tealin | Entries tagged with life

It's been almost a year since my Very Important Food Poisoning, and I've learned a lot of stuff I should have learned when I was a teenager. In the interest of abolishing the stupid taboos that kept me in ignorance, and hopefully reaching some people who may still be in ignorance, I'm going to share what's happened to me and what I've learned.

But it's about periods. You know, that evolutionarily baffling thing where a sexually mature human female sheds perfectly good blood and tissue because she failed to get pregnant that month. (Seriously, is that the best system, Nature?) This makes people squeamish so I'm putting it behind a cut, but this squeamishness is precisely the problem, so I encourage you to put on your Grownup Pants and educate yourself about what is normal, what is definitely not normal, and what 'birth control' actually means. So much of my life I was hobbled by a condition that was entirely treatable, but I never sought treatment because I didn't know it wasn't normal. This ignorance can't be allowed to continue.

( Join Me On A Magical Journey To The Uterus... )

( Important Things To Know, Which I Didn't )

On top of all the madness of going to sea, cramming to get stuff done for Free Comic Book Day, juggling a handful of commissions that somehow happened, property drama, and just keeping myself fed and rested and generally clean –

I have just dropped more than a month's rent on a new laptop.

When I bought my current one (which I named Klaus) I needed something that would keep up with animation software and running/editing large video files, which in 2012 meant a dedicated graphics card and a top-of-the-line chip, so I ended up with a gaming laptop. I considered future-proofing a good investment, figuring if I bought the best model going at the time, I'd get a good head start on technology and it'd take a while to fall behind. I have never played a game on him, but Klaus has been more than up to the jobs I've asked of him, and has accompanied me around the world and on many, many trips to the SPRI archives, and sailed through it all without a ruffle.

Klaus is still a workhorse, but has developed a few tics in the last year or so, such as occasionally failing to wake up after going to sleep, or not going to sleep when closed and then BSOD-ing. And he's started to slow down a bit, in small but noticeable ways, probably because of the umpteen gigs of photos I'm too paranoid to relegate to my backup drive. None of this was too obstructive, and better than one would normally expect from a seven-year-old computer, but when I found out Microsoft was going to stop supporting Windows 7 in January I realised it was finally time to shop around for a replacement.

Imagine my surprise to discover that, seven whole years* after I last scoped out the market, a mid-range Windows work laptop has LESS power than my now-ancient gaming one. Having lived most of my life when exponential improvement in personal computing was the norm, this was shocking. On top of this they've done away with disc drives in most models, and my beloved 'end' key has been relegated to a function on the number pad. Surely we all ought to have solid state hard drives, 64GB RAM, Blu-Ray disc drives, and full programming functionality as a matter of course, now? What is this going backwards?
*that's 1,457 in computer years

Anyway, all the reviews for the model I was looking at – more or less a one-for-one replacement of the one I have now but with slightly more storage and RAM – complained of it being slow, and I was darned if I was going to pay new money and not get a faster machine. There didn't seem to be another option besides dropping an extra £500 for a SSD/HDD hybrid. Luckily a refurbished one turned up for about half that markup, so I ordered it this morning. As it's the Nice Version it has the additional perks of a better screen and backlit keyboard, which I've wanted for a while. It's in naval colours, so I'm going to name it Bowers. He was super organised, had a flawless memory, and a good head for figures, so it seems a good fit. I need a crackerjack project manager, and if I can't have one in person then I can conjure one in my computer. He should arrive Friday.

This is shaping up to be another expensive year ...

