Catching up
Jan. 19th, 2024 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shivverIt's already three weeks into the new year and I only just now am feeling that things are getting back to normal.
We had nearly 1.5 weeks of holiday, which was really nice. I'd been feeling rather stressed and despondent during the latter half of the year (if not more) and I really needed it, and I'm feeling better now. I'm not really sure why I was feeling that way - work hasn't been any worse than usual and, in many ways, was better than it had been two years ago, but it's just been bad.
Anywhos, I had a great holiday. I got those shelves put up, and a lot more. We put together a schedule of things we wanted to accomplish each day, and we did a pretty good job adhering to it. We fell off quite a bit during the latter half, but we got what we really needed done. In specific, I've been loving my new workspace. I have a nice, big desk, with a nice big monitor, an excellent mechanical keyboard, a rack to hold various supplies, two Doctor Who pictures watching me as I work (a Journey's End character painting and John Smith) and two more behind me for people to gawk at during meetings (series 4 character painting and UNIT - the Brig, Benton, Yates, Bambera, and Mace), and those shelves I mentioned with a Ten statue, a Dalek fig, a plague doctor plushie, and Aziraphale and Crowley Funkos. I'm in my own room now, and there's still a bunch of stuff that needs to get put away or reorganized, but once that's done, I'll have room to set up my drum set. Meanwhile, my husband's also got a nice large space cleared for his desk upstairs and he's loving that, too. Though, typically, I've bought him a new, big monitor but he's too lazy to set it up and is working off a tiny one. :P But I also bought him a little shelving unit which he's put his anime figurines on.
As usual, we didn't do much for the actual holidays, as we don't have any family in town here. Also, as usual, my husband's in the doghouse with his mom. You see, her cat of many years died earlier this year, so she's gotten a new kitten. She loves the kitten but complains that he's always bugging her and monopolizing her time. So, for Christmas, my husband sent her two cat toys, electronic ones that are designed to operate solo, to distract the kitten away and keep him occupied. On Christmas, she called up, talked about how wonderful the cat toys were, and then asked, "Are you going to give me anything for Christmas?" My husband replied that the cat toys were her present, to help her manage the kitten. I think she realized what she sounded like, because she then said, "Oh, I just wanted to know if I should expect any more packages in the mail." But yeah, she's still upset that he didn't get her anything.
The holiday also gave me a little time to pursue my own things, and that resulted in an uptick in writing. I wrote an actual Christmas-related story... and then didn't post it, because it's Blue Rain and it's so similar to one of the last BR stories I posted, it really wasn't worth it. Maybe I'll post it next year. So I finished the first draft of a different vaguely Christmas-related BR WIP, and then declined to work on the editing. Maybe I'll get that thing out by March or so. I did some work on a few other WIPs, and then started on a new idea, which has been my main focus for the past two weeks. I got the skeleton done yesterday and now it needs fleshing out.
But the real point is that I'm writing again, yay! I blame the 60th specials and "The Church on Ruby Road" for being so inspiring. No, I'm not writing anything related to any of them, but they've reawakened my brain thinking about stories again.
Another thing that we've been enjoying are the "Doctor Who: The Collection" blu-ray sets. We have a few of them, and along with enjoying the episodes, we've been loving the extras, especially the "Behind the Sofa" segments. They have DW people (actors, writers, producers - one group from the episode and one not associated with the era) watching the episode and commenting on it. It's just fun watching the first group remembering stories they haven't seen in thirty years and the second group experiencing the story, often for the first time ever.
We also binged seasons 1-3 of Star Trek: The Lower Decks and Marvel's What If?, but I think those should be in a separate post.
And now... the past week has been a trip. So it started with drippping in our attic. We've heard it occasionally for the past year, but this time it was steady during a rainstorm. So, we took half a day on Wednesday to clear the attic access, which meant moving my husband's bed out of his room, into his office and clearing out some other stuff. We got the access open and put up the ladder, and we found... nothing. There were no obvious wet spots among the blown insulation, and it wasn't raining anymore so nothing was dripping. So, we decided to leave the access open and turn off the heat (since we were leaving a hole in the insulation) and wait for the next rainstorm - which, as you can probably guess, hasn't happened yet. Surprisingly, not having heat wasn't all that bad. The temperature was in the forties and we stayed in specific rooms with space heaters, so it was tolerable.
Late in the evening on Thursday, we got a text from our ISP saying that they would be upgrading lines in our area, so internet access would be spotty. Thanks for the huge advanced warning. o.O Of course, 8 a.m. hits on Friday and the internet goes down... and doesn't come back until 10:30 p.m. We were panicking that we were going to be internetless for the entire holiday weekend. But at least we got it back, though we lost a day of work.
Then the snows came. We closed up the attic access and turned the heat back on. Then the freezing rain, turning the entire town to ice. We were lucky - we lost power for about an hour on Tuesday, but there's still thousands of people here without power at all, and in the next town over, the water station lost power and they've been instructed to boil all drinking water. Our trees lost a number of branches, and we spent over two hours on Wednesday cutting the broken branches down and chipping the ice and snow off the sidewalks. The temperatures rose over the last two days so we're all good now, but the town is still recovering.
One bright spot: we have a guest! Every few days, we hear scratching against the side of the house, up in the corner right by my gaming computer. We finally went out to look and found this.
It's hard to tell from the photo, but it's about the size of an American football. A friend thought it was a northern flicker, but no, it's at least twice as big as that. We think it's a hawk. Hawks don't have nests; they sleep wherever they feel like, so the fact that it only hangs out at our house every so often makes sense. I like having a guest. My husband's not so happy, afraid that its claws are going to shred the wall.
