personal

“Shall I walk you through the history?” “I’m going to explicitly say no.”

It was back to work for me today after a three-day weekend, and I think it’s safe to say I prefer snow days to work days. Not that today was particularly bad or anything — far from it — but it’s always nice to have an excuse to sleep late in the morning.

Overall, it wasn’t a terribly exciting day. I did some work, wrote a little, and watched tonight’s episode of How I Met Your Mother. (It was a decent, if unremarkable episode, but that’s been pretty much the norm for this entire season.) I also finished reading China Miéville’s The City & the City, about which I think I’ll have more to say later. I’m not sure what to read next, although my signed copy of Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead did arrive in the mail today. I already read and really liked Heather‘s story in the collection, and the rest look really interesting. Though, after the Miéville, I’m thinking it might be nice to take a short break from genre fiction. We’ll see.

Right now, though, I think I’m just going to go to bed.

Giant inflatable beavers?

Not a whole lot to say about today, actually. It was the tail end of my unexpected three-day weekend, and I spent it mostly doing the same things I did for the past two days. I did finish a short-short story I’ve been working on recently, and I e-mailed it out to a small-press magazine for consideration. So, y’know, fingers crossed and all that. Regardless of what happens to the story, it’s nice to finish a piece and send it out. That’s not something I do often enough.

I spent the rest of the day reading through accumulated links in Google Reader and watching some stuff online and on DVD. There are scant few extras on the DVD for A Serious Man, but I was amused when one of the production crew discussed how, in re-creating the ’60s, they couldn’t use cars made later than 1960, since these look too distinctively flashy, too later-century, to our modern eyes and therefore don’t read as believable on the screen anymore. I remember this sort of thing coming up a few years back in my viewing of Lost and Deadwood, and how those shows had to diverge from reality in order to make things look more real.

What I didn’t watch today was the winter Olympics — though from all the talk on Twitter, I gather I missed one heck of a hockey game between Canada and the United States and I am, right now, missing one very interesting closing ceremony. I watched a lot more of this year’s Olympic games than I have in recent years, and from the little I saw I think Vancouver did a splendid job of hosting the events. It was nice to regain a little of the Olympic spirit I really haven’t felt too strongly since the early ’90s, but I’m afraid that didn’t translate to watching a parade of flags and Nickelback. Not when there were episodes of The Mighty Boosh and Being Human I could watch.

Though if someone had told me there would be giant inflatable beavers, I might have reconsidered.

♪ When the truth is found to be lies ♪

Today felt a little like Sunday, what with yesterday’s unexpected day off, and I spent the afternoon not doing a whole lot. I went to the library, read some, played some computer games, and worked a little on a flash story I’m really hoping to finish by tomorrow. This evening, I watched A Serious Man on DVD. I think, more than any other Coen Brothers before it, I feel like I need to watch it again. It’s really quite an accomplished, and often brilliant, piece of work. I really enjoyed it.

And that, really, is about it for Saturday, I’m afraid. Onward to actual Sunday.

Everybody always talks about the weather

I don’t know about you, but I had a snow day today.

I woke up a little early this morning, and when I noticed the snow that had started to fall in the middle of the night — it was still mostly just half-frozen rain when I went to bed — I debated calling (or rather e-mailing) in to work and taking the day off. It was tough to tell from my bedroom window just how much snow had fallen, much less how bad it would get later in the day, but I really didn’t feel like risking it. I just didn’t want to be the first person in my group to take the day off. But twenty minutes or so went by and nothing seemed to be happening, either by e-mail or on the company’s emergency telephone line. And the office is officially open at 7 AM. I was going to have to commit to either taking a shower, or taking the day and going back to sleep.

In the end, I guess I did a little of both. I took a shower, but no sooner had I finished then an e-mail informing us that the office would be closed for the day was sent out. Had it been sent only ten or fifteen minutes earlier, I could have just gone back to bed, but, hey, a snow day is a snow day. It was pretty unexpected, but I was happy to take it.

I spent a good chunk of the day shoveling and snow-blowing out the driveway, and in trekking out into the backyard with the dog, who seems mystified every time we go out to discover there’s still snow everywhere. I also watched the really terrific Passing Strange, which I have out from Netflix — and which, I’ve got to say, beats venturing into Manhattan to reformat PowerPoint files all day. Which is probably what my day would have entailed, had our office been open.

Right now, I’m thinking about watching this week’s episode of Burn Notice or maybe a little late-night capping. I’m really just enjoying this unexpected three-day weekend.

Beans are in flower

It’s tempting to just fall back every day on my Forgotten English desk calendar, whether or not the phrases it defines are especially apt or not. Especially when it’s a phrase like today’s — “beans are in flower,” which was apparently “a suggested explanation for a person’s stupidity.” The thinking being that “it was formerly believed that the scent of the flowering bean induced stupidity in the recipient of it.” There wasn’t a whole lot of evident stupidity in my day — bean-induced or not — but it’s good a phrase not to share.

What there was a lot of today, however, was snow. No real accumulation, just a wet and dreary sludge. It meant I couldn’t take my usual walk around Manhattan at lunchtime, and also that I had to be careful about not slipping into a messy puddle on my way home. In the past hour or so, it seems to have turned more into snow than rain, so we might get they the three to five inches they’re predicting for overnight. Still, my commute tonight wasn’t so terrible — and a lot better than most, judging by tonight’s evening news. A man was even killed by a falling tree in Central Park. We’ll see what it looks like tomorrow.

And that’s about it, really.