I need to clear space on my desk to set up my light table. This has resulted in the following list of accomplishments since the weekend:

Currency-converting and filing business expense receipts for the last 7 months (because I had some tax-related paperwork that needed filing, and if I'm digging up Ye Tax Bindere I might as well do it all)
Scanning one character's design materials and the design of the Terra Nova's engine room I drew up while thumbnailing (because I can't put them away until they're scanned; it's a Rule)
Candying a batch of orange peel (because I have a bowl of mandarins on my desk for Healthy Snacks, and I save the peel, and I finished that bowl's worth which meant I had a batch's worth of peel, and that stuff doesn't keep forever)
Making a big shopping trip to Aldi (because they have the best mandarins and I needed to refill the bowl)
Packing away the extra flour and preserves I bought in anticipation of the pound tanking (because I was at Aldi anyway, why not)
Reorganising the boxes under my bed (because these things have to go somewhere)
Vacuuming under the bed (because – yikes)
Vacuuming the corners of my room (because I had the vacuum up here anyway)
Including the terrifying corner where Ye Tax Bindere lives in sin with piles of life drawing and oversize books, which needed organising anyway (nice bit of synergy with item no. 1 there)
Going to Wilko to stock up on vitamins etc (for the aforementioned poundpocalypse)
Making an appointment for a haircut tomorrow (because on the way to Wilko I walked past the hairdresser's for which I have a coupon, looked at their prices, made a big nope, and booked at the place where I got it cut before)
Making an appointment to get topped up on some extra sleep-happy acupuncture (it's in the same neighbourhood as the hairdesser's)
Emailing someone for character design advice (because the char design sketchbook told me to)

And yet my desk still is not clear. It is a mystery.

Current Location: the labyrinth

Back when I was working at Disney, with a lot of dads who had daughters in the Girl Scouts, I bought a drawer full of Girl Scout cookies and would have two or three every mid-afternoon. When I ran out, three o'clock would roll around and I would be seized with the most existential craving for a cookie – nothing could satisfy but something crisp and buttery. It lasted for months. I discovered a sudden sympathy for drug addicts, and never bought Girl Scout cookies again.

When I was visiting the Discovery this past September, after breakfast and orienting myself for the day I would usually get below-decks around 11 A.M. There was a recording which played on continuous loop in the crew's mess, which you could hear around most of that deck. For the next week, every day at 11 A.M. it would get stuck in my head. That's what I needed to hear at 11 A.M. and if I wasn't going to put it in my ears, my brain would supply it itself.

This Christmas I spent a few days at the San Diego Maritime Museum, filling in as much as possible of my mental map of the Terra Nova, spending a lot of time on the Star of India which, unlike the Discovery, is still afloat. The waters of San Diego Bay are quite sheltered, and there is never more than a slight bob, but it was enough that when I stepped off the ship, the balance part of my brain, used to compensating for the motion, wrong-footed itself and made me feel like I was still bobbing. Pleasant enough. But again for a week after I would get that bobbing feeling at the time I'd usually be arriving at the ship, even when I flew back to Europe and was suddenly compensating at dinnertime instead of mid-morning.

For the last week I've been watching The Terror, one episode a day, usually over dinner. I finished day before yesterday (it is very good; there will be posts). Both yesterday and today I've been getting on with things and feeling fine and then Terror Time rolls around and it's the Girl Scout cookies all over again. For now, ten minutes browsing Terror gifs on Tumblr seems to scratch the itch, but I can't deny it's a little ridiculous. Is this addiction? Is this just the power of habit? Does habit have an inordinate pull over me or is everyone like this? How does one harness it for good instead of mega distraction and cravings? I never seem to form such intense behavioural conditioning for yoga, or meditation, or going for a walk in the fresh air.

At least I can be abundantly careful never to touch any substance that is scientifically known to be addictive. All hope would be lost.

Tried to initiate another wire transfer yesterday. It went surprisingly well! I spelled everything out to the person at the call centre, they repeated everything back to me word for word as I'd spelled it, and seemed to have heard of both Vancouver and Cambridge, which was a nice surprise. Maybe, maybe, this time ...

I got the PDF form to check over and sign. Half the recipient bank's address was missing, as well as the last three digits of the destination account number, and my street address was spelled wrong.

When doing the rounds of corrections later, I learned that only the first two lines of the destination bank's address are shown on the form, and they have the rest but just don't show it. Because .... there's no chance any of that might be wrong? More likely because if they're wiring to another US bank, two lines of address is all you need, so why should the form be designed to show more?

