personal

The long weekend

Today is Presidents Day, and I spent most of it spring cleaning, if only to let myself pretend for a little while that it was spring. And not, you know, bitterly and painfully cold.

I took the dog for a walk at 6:30 this morning, and no amount of layers was keeping that windchill away. I looked at the weather report as soon as I came back in, and I seem to remember it saying 17°F (“feels like” -1°F), but I could have been delirious from the cold. (I also remember dreaming an extensive rendition of some children’s barnyard song in the style of Billy Joel, though I can’t remember the song, and the more I think on it, the less I think it would be amusing if I could.)

I did some grocery shopping, some cleaning, and some more watching of Rubicon. I’m three episodes to the end now, and while I know the show was cancelled somewhat unceremoniously, I’m hoping the rumors that it reached some kind of conclusion are true.

I go back to work tomorrow, although thankfully not back to the office until Wednesday. By then, it’s supposed to be a little warmer — back up to the balmy 40° it was on Friday, perhaps? — and I won’t have to worry about dying from exposure just to take the dog out to pee.

The weekend

Yesterday, I gave blood at the local library. Or, rather, in the bloodmobile parked outside the library. This was my first time donating inside one these things, and while I don’t have any pictures, it was similar to this one, only a little smaller and a little more cramped, especially with everyone wearing winter coats and all.

Afterward, I cam home and re-watched Almost Famous. It’s altogether I napped during a small chunk of it. That’s pretty much the highlights of my Saturday.

Today, my writing group was cancelled, thanks to car troubles — not mine — so I went and had what turned out to be a really great sushi lunch. I’m new to this idea that raw fish can actually taste good — although I usually do still stick to the rolls — but today’s tasted very good indeed.

Then I came home, did a little housecleaning, and shredded some old documents while I watched episodes of Rubicon. I liked it for the brief moment it was on TV back in 2010, then bought the season, then just let it sit there. But today I’ve watched a third of it, and I’m still liking it, so I’m not regretting the purchase. I can see why it didn’t click with viewers, and nowadays it would probably fare even worse on AMC. (I like The Walking Dead, except when I don’t, but it’s hard not to argue that it’s distracted AMC from the path it seemed to be on before this. Even its other powerhouses, Mad Men and Breaking Bad seem a little like legacy shows that don’t quite fit the new model.)

Anyway, I like Rubicon, even if it is, by design, slow. But I figured, political thrillers don’t necessarily age well. (Even if I remember being pleasantly surprised by The Parallax View a few years ago, and that was definitely one of this show’s models. And some forty years old.) Time to give it a shot.

That, plus an incredible amount of freezing cold wind, was my Sunday.

Mostly just a Thursday

I don’t know how you spent your Valentine’s Day, but I went the traditional route: visiting a campus with my boss and talking to instructors about the courses they teach and the textbooks they use. I’m just a hopeless romantic that way.

I mean, sure, the school is located at the corner of Valentines Lane, and one of the professors actually has his office in the same place my sister had her wedding reception. But I’m not sure I’d call it a very Valentines-y day.

I did get to sleep a little bit late, since the school’s only about fifteen minutes from my front door. And that’s always quite lovely. Mostly, though, it was just a Thursday.

The leap home

I wish I could say the last couple of days have been a whirlwind of excitement and that’s why I haven’t posted here. But unless you count a handful of Quantum Leap episodes as excitement — and it’s still a good show, but I wouldn’t go that far — that really won’t hold up under close examination. Thanks to the snow, I didn’t even go to my weekly writing group. Which is a shame, because aside from the morning pages I haven’t been doing any writing at all. And today, I didn’t even remember to do the morning pages until 2:30 in the afternoon.

Mostly, I’ve been going to work in the morning, watching over the dog, getting woken up several times in the middle of the night by the dog, and going to bed earlier than usual just so getting woken up by the dog won’t lose me the decent night’s sleep I need to go to work in the morning.

Plus some Quantum Leap. It holds up surprisingly well.

Nemo in snowy slumberland

It has definitely been a weird week.

That picture up above is before the worst of last night’s snow, in the early evening when, out with the dog, I was led to think, you know, maybe this historic world-crushing snowstorm isn’t going to be so bad after all.

Well, we didn’t lose power or heat, but between that photo and the time that I woke up — around 6, and let me just say, on a Saturday? — we gained maybe another foot and a half of snow. It was now fun shoveling and snow-blowing off the driveway this morning. I spent an hour and a half at it this morning, and I still only made a dent. A large-ish dent, granted, but both cars are still covered in snow. I’ll take a look at them again shortly, but I’m really hoping the afternoon sun will do some damage.

I did get to stay home from the office yesterday. We were open, and I spent the day working, but doing so from home. My boss had given us permission yesterday to leave early if we thought the weather and commute were going to be really bad. The Long Island Railroad was already talking about shutting itself down before the early evening. I took my laptop home with me just in case. And then when I woke up on Friday, it was already snowing and I made a judgment call. It was a call to my boss to see if my judgment was something I could follow up on. But I was genuinely worried about getting stuck in Manhattan, especially with a hungry dog at home waiting all by himself.

So I worked from home, and for most of the day actually felt a little silly about it. The snow turned to rain for most of the afternoon, and while nasty and wet, it wasn’t exactly snowmaggedon. Even by around 9 o’clock that evening, I was thinking, is that it? I made myself some scrambled eggs for dinner and settled into the mistake that was watching the 2012 version of Total Recall. You can read all my tweets about the movie here, which is probably more informative than trying to go through it all again, and certainly more entertaining than the movie itself. (Even if you don’t find my tweets entertaining at all, trust me, the movie is lousy.)

Today I’m really just hanging out, since I’m still kind of snow-bound. (Also tired. Did I mention I’ve been up since 6 am?) No idea what I’ll do today, though I promised myself I’d write for at least half an hour. Aside from morning pages, I’ve fallen out of the habit this week. It’s been a weird one, have I mentioned?

Maybe next week I’ll actually go into the office more than one day. That’d be weird.