed the heavy winter coat, my hat, scarf, and gloves. It’s getting colder, and we’re likely to see colder temperatures still as the night and the week drag on.

I worked from home today, and there’s a part of me that wishes I could keep doing that for the rest of the week. It’s the part of me that read the e-mail about “bed bug activity” at the office from Human Resources. It doesn’t appear to be a huge infestation, and the exterminators are coming tonight, but still, y’know, ick. We’re still expected to show up from work, and take personal responsibility for checking our work area and clothing for any bugs, because I guess burning the place to the ground and salting the earth would have forfeited our lease or something.

And to think, it’s only just Monday.