personal

Bezonter!

Today is my mother’s 60th birthday, so we had cake and presents this evening, and then spent several hours watching the Olympics. First curling, which I’m starting to think could be a lot more fun if the games were at least only half as long, then men’s skeleton, and finally ice dancing. NBC is apparently getting a lot of complaints about how they’re airing the Olympics, but beyond Bob Costas’ hair, I didn’t notice anything too egregious. My mother, my sister, and her husband are still downstairs watching, but I used the dog finally getting out of my lap on the couch as an excuse to come up to bed.

Catherine and Brian (the aforementioned sister and brother-in-law) drove down from Maryland to surprise my mother, and we’re all going out to eat tomorrow. According to my Forgotten English desk calendar, today’s word is bezonter, “an expletive denoting surprise,” which seems entirely appropriate. My mother is a big fan of Mary Chapin Carpenter, so over the past few months I’ve been putting together a collection of six CDs featuring rarities and interviews and video clips I don’t think she’s ever seen before. I put together something similar for her last Mother’s Day, but I think this may finally be all the material that’s out there to unearth. (This website was particularly very helpful in finding rare tracks.) I also ordered her a copy of Chapin’s new album, due out in April.

Beyond that, my day was pretty uneventful, though a lot better than I expected when I got to work today. Never underestimate the power of actually accomplishing something to turn the day around. I’ve still got a lot of work on my plate — and today took on another small project — but I made some serious progress today, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for next week.

I am really glad the weekend’s here. Overall, it was a long four-day week.

A whole lot of Thursday

Today was an awful lot like yesterday, only slightly more Thursdayish. Very busy, and running into some roadblocks at work — mostly things that seem like they should be easy but that I’ve been informed can’t under any circumstances be done. I grabbed a slice of pizza and worked through lunch, just trying to do what I can. This whole “textbook adoption cycle-imposed deadlines” thing is seriously harshing my mellow.

In other news…not a whole lot. There was a brief moment today when I thought Gordon Lightfoot had died, just minutes after I very coincidentally posted a lyric from his song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” to my Twitter feed. That was kind of weird and creepy. Turns out, of course, it was a hoax, and fortunately the man is still very much alive.

And I actually watched a little more curling this evening — the women’s teams, Denmark versus the United States — and while I’m not sure I actually enjoyed it, it was a lot more entertaining when you at least think you have a vague idea of what’s going on. It’s not really enough to give me Olympic fever or anything, but maybe if I keep listening to Stephen Colbert. I believe in miracles.

“Come on baby, put the rock in the house”

Today is Wednesday, and there’s not a whole lot to say about it except for that. It was a lot more of the same — more reading chapters, more hoping I can get these two projects finished before February is done — except with much better weather than yesterday. I still don’t love the walk between the house and train station, especially today when I didn’t wear my boots but everything had iced over, but even this evening was a whole lot nicer than the wet sludge we had on Tuesday.

It’s Ash Wednesday, and as I joked on Twitter earlier this afternoon, it’s that day when, traditionally, we draw a circle of ashes around ourselves to keep the island’s Smoke Monster at bay. (Does that qualify as a Lost spoiler? If so, um, oops.) I hope that doesn’t make me a bad Catholic…although, truth be told, I also ate meat today, and aside from my sister’s wedding (which wasn’t a full mass), I haven’t really been anything like a regular churchgoer in years. Maybe it’s the four years at an all-boys Catholic high school that did it, I don’t know. I’d probably consider myself a spiritual person, if not a religious person, but despite how I was raised — and though it might pain my mother to learn this — I don’t know for a fact that I’d call myself Catholic. God and religion are definitely things I think about, seriously and often, but I’m not entirely sure I’d put a label on any of my beliefs. (Nor am I unwilling to admit that might be a little bit of a cop-out.)

In other news, I watched a little more of the Olympics this evening — mostly women’s hockey, Canada versus Sweden. At the time when I get home in the evening, it’s apparently that or curling on NBC. And despite having seen Men With Brooms, which is ostensibly a movie about curling, and despite realizing it’s not all that complicated, I remain a little mystified by just what those teams are attempting to do. (Though I’m with John Scalzi: these pants are nothing short of amazing.)

And that, really, is that.

Perpetual sludge

Today was such a wet and sludgy day, my first day back to work after a three-day weekend, and all around it was pretty busy. I’ve got several book projects in the pipeline, a couple that need to finished and off my desk before the end of the month, so I spent most of the day reading chapters for one of those projects and making some final edits where needed. I’m really just sort of glad the day is over.

This evening I spent a whole lot more time than I expected to working on a little side project, my mother’s birthday present. It’s all hush-hush, but her birthday is this weekend, and I’ve been putting together this gift for awhile.

And I also finished reading Scott Westerfeld’s The Risen Empire. It’s really space opera, and the fact that it ends on a cliffhanger with much of the plot unresolved is maybe the best argument against my whole “no new books for 2010” pledge yet.

And that’s that. Right now, I’m going to go to bed or watch Lost and then go to bed. I haven’t yet decided, though bed is definitely in the near future.

President’s Day

I was home today for the holiday, which basically just made it nice extended weekend. I worked on a couple of small projects, including (unexpectedly) a short piece of fiction I’ve had brewing recently. As I noted on Twitter recently, I think the character I’m writing about is some kind of strange Britney Spears/Hillary Duff/Scarlett Johansson amalgam. I’m not yet convinced whether that’s a good thing or not, but I nice it’s an amusing enough little piece so far. We’ll see where it goes.

Meanwhile, I tried and failed to watch Goodbye, Mr. Chips this afternoon. I’m a big fan of Peter O’Toole — Lawrence of Arabia is one of my favorite movies — but the movie really just wasn’t working for me. I may give it another shot, but I think more likely I’m going to return it to Netflix, having watched less than an hour of the film. I really have to agree with Roger Ebert, who wrote, “there’s not a really first-rate song in the show.” (And he gave it four stars!)

Anyway, it’s back to work tomorrow, so now I’m off to bed. Goodnight!