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Winter vacation, day 2

You’ll be pleased to know that I didn’t answer any work e-mail today. I mean, I glanced at it several times, don’t get me wrong. I have a bunch of deadlines that didn’t go away just because I’m done for the year. And I am also a little insane. But today I was happy and able to let things sort themselves out on their own without directly answering anything myself.

I didn’t do a whole lot today beyond a little more writing. (I gave a witch a name.) I shoveled some snow, but there turned out not to be a lot of snow to shovel. I watched a couple of movies (a very weird double feature of The Odd Couple and Hellraiser. And that’s about it. Oh, and I watched this week’s episode of How I Met Your Mother. (I liked it a lot.) But that hardly seems like enough to have filled the day.

That said, it wasn’t too shabby by wintry Tuesday standards.

Tuesday

So it’s turning out to be an interesting week.

It’s snowish, for one thing, or at least it was in the city, where it turned mostly into rain or too wet to stick. But here on Long Island, there was actually some accumulation. Not as much as in that photo up top — that’s from this past February, when it snowed a lot — but enough that I think this qualifies as our first proper snowfall of the season. We’ve had little bits and light dustings so far, but nothing really that would have lasted through the night.

We got a new coffee machine at the office. And while it’s very weird and perhaps needlessly complicated — little packs instead of little cups, no choice of serving size, and our mugs just barely fit — but it seems to make a better cup of coffee.

Two of the textbooks I’ve worked on published this week: one I was expecting and another I wasn’t, at least not for a couple of weeks.

I’m making some good progress on a short story, rather unexpectedly. Except tonight, when I was distracted by copyediting some stories for Kaleiodtrope‘s next issue, which it occurred to me this weekend is next month. (And I need to give authors time to respond.) I also spent some time re-creating a lost spreadsheet which had all of the stories and poems I’ve already accepted for 2014 and 2015. I essentially have the next six issues mapped out, or at least filled up, but reminding myself of which stories will fill those issues was good, as I’ll admit I’ve been feeling my enthusiasm for the zine lag a bit lately. It can feel like an expensive hobby that garners some very good but limited attention. I’m trying more ways of imprinting my own personal stamp on it. (Hence things like the fake advice column.)

Oh, and I haven’t mentioned that I will almost certainly be going back to the Banff Centre near the start of next fall. I still need to confirm the dates at work — still waiting til we can request 2014 time off — but my application for a self-directed residency was accepted. So that’s cool.

But, really, it’s all about that new coffee machine.

Sunday

It’s been a couple of days.

I took Friday off again, mostly just trying to make it feel like a Friday instead of a Saturday — mostly because that makes Saturday feel like a Sunday, and I don’t need two Sundays in my weekend. (I like Sundays, but I don’t need two of them.)

That evening, I watched Before Midnight, which I really liked a whole lot. While I think it can be enjoyed without having seen Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, it’s absolutely a companion piece to those two films, and it’s a delight to dip back into these characters’ lives — even when those lives themselves aren’t always delightful. (Watching them fight is like watching good friends, or your parents, fight and almost as uncomfortable.) I’m surprised to discover I was hoping they wouldn’t make the movie a couple of years ago. This, too, seems like a fitting end to the story…and yet I could see coming back to them again in another ten years. This film is sometimes less fun than the first two — it’s less about falling in love than struggling to maintain in — but it’s still terrific.

Yesterday, I thought about watching a movie, but ended up just watching a bunch of television. Scandal, Agents of SHIELD, the new Doctor Who. Mostly that’s because I went to dinner with my parents and aunt and uncle to celebrate a birthday and got a home a little later than I expected. (A short but furious snow squall that made driving almost impossible for a good stretch of road didn’t help any.) And today’s it’s mostly more TV, trying to avoid the ridiculous cold and wind outside.

My writing group got canceled, thanks to a friend’s car troubles, but I decided to make use of the writing prompts he posts every Saturday and do some free-writing on my own. I really do need to get back into writing more regularly, above and beyond the forty minutes of it I do most Sundays.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote:

She was staying at the cabin, the one her father bought before he died, when she saw the thing that might have been a wolf.

