personal

Thursday, all day long

This evening, I had these vague plans to go to a local bar with co-workers after work that fell through, either because the plans themselves fell through and nobody was going, or because I just wasn’t interested enough to inquire if the invite from last week was still operational. I hung around until five, finishing the review analysis I was hoping I would finish yesterday, but as I watched one co-worker after another say goodnight and say nothing of the bar, I decided I would probably just go home. I could have checked, since the place is right around the corner, but I really didn’t want to stay out all evening drinking. Two for one happy hour appeals to my wallet, but less to the part of me the drank too much at the office holiday party. I’m not worried about embarrassing myself, just physically feeling like I don’t want to do a lot of drinking. Particularly on a Thursday.

Do you know it was Thursday all day today? There ought to be a law.

So instead of a couple of drinks with co-workers, I went home. And let me tell you, the difference between New York mass transit at 4:30 and 5 o’clock is the difference between purgatory and hell.

I came home and had some scrambled eggs for dinner, did some writing — with some real momentum, if not necessarily word count — and played Portal. Did I mention that I downloaded Portal 1 and 2 again recently? The game’s easier the second time around, but it’s still enough of a challenge — and very funny — that it’s still a lot of fun to play.

So that was my Thursday. I’m sure some other things happened along the way, but those are the highlights, such as they are. “Such as they are” is about the closest I come to highlights, I’m afraid.

Still, tomorrow’s Friday, and then it’s a three-day weekend. Which is very nice.

The cake, though, is still a lie.

Confessions of a One-Man Spambot

It was very dark this morning, dreary and rainy, and every inch a Monday.

I spent the day doing work-type things, sending out close to 150 e-mails in the process. Yeah, it was that kind of day.

Luckily tomorrow’s Tuesday, which means I get to work from home and, maybe more importantly, get to sleep a little later. One should never pass up the opportunity to sleep a little later on a work day, when and if it comes along.

Sunday

Last night, I watched Chronicle, which I generally enjoyed, even if one of its defining features — the “found footage” format — is also one of its weakest. Aesthetically, I think it works; as Scott Tobias notes, it often “seem[s] less like a movie than like the fantastical abruptly, artlessly colliding with the real world.” But on a practical level — who’s filming? why are they filming? still? — it’s a weak link in an otherwise quite entertaining, realistic take on superpowers. I’m a little tired of the shaky-cam, found-footage thing in general, which I think works better in horror anyway, but the other stuff makes Chronicle worthwhile.

Meanwhile, more fun household repair projects found me today: helping with the kitchen sink before I’d even had breakfast, then spending a couple of hours trying (and failing) to fix the garage door after dinner.

In between, I watched The Sting off and on — it’s long been a favorite, and I got the Blu-Ray for Christmas — and wrote this with my weekly group:

The Wizard was an engineering marvel. It was designed for interstellar travel before interstellar travel was cool. Even today, nobody’s quite sure how the Millenium Corporation did it, how they raised all the capital needed to build the damn thing, which even today, a decade later, would be the envy of almost any fleet out among the stars. If it hadn’t been destroyed along with the Earth, just a year after launch, I don’t doubt it would be flying still.

But you didn’t come here for a history lesson. You came here to hire our services, put us on your payroll. I have to promise you, though, what we do here, it doesn’t come cheap. And if we do it right, even you won’t remember hiring us to do it.

It’s called “temporal erasure,” or “history smudging.” You might also have heard it called “time squelching,” if you really have been doing your homework, like you say. But frankly, those folks are amateurs. It’s like using a hacksaw instead of a scalpel to cut out a cancer; the end result is the same, more or less, but there’s a whole lot more collateral damage with the hacksaw.

Chopping up the past too messily is the surest way to bring the time cops down on your ass. If you’ll pardon my French.

We use a scalpel here, with laser precision, and we get results. Results so good, nobody’s the wiser, not even the client.

For instance, you started off by asking me what I knew about the Wizard, one of the first ships launched from Old Earth. A great hulking beast of a ship — ugly too — but you don’t need to be sleek to be fast out in space, I guess; you don’t have to be aero to be dynamic. Massive, and massively expensive. And still under investigation. The circumstances of its destruction, the explosion in the core that took out the ship and the planet below it were suspicious enough that the System’s never quite closed the book.

In fact, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think they were just about to report on some kind of new evidence? An ten-year investigation, arrests possible, iminent…

Of course, they aren’t going to find any. Aren’t going to have found any…? Tenses can get complicated around here, as you might imagine. But not to worry, your Corporation is safe. I could ask you WHY you wanted to destroy your own ship — it really was an engineering marvel, nothing quite like it since — but that isn’t what you paid us for.

Tomorrow, I return my attention to this other short story.

All that and the kitchen sink

Today didn’t go exactly like I’d planned.

I tried to do some writing, although I didn’t get very far at all. I’m struggling with this short story, not least of all because it’s got a deadline attached to it. It’s not an unmissable deadline — it wouldn’t take a whole lot to rework the…oh, five and a half pages I’ve got so far — but I’d prefer not to miss it. I’d also like to have a whole story under my belt, something unpublished but of significant length that I can submit to the Online Writing Workshop. My brain just didn’t want to cooperate today.

Admittedly, it didn’t help that I downloaded Portal again and started playing it a little bit.

Or that this evening, the pipe to the dishwasher broke and we had to do a little impromptu plumbing. It’s not yet replaced completely — it was getting too late for that — but there’s always tomorrow. Oddly enough, we’d planned on doing some plumbing in the basement this morning, replacing the hoses to the washing machine. But we’d had no luck. (Seriously, it would not budge.) So I guess the universe decided, hey, let’s give them the handyman project they wanted and then some.

Now if the universe could just tell me how to finish this short story…

Be prepared

I had an hour-long Emergency Action Plan Refresher Training Session this morning. Aren’t you jealous?

Not quite a year ago, I agreed to be one of our floor’s two male searchers at the office. My duties don’t extend much further than checking the men’s room in case of an emergency evacuation, but I do get a hat that says “Searcher” on it. And I also got to sit through today’s refresher about what to do in case of fire, earthquake, biological or chemical attack, etc. Hopefully, none of that will ever be an issue, but it’s good to know the building takes safety and preparedness seriously.

The rest of the day continued about as expected, although it took a turn for the Thursday-ier after lunch.

I’m quite glad that tomorrow is Friday.