All I can figure is there's some Floridian cryptid lurking in their HQ messing with both brains and computer networks, which may not be that different from its point of view. Frankly it inspires me to move the rest of my money out and close the account to save ever having to deal with them again, but I probably shouldn't do that until my GIC has matured ...

By the way, HI EX-TUMBLR people and welcome! I swear I blog about more interesting stuff than this most of the time!

I checked my Canadian account today just to see if maybe the wire transfer got there early ... and it had been deposited the same day I finalised it with the credit union.

I GUESS IT WORKED THEN???

[super exaggerated shrug]

The credit union got back in touch today. I talked with someone who seemed to be on the ball. The specified corrections had been made to my form. We caught that my Canadian bank's address ought to be in Canada and not the UK.

The money should get there by December 4th.

WHAT CRAZY THING WILL GO WRONG??

Find out next time on – – –

INTERNATIONAL BANKING!

Given all the fun I had doing this last time, I thought I'd keep a running account of my attempt to transfer funds from my US credit union to my Canadian bank account. The credit union offers good services; I was happy to be a member when I was living in California, and to keep more money there than in the Big Evil bank which has slightly more competence but is still, shall we say, developmentally delayed when it comes to acknowledging that people sometimes live outside the US. The credit union clearly has even less experience doing anything international, despite being a subsidiary(?) of a major multinational corporation with employees from and in a huge number of countries around the world. Also their service centre employees, who sound chipper and articulate on the phone, appear to have sawdust where their thinkers should be.

PROLOGUE
Remembering the three tries it took to get the transfer through successfully when I was imminently departing North America, I decide to log into my account online to see if they've made online international wire transfers a thing.

They haven't.

I initiate a chat with their online help service, which oddly I don't think is staffed by bots. Kristynia informs me I should phone the call centre to see if my account is eligible to make a wire transfer. I phone. It is. I gird for battle.

EPISODE 1
Every last tiny little detail of the transfer information has to be letter-for-letter, punctuation-for-punctuation correct, or it won't go through. I haul out my Folder of Money Stuff and get the sheet my Canadian bank gave me for this purpose, and also all the information for the account I'm transferring from, to pass the dragon at the gate of the call centre.

( And so we begin ... )

Current Location: somewhere in the formless void of space, according to the US banking system

I don't know how I ended up on the BBC's list of animators to phone up for my 2p on an animation-related story, but for the second time in a year I've started my day with a call from a radio producer lining up guests. This time it was for the morning show in Birmingham, a story about the globetrotting reboot of Thomas the Tank Engine. Was I in favour of more diversity in entertainment? Well, obviously. Very good we'll call you back at nine!

It wasn't Radio 4 – it was a local phone-in show clearly angling for the participation of those who'd be available to opine post-drive-time; in this case, apparently, retired men for whom foreign accents and strong female characters are an onerous imposition by the PC Brigade, even if they appear in train form. Luckily I wasn't called upon to debate the callers – I had told the producer I had a train to catch – but the host, performatively or not, was taking their side of the argument.

Here's a thing about me: I can't argue. Arguments in our house growing up were conducted on a hyper-competitive, all-or-nothing, sudden death basis, which taught me only to run as far from an argument as possible as soon as I saw one brewing. I get panicky and freeze whenever landed in one by circumstance. But this morning, none of that. I felt about two feet taller when I got off the train.

I was coming in to London to help a friend get home from outpatient surgery, but wouldn't be needed until the afternoon, so I had lunch with a friend from animation studio days, who has had an incredible year of self-discovery and transformation. Much as the world is going down in flames, I have been witness to enough of these self-redemption stories in the last few years to have some deeply perverse hope in the human spirit despite everything. People can do amazing things when they open their eyes, internal or external. Maybe that's how we can solve the bigger problems.

Hospital friend was supposed to go under before noon, but by the time I crossed town she still hadn't been called in. We chatted for a bit before they finally came for her; I made my way to the nearest coffee shop (the hospital café was stifling) and am now drawing polar explorer headshots while the corner of Grenfell Tower plays peek-a-boo with the business park's orderly trees. One is always aware, in London, of being in the shadow of history ... Some history is just fresher than others.