There wasn’t any heat or running water at the place, and only candlelight or a beat-up lantern by which to see. But she was only staying the one night, packing up the last of the old man’s books and papers because nobody else in the family wanted to. There were ten months of notes and ratty journals squirreled away up here, maybe more; and although she and her sisters were just as likely to burn it all, Karen had agreed to travel the three hours north to box and tag everything she could find. She wasn’t sure if anyone outside the family even remembered her father’s novels, and whatever he’d been working on here, it sure as hell hadn’t been another book. But maybe there were still some collectors out there, die-hard fans who would pay good money for a glimpse of his later writing.

God knew the old man hadn’t left them much of anything else. It was only chance that Karen had even found out that he was dying.

He’d come back to Chicago for some reason. She didn’t think it was to die — she couldn’t even say for sure if he’d known he was sick — but that’s how it had played out. Almost a year without contact, not even a word, and then one morning Deb called her from the hospital and said, “Um, Kar? I think they just wheeled Dad into the emergency room downstairs.”

Karen was tempted to think of it as destiny, or maybe karma. Those were the kinds of words that Deb had used at the funeral, and like always Maggie had echoed her, but maybe there was some kind of truth to it. All Karen knew was that the man was dead, and there was a strange satisfaction in knowing that he’d breathed his last in a city that he’d always hated.

Not that the cabin revealed anything more about her father. She’d glanced at the writings she was bundling for the drive back home, but it seemed like there was more of his madness than answers in there, and the building itself anonymous and ramshackle. He’d apparently been there since last October, paid in full, but it was a lonely shack in the woods more than anything else.

Not quite sure where it’s going, but it’s something that wasn’t there before I started, so that’s something.

Beware the broken glass

It snowed this morning, kind of a wet, rainy mess, and then afterward it was winter and cold.

I’m not sure I’m entirely okay with this. I just got used to it being autumn, and, true enough, it’s supposed to warm up again by the weekend, but still. I don’t think the seasons should just change like that over the course of a couple of hours. I may grumble about it here, and on Twitter, but I don’t dislike winter. I just feel like it snuck up on us this morning, and that’s dirty pool.

Meanwhile, the week is continuing pretty much as it ever does. Lots of reports at the office, broken glass to beware. It’s been that kind of week.

Is it Tuesday already/only?

Thursday

I think the week may be starting to get to me. Or maybe that’s just this Thursday talking.

I overslept this morning, waking up ten minutes before my regular train. No, I’m sorry, I exaggerate. Eleven minutes. Yet I managed to shower, brush my teeth, get dressed, and get out the door to be on the station platform at exactly the moment the train was pulling in. If there were an Olympic team for that sort of thing, I feel like I at least aced the qualifying rounds.

Amazingly, I was still expected to do other things for the rest of the day, like work. But believe me, there’s no lack of that stuff to be done.

At lunch, I didn’t take my umbrella with me, primarily because it wasn’t raining. Sometime between buying my sandwich and eating it, however, the skies opened up and the started bucketing down. And I thought, well, it’s just two or maybe three blocks to the office. Just how wet could I possibly get? I waited under the overhang of a scaffolding on 42nd Street until the light at the crosswalk changed, and then I bolted across the street. And discovered, unsurprisingly, that the answer to my earlier question was: a whole lot of wet. Somewhere between sopping and soaking. You know those log flume rides at water parks, where you get thoroughly drenched? (Do they still have those? I haven’t been to a water park in a long time.) I looked like that.

I spent the rest of the day damp and cold. Luckily the office wasn’t at its peak freezing temperatures — last week had us all fooled into thinking it was early fall — and I compensated with an extra cup of coffee. (I’d bought a box of K-cups from a nearby Tim Horton’s on the non-rain-drenching part of my lunch break.)

It was really nice to finally get home and change my socks.

But tomorrow’s Friday, and with the rain today the temperatures, which had jumped back up to muggy and insane, are supposed to go back down. It’s not quite fall by any stretch, but we’ll get there, by hell or high water. (Though neither one of those would be super-appreciated. I have only so many socks.)