So that's life so far in 2024. The boring meeting that I'm currently in is ending, so time to go. Take care, all!
We had nearly 1.5 weeks of holiday, which was really nice. I'd been feeling rather stressed and despondent during the latter half of the year (if not more) and I really needed it, and I'm feeling better now. I'm not really sure why I was feeling that way - work hasn't been any worse than usual and, in many ways, was better than it had been two years ago, but it's just been bad.
Anywhos, I had a great holiday. I got those shelves put up, and a lot more. We put together a schedule of things we wanted to accomplish each day, and we did a pretty good job adhering to it. We fell off quite a bit during the latter half, but we got what we really needed done. In specific, I've been loving my new workspace. I have a nice, big desk, with a nice big monitor, an excellent mechanical keyboard, a rack to hold various supplies, two Doctor Who pictures watching me as I work (a Journey's End character painting and John Smith) and two more behind me for people to gawk at during meetings (series 4 character painting and UNIT - the Brig, Benton, Yates, Bambera, and Mace), and those shelves I mentioned with a Ten statue, a Dalek fig, a plague doctor plushie, and Aziraphale and Crowley Funkos. I'm in my own room now, and there's still a bunch of stuff that needs to get put away or reorganized, but once that's done, I'll have room to set up my drum set. Meanwhile, my husband's also got a nice large space cleared for his desk upstairs and he's loving that, too. Though, typically, I've bought him a new, big monitor but he's too lazy to set it up and is working off a tiny one. :P But I also bought him a little shelving unit which he's put his anime figurines on.
As usual, we didn't do much for the actual holidays, as we don't have any family in town here. Also, as usual, my husband's in the doghouse with his mom. You see, her cat of many years died earlier this year, so she's gotten a new kitten. She loves the kitten but complains that he's always bugging her and monopolizing her time. So, for Christmas, my husband sent her two cat toys, electronic ones that are designed to operate solo, to distract the kitten away and keep him occupied. On Christmas, she called up, talked about how wonderful the cat toys were, and then asked, "Are you going to give me anything for Christmas?" My husband replied that the cat toys were her present, to help her manage the kitten. I think she realized what she sounded like, because she then said, "Oh, I just wanted to know if I should expect any more packages in the mail." But yeah, she's still upset that he didn't get her anything.
The holiday also gave me a little time to pursue my own things, and that resulted in an uptick in writing. I wrote an actual Christmas-related story... and then didn't post it, because it's Blue Rain and it's so similar to one of the last BR stories I posted, it really wasn't worth it. Maybe I'll post it next year. So I finished the first draft of a different vaguely Christmas-related BR WIP, and then declined to work on the editing. Maybe I'll get that thing out by March or so. I did some work on a few other WIPs, and then started on a new idea, which has been my main focus for the past two weeks. I got the skeleton done yesterday and now it needs fleshing out.
But the real point is that I'm writing again, yay! I blame the 60th specials and "The Church on Ruby Road" for being so inspiring. No, I'm not writing anything related to any of them, but they've reawakened my brain thinking about stories again.
Another thing that we've been enjoying are the "Doctor Who: The Collection" blu-ray sets. We have a few of them, and along with enjoying the episodes, we've been loving the extras, especially the "Behind the Sofa" segments. They have DW people (actors, writers, producers - one group from the episode and one not associated with the era) watching the episode and commenting on it. It's just fun watching the first group remembering stories they haven't seen in thirty years and the second group experiencing the story, often for the first time ever.
We also binged seasons 1-3 of Star Trek: The Lower Decks and Marvel's What If?, but I think those should be in a separate post.
And now... the past week has been a trip. So it started with drippping in our attic. We've heard it occasionally for the past year, but this time it was steady during a rainstorm. So, we took half a day on Wednesday to clear the attic access, which meant moving my husband's bed out of his room, into his office and clearing out some other stuff. We got the access open and put up the ladder, and we found... nothing. There were no obvious wet spots among the blown insulation, and it wasn't raining anymore so nothing was dripping. So, we decided to leave the access open and turn off the heat (since we were leaving a hole in the insulation) and wait for the next rainstorm - which, as you can probably guess, hasn't happened yet. Surprisingly, not having heat wasn't all that bad. The temperature was in the forties and we stayed in specific rooms with space heaters, so it was tolerable.
Late in the evening on Thursday, we got a text from our ISP saying that they would be upgrading lines in our area, so internet access would be spotty. Thanks for the huge advanced warning. o.O Of course, 8 a.m. hits on Friday and the internet goes down... and doesn't come back until 10:30 p.m. We were panicking that we were going to be internetless for the entire holiday weekend. But at least we got it back, though we lost a day of work.
Then the snows came. We closed up the attic access and turned the heat back on. Then the freezing rain, turning the entire town to ice. We were lucky - we lost power for about an hour on Tuesday, but there's still thousands of people here without power at all, and in the next town over, the water station lost power and they've been instructed to boil all drinking water. Our trees lost a number of branches, and we spent over two hours on Wednesday cutting the broken branches down and chipping the ice and snow off the sidewalks. The temperatures rose over the last two days so we're all good now, but the town is still recovering.
One bright spot: we have a guest! Every few days, we hear scratching against the side of the house, up in the corner right by my gaming computer. We finally went out to look and found this.
It's hard to tell from the photo, but it's about the size of an American football. A friend thought it was a northern flicker, but no, it's at least twice as big as that. We think it's a hawk. Hawks don't have nests; they sleep wherever they feel like, so the fact that it only hangs out at our house every so often makes sense. I like having a guest. My husband's not so happy, afraid that its claws are going to shred the wall.
So that's life so far in 2024. The boring meeting that I'm currently in is ending, so time to go. Take care, all!