When I graduated college, someone had us do 5, 10, and 15 year projections. I think I put Disney in the 15-year box. I wonder what newbie animator me would have made of finding out what an ordinary September Monday would look like in that distant future. It seems surreal even now.

Current Location: White City

ME: Well, heading off for my visa extension tomorrow, and I'm not even a little bit stressed about it!

STOMACH: [out of a knotted-up yoga pose even a contortionist could only dream of] YES YOU BLOODY WELL ARE

ME: Sigh, OK, what do you want.

STOMACH: LIE DOWNY

2 hours later

ME: OK, now what?

STOMACH: TIKKA MASALAAA

1 hour later

ME: OK, now what?

STOMACH: ANYTHING BUT THINKY VISA

ME: I still have to pack.

STOMACH: NO

ME: And double check the backup copies –

STOMACH: NO NO NO!

ME: You're not helping.

STOMACH: YES

STOMACH: ---> FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST <---

ME: Sigh.

After four years of visiting Denmark, I'm finally trying to learn Danish. It hadn't seemed worth the effort before, as I teach in English there, and anyway, how likely was the school to keep inviting me back? Turns out, very likely, and as I like going and feel one ought at least to try to function in the local lingo, I'm starting on it in a more organised fashion than recreationally cross-referencing the Danish and English copy on packaging.

It's fun, and – for a language whose reputation is 'very very difficult' – so far fairly easy. I've also found that a tiny upside of having spent many young years in Utah, where my mum tutted at everyone's 'lazy tongue' when they turned mountain into mou'en and something into sum'm is that I'm taking very naturally to the wide variety of glottal stops that Danish requires of the hapless English speaker. This is not an accident, I think: there was quite a lot of Scandinavian settlement in Utah in the early days,* so I suspect the comfortable habits of the Nordic tongue outlived the taste for fish and minimalist interior design.

I first started trying to learn French so long ago that I've forgotten what it's like to be a beginner with a language; in my first few days with Danish I'm amused to observe that I'm coming up with all sorts of mnemonics which will be completely impractical in a conversational context. But I don't think I'll ever quite shed the impression that, in Danish, a girl is a pigeon (pigen), a boy is a dragon (drengen), a man is a maiden (manden), and a woman – any woman – is a queen! (kvinden)

Perhaps the reputation Danish has for being difficult to learn comes from the way the spoken word hardly resembles the written one – it could give English a run for its money. Pigen is pee'een, drengen is drain, manden is mai'n, and kvinden is kveen-n. The phrase Jeg er en kvinden (I am a woman) sounds more like Yerre kveenn. My first experience of this was when I was talking about words I'd learned off packaging and, in my obsession with Danish bread, one of these was wheat flour – hvedemel. One of the Danes present gave voice to it, and it came out velmee. I pity anyone who's tried to learn it from a book and then arrived in the country; they wouldn't understand a word.

I'm next due to teach at the end of November, and I doubt I'll be the least bit capable of conversation by then, but it'll be interesting to see how my experience of the place changes. I have learned what ikke means at last – it's a negatory – but Duolingo is insistent on the importance of my learning the word for 'plate' which so far I have been completely unable to remember beyond that it starts with a T.

But I know that you find pastries at a place called lagkagehuset, and what is necessary beyond that?

*and quite a lot of skin cancer there now, not coincidentally

This isn't normally the sort of story I'd find much point in sharing, because it's all worked out fine so no one needs to be bothered with it. However, I find myself in the position of having to repeat it to everyone in my close acquaintance, so to save myself a little verbal legwork, I'm writing it down here. If you don't want to hear about food poisoning and a late night in an NHS hospital, feel free to skip this entry.

May 18th, 2018 was the 59th anniversary of Cherry's death.

The weather promised to be perfect, after a wet spring that has precluded a lot of good walking, and despite having been by a handful of times I'd never actually dropped in to Shaw's Corner (Cherry and George Bernard Shaw were friends and neighbours and visited frequently) so all the pieces were together for a grand day out. My walking buddy Sydney Padua, of Lovelace and Babbage fame, was up for it too – we'd done the circular walk which took in both Shaw's house and Cherry's grave last year and enjoyed it immensely, so a revisit was a welcome prospect.

