"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
I didn’t do morning pages today, because I forgot, but I’m going to try again tomorrow. Mostly because it really did seem to work, tricking my brain into being able to write, and because I can no longer remember any valid reason I had for stopping it. (It does require that I get up a little earlier in the morning, so there is that.)
Otherwise, a pretty average, work-from-home sort of day. No mountains of e-mail waiting for me after the holiday, thank goodness.
My lovely four-day vacation, during which I didn’t even once glance at my work e-mail, is pretty much at an end. I don’t return to the office until Tuesday, but the work e-mail will have to be re-opened again tomorrow.
It was a pretty uneventful long weekend, the 4th of July holiday (and the fireworks that have commenced that and every evening since) notwithstanding.
I watched a couple of movies, Death Race, which surprised me by being dumb but entertaining, and also Dredd, which was pretty much just dumb. It shows a few glimmers of being something other than a dark and generic sludge, mostly near the end, but it continues a long tradition of Karl Urban making no real impression on me. (Seriously, the only thing I’ve ever really liked him in are the Star Trek movies, where he’s basically just doing a very passable DeForest Kelley impression. Here, you never even see the top of his face.) I also re-watched Rushmore this morning while I did the Sunday crossword. I’d forgotten how good that movie is.
And that’s pretty much it. No writing group this week, although I chipped away a little at a short story, not making much progress, but needing to get back into it all the same. (I’m thinking I may start doing “morning pages” again tomorrow.) And I spent a good chunk of the long weekend listening to the audiobook of Stephen King’s The Drawing of the Three. I’d read it a few years ago — read the first four Dark Tower books, in fact — but I’ve wanted to get back into the series, and I’ve really been enjoying listening to it.
Oh, and I gave the dog a quick bath this afternoon.
A quiet (aside from the fireworks) set of days, pleasant (aside from the heat and humidity) but now, alas, at an end.
It feels like Friday. I know it’s not, but I also know I’m off for the next four days (and don’t return to the office for the next five). So I’m going to let the Friday feeling last for as long as it can.
Some big and unexpected news at work today notwithstanding, it was a pretty ordinary day and a pretty unexciting work week. In lieu of real content, I direct you again to Kaleidotrope, where you’ll find stories of magical cats, fairy tales, and the music that accompanies the end of the world. And I’ll share my musical mix for June, though it’s not much of one this month, I’m afraid:
Is it really already July? How’d that happen, anyway?
I can’t really claim to be having the most productive of weeks. It seems like just about everything I need to do needs something else to be done first, frequently by someone other than me.
Then again, this is an exceptionally short work week for me. I worked from home yesterday, and today and tomorrow are the only two days I’ll be in the office this week at all. Thursday we’re closed for the 4th of July, and I’m taking the Friday after that off as well. We’re not even on summer hours this week, thanks to the holiday.
I did manage to finish putting up the newest issue of Kaleidotrope over the weekend. There’s a lot of great fiction and poetry this issue, and I had a great time writing the fake advice column. Check it out, won’t you?
Meanwhile, I finally got around to checking out the first episode of the Under the Dome miniseries, and I’ll just say what I said over Twitter: as an adaptation of the novel, it’s a complete (albeit curious) failure. Though it’s obviously not trying — at all — to be a faithful adaptation. So it has to be judged more for what it is. Which is a kind of okay, mostly, but not very remarkable TV series that shares the same starting point and some character names as the book. There’s a part of me that wants to continue watching it just because it’s like a strange parallel-universe version of the novel. Alas, there aren’t a lot of other parts of me that want to continue watching.
No free pizza today, alas, and in fact it took me about fifteen minutes just to get out of the building this afternoon at lunch.
See, the building has this “green initiative,” whereby they try to use less electricity, particularly during the summer months when city blackouts are more likely. And the building’s management is to be commended for this…except when they accomplish their eco-friendliness by shutting down half of the elevators during the busiest time of the day. I watched many, many elevators — or, rather, the same two elevators, but many, many times — go up and down, too full for me to squeeze on. And eventually, a bunch of us just took the stairs, even though we’re not supposed to. It apparently triggers a silent alarm in the lobby, or that’s what I’ve been told, and they’re meant for emergency purposes only. But I’d probably be waiting there still if I hadn’t taken the stairs.
I had high hopes that when I got home this evening, it would be to a new air conditioner and an easily activated new cell phone. But both took several hours, the AC installation guys not arriving until almost 9 PM (after many phone calls and promises to my parents throughout the day), and my phone would not activate until I spent forever and a day chatting with tech support online. Luckily, both were finally working around the same time, and now I have an air-conditioned bedroom — a little chilly right now, actually — and a shiny new smartphone.
That’s something.
Meanwhile, started reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, for a change of pace.