"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
No big announcements today at work. A few more details about the big move — planned for late winter or early spring — but otherwise just an average Tuesday.
I wrote some again tonight, working on a story I need to have done by November if I hope to submit it where I want to. And that rare and wonderful thing happened while I was writing: I completely lost track of time.
Admittedly, only for about twenty minutes, but still.
It’s hard to believe September’s almost half over already.
So it was back to work with me after a little more than a week of vacation, almost all of it spent with just me on my own. (There were a couple of days in there when I don’t think I talked to anybody but the dog, and I went out to dinner one night largely just so I could be around other people for awhile.)
It was kind of a weird day back, thanks to an announcement this morning that our offices will be moving in the spring. Our lease is up, and…well, our offices have never been all that remarkable. We’ll be moving a few blocks closer to Grand Central, maybe a ten-minute walk from where we are now, and these will apparently be a lot more modern, impressive, and moreover built to our company’s specs.
I’m not so keen on the open-plan layout they’re promising — I miss having an office; now I may not even have a cubicle — or of the added distance I’ll have to travel every day. It’s easily twenty minutes to half an hour by foot from Penn Station, which is doable but screws royally with my preferred work schedule. In the afternoon, I leave at 4:30 and get a 4:54 train. That could get tough.
The subway isn’t too much help, despite the office’s proximity to Grand Central. East Side Access, connecting the Long Island Railroad to Grand Central, isn’t expected to be operational until 2016. There’s just no good trains, and none that don’t involve at least one transfer, to get me from point A to point B. And even the bad choices are going to cost me money in Metrocards.
Maybe I really should think about moving. If I lived in Queens, I could take the subway directly in.
That’s a whole other kettle of fish, of course.
Just a quiet day at home, hurting my brain with the New York Times crossword puzzle. (Maybe it’s just me, with my on-vacation brain, but it seemed kind of hard this week.)
I think my parents brought the rainy weather with them from England, since this is the first rain we’ve had all week, and the weather is starting to cool. Then again, it is already mid-September, so I guess we were due.
Went to my writing group again. This week, this is what forty minutes of free-writing produced:
One hour later, it still didn’t work.
“You might as well give up,” Samuel told her. “After nightfall, the incantations aren’t going to work, even if you do chance upon the right one. We really should start looking for shelter.”
“The temple is shelter,” Tabitha said. “I just need to — ” she glanced at the weathered spell book in her hands — “‘pierce the obsidian veil of…’ It has to be on one of these pages.”
“For all we know, Amos was a fraud,” said Samuel. “He said he was part of the Order, but that didn’t save his life at the pass. And if we’re still out here when it gets dark, we’re risking our own lives.”
Tabitha sighed. “That’s just an old wives’ tale,” she said. “Nightwalkers, moonwraiths…”
“Trust me,” said Samuel, “they’re real. And nothing in that book is going to protect us from them if they decide to attack.”
“There’s nowhere else for miles,” she said. “These are the northern wastes. If we can’t unlock the temple, where do you suggest we go?”
He hefted his pack to his shoulder. “I spied some caves to the east. Maybe an hour’s hike. We should start moving.”
She held out the book. “I think that’s a mistake. We’re really close. And Amos die to protect this book. He died protecting us from — ”
“Amos died because he was an idiot. If he was a real sorcerer, he never would have been exiled. We never would have been saddled with him in the first place. We’d still be living in Bartertown. We’d still — ”
“They almost killed you in Bartertown.”
“Yeah, well, that was a misunderstanding. If you’d seen the magistrate’s wife, you’d have thought she was half orc, too.”
“Face it, Samuel, it’s the temple or nothing.”
“Then I’m afraid it must be nothing,” said a voice from behind her. A robed figure appeared from the side of the building, a pair of short swords sheathed at her hips. “The temple is cursed. None of the Order’s prayers will unlock the doors now.”
“And who are you supposed to be?” asked Samuel. “The Order’s last guardian, left behind to guard their outpost?”
“Not quite,” said the woman. “I’m the one who killed the last guardian. And I’m here to make sure the curse is never lifted.”
She smiled. “So,” she said, “which of you would like to die first?”
And that’s about it. It’s weird to think I have to go back to work tomorrow. I haven’t been there since the Friday before Labor Day, and even that was only a half day. I’m hoping I can get back into the swing of things pretty quickly, getting to work on the same train I was taking during summer hours, but being able to leave at 4:30 instead of 5:15 every day.
I haven’t glanced once at my work e-mail in all the time I was off. I wonder if that was a mistake…
We’ll see tomorrow.
I spent the day, again, cleaning, and watching episodes of The Office. I now have a much cozier bedroom, with more floor space than I had before, and lots of trash for recycling next week. (We had trash delivery but no recycling pickup this week, because of Labor Day.) I’m also now caught up on the first two seasons of the show. (I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to watch this much of the US version. Thanks, Netflix Watch Instantly.)
Other than that, it was a slow day. My vacation is slowly drawing to its end. I heard from my parents this evening. They had a nice visit in Bath, will spend tomorrow morning seeing a few last things in London, and then get a flight home tomorrow evening. So this presumably will be the last night in a while that the dog will wake me up at 1 in the morning, convinced it’s a reasonable hour for him to walk and have breakfast.
And I managed to do a little writing tonight for a change. All my grandiose plans of writing each day, getting a lot read, getting caught up on Kaleidotrope slush, getting caught up on saved newsreader links…nope, none of that really came to pass.
There’s still the regular weekend, though, right? I don’t back to work for another two days.
Is the fact that I’ve been watching The Office, of all things, a sign that I’m ready to go back to my cubicle? I wonder.
Today marked the end of my summer hours at work and the start of my week-long vacation. My parents are headed off to England tomorrow evening for a week of their own, and I don’t go back to work until Monday, September 13. It promises to be a quiet and relaxing week, just me and the dog.
Today was the last of my half days, though even the people who didn’t take advantage of summer hours got to leave at 3 o’clock, thanks to the Labor Day weekend. Judging by how crowded my train was before two o’clock, I’m glad I didn’t have to stay in the city a lot longer. I also wanted to go pick up my new eyeglasses, which you can see in the photo up above. (Or here, if that’s too extreme a close-up for you.) They’re a lot different (and a little heavier) than either of my other pairs, or any of the glasses I’ve worn in decades. But they’re comfortable, and I actually quite like them.
This evening, I watched (and pretty much enjoyed) 3 Days of the Condor. It’s maybe a little dated and occasionally a little implausible, but it’s a taut and well-crafted ’70s thriller. And how can you not like a movie with the line “You can always count on the old spy-fucker”? I can certainly see how it was an influence on AMC’s new conspiracy show Rubicon — which I’ve also been quite enjoying.
And I also finished reading Paul Auster’s Invisible. I hope to write more about that later, but it’s quite good, if occasionally disturbing and difficult to puzzle out. And I’m not sure how well it hangs together, or is meant to, in the end. I also don’t know that it actually “is the finest novel Paul Auster has ever written” (as the New York Times claimed), but it’s definitely a return to form for him after a string of disappointing novels. (Of which, admittedly, I’ve only read Man in the Dark, but that was pretty weak stuff.) Again, hopefully more later.