( And we're off )

Yesterday I outlived Taff Evans.

I'd known it was coming for a while – since I first realised he died before his birthday in 1912, and did the math to figure out when I would reach his tally of days – and so managed to produce a short comic idea I've been mulling for a while:

One By One

Given that I probably outlived him sometime in the wee hours of the morning, I was more aware than usual, yesterday, that it was the first day of the rest of my life. It was spent thus:

drawing both real and fictional people at a café on Kings Parade
finishing up with Pennell's letters at SPRI
attending a lecture on a little-known, hilariously dysfunctional expedition
having fish and chips at a snug little pub on a foggy night

If that's any indication of the future, it's a pretty auspicious start.

It's been a very retrospective few months. 2008 was a hugely pivotal year for me, as discussed previously. This August, I will have spent as much of my life away from the family home as in it. It's also five years since everything went down and I emerged, shivering and withered, from the chrysalis of my former life. I wondered at the time what my life would look like when I was 36 ... I could never have remotely guessed where I'd be now. I wish I could tell 31-year-old me how it was all going to work out more-than-OK. She really needed to hear that.

Today I've been cataloguing Bill Wilson's account of the Terra Nova's journey down from Cardiff, as part of my preparation for writing the first volume of the series. July 23, 1910, which I have just reached, was his 38th birthday. They were in the tropical Atlantic and enjoying magnificent sunrises, while their cabins below were too hot to sleep in. His next birthday would be spent in a howling blizzard in the middle of nowhere on a mad quest for penguin embryos. He didn't get another birthday after that.

I wonder where I'll be when I turn 38. And 39. And 39 years, 250 days. That last one will be a much, much harder date to pass than my 40th birthday. 40 is just a number, but having more days than Bill Wilson is hard to fathom, and simply unfair. Oh that I could use them half so well.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: the future

In October of 2007, the Decemberists and Lemony Snicket released the latest (and in the case of the latter, last) instalment of their respective oeuvres in the same week. The Crane Wife and The End are still inextricably intertwined in my mind, and either will strongly evoke the flavour of my last autumn in Vancouver and everything bound up with it.

This week, the Decemberists have released their latest album, and next Friday the new series of Netflix Snicket is released.

The pattern-seeking part of my monkey brain can't help but wonder if we're on the cusp of something again.

This October, it will be ten years since the Worst Journey radio play aired and my life turned a huge corner (though I had no idea of that at the time). For whatever reason, that sounds about right – long enough for it to have taken root and grown in me to where I am today.

That means that, this September, it will have been ten years since Glen's Rapunzel was abducted and lobotomised and set on the path to becoming Tangled ... Which, again, sounds about right; a lot has happened since then for both of us, mainly good things, and the pain has subsided in accordance with the passage of time, though it is not forgotten.

But that means that it was ten years ago this February that I started at Disney, and that just is not right at all. There's no way that was ten whole years ago.

I observed at the time that the years 2010-13 felt like one year because I had neither seasons nor films by which to divide them. Noticing that it seems to work in retrospect – I can appreciate the passage of time in the other cases because the cause/effect streams continue past Disney Time, whereas Disney Time is only measured in relation to itself – leaves me feeling oddly that I've been robbed of two years, rather than having one 'year' that lasted three. Imagine I'd stayed longer ... I might have lost the perception of 15, 20 years of my life. The horror.

The ticking grows louder. I need to work on my book. The next ten years need to see the fruits of the past ten years come into the world. I don't know why I feel a deadline looming as I do, but I can't ignore it, nor do I want to. One of the great gifts of getting into polar tragedy is the constant awareness that one never knows when one's time is up, so one must make the most of it – an especially pertinent lesson on this 106th anniversary of Titus Oates' famous departure. Things must be done, and I must be doing them, while I can. Back to work.

Current Mood: philosophical
Current Location: Denmark

When you get a piece of mail from Denmark, for a former housemate ...

And you mark it "Return to Sