personal

Monday is the new Monday

I had originally planned on being off today, for no particular reason other than a three-day weekend, but with the doctor’s appointment last week, I decided to shuffle the day to the end of the week. I don’t get a day of for Veteran’s Day, but this way I still get the long weekend. And besides, I’m taking a four-day weekend next week…and, um, the week after. But that’s Thanksgiving, and we get those days anyhow.

Otherwise, today was an uneventful day. We had some sleet this morning, but that’s about it.

The end of Daylight Savings Time as we know it

I slept late this morning, and I guess, considering that today marked the end of Daylight Savings Time, that I means I slept especially late. In my defense, the medication I’m on does make me a little drowsy, and I’m supposed to take it right before I go to bed.

So anyway, once I woke up, I spent most of the morning working on the Sunday crossword. I enjoyed the theme a lot this week, although a few of the shorter answers eluded me. Then, I joined a couple of friends for our weekly writing group, which hasn’t met in a couple of months. It was good to meet up again, in no small part because I slacked off last week and did almost no writing.

I’m not so sure about what I wrote today. It’s not exactly a story with any legs to it, but I had fun with it. It all started with this writing prompt my friend Maurice posted the other day:

“You cannot kill the beast by conventional means,” said Margyl. “It is far too wily for that.”

“A sword forged in the hellfire storms of Hades is conventional means?” Rhianna asked, incredulous. “Your conventions are a lot stranger than mine.”

“That is the way of mid-Earth,” said Margyl. “The star-fang beast may not appear as much a threat, but verily, it is — ”

“Wily. Right, I got that.”

She sheathed the bone-encrusted sword — forged, it was said, in pools of molten demon blood, centuries past — and sighed.

“Well I’m open to suggestions,” she said. “It’s not like we can just stand around here all day, twiddling our thumbs. How do I kill it?”

“The beast has felled many warriors, feasted on the bones of any foolish enough to venture into its lair empty-handed. Only the hardiest souls dare face its gaping maw. For truly is the beast — ”

“Wily. Yeah, you keep saying that.” Again she sighed. “You know, for a wizard guide, you’re kind of crap.”

Margyl nodded. “I have been told.”

“So I can’t kill it with the sword, Rhianna said, “but I can’t go into those caves without a weapon. If it’s a magic beast and can’t be killed by magic, would — I don’t know — this rock be less conventional?”

She hefted one of the stones from the desert floor.

“Could be…” Margyl said with a visible shrug.

Rhianna glared. “And how do wizards fare against rocks? Is there an anti-rock-upside-the-head spell in that book of yours?”

“You have the fiery spirit of a hero,” Margyl told her, though he took a step back.

“All right, fine,” said Rhianna, heading toward the cave. “I’ll try the stupid rock. If that doesn’t work, I guess I can always reboot.”

She paused at the dark entrance of the cave.

“Though if I get booted back a level, I’m skipping the whole wizard helper thing.”

You know, I notice that in my WordPress dashboard, “writing” is not among the most used post categories. I ought to look at rectifying that.

“You know what?” “What?” “We’re in trouble.”

A boring day at home, which, quite frankly, is exactly what I was hoping for.

This evening I watched The Crazies, the recent remake of George Romero’s 1973 film. As horror remakes go, it was pretty decent — not least of all because most horror remakes aren’t decent at all, and because the original wasn’t all that perfect either. I do think the original maybe did a better job of portraying madness and a town in the grips of it. (As I’ve noted before, it and The Signal, another horror movie with similar themes, make for some interesting companion viewing.) By the end, in the remake, the townsfolk are a little too standard-issue zombie. Still, Timothy Olyphant’s good in it, and the movie offers some efficient scares.

Office Clean Up Day

We spent most of the day — the entire afternoon, actually — cleaning in the office. Throwing out old folders and manuscript printouts, consolidating file drawers where we could, and packing up books to be shipped back to our warehouse in Kentucky. It’s all in preparation for our upcoming move in the spring. Or maybe late winter. I don’t think that, or even how much shelf and storage space we’ll each have there, is set in stone just yet. We’ll almost definitely need to do this a couple more times before the move, but this should mean we have just that much less work to do then.

And really, some of those old papers just needed to go.

The most exciting part of the day — besides the free pizza — was when I discovered the office does have a shredder, and I could use it. Which, in retrospect, sounds almost not even a little bit exciting. But hey, that’s about you can hope for on Office Clean Up Day.

Make a left at the piano

A rainy day here, the bulk of it spent at the doctor’s office — or at least that’s how it seemed at the time. I had a 10:30 appointment with the urologist, but for whatever reason, I ended up waiting almost two hours before I was seen. Most of that was spent in the magazine-free exam room, me just twiddling my thumbs and occasionally sending out a bored tweet with my cell phone.

A nurse practitioner, and then the doctor, finally came in a little after noon. And the short version is, I’m pretty much okay. I had an exam, and now I have a couple of prescriptions to hopefully take care of my symptoms, which aren’t indicative of anything too serious. (They’ve been more worrisome and discomfiting than painful, and they haven’t gotten progressively worse since late September.) I go back for another appointment in a month, hopefully with all of this resolved. And hopefully never needing to go back to a urologist until I’m at least as old as most of the other patients I saw there today. (Sixty- or seventy-year-old men, I suspect, are urology’s bread and butter.)

The place, incidentally, was huge, affiliated with a local hospital. How huge? A woman came in, asking for directions to another office, and the woman behind the front desk told her to go back out and make a left at the piano, and then… Seriously, if a medical practice has a piano in the lobby, that’s pretty huge.

Overall, the appointment went well and helped to alleviate some of my concerns. (I kept flashing back to this Mike Birbiglia bit where he notes that it’s never good news when they say they’ve found something in your bladder. “We’ve found something it your bladder…and it’s season tickets to the Yankees!”) I go back in mid-December, so we’ll see what happens.

I have an 8:30 appointment then, so maybe I can even get out of there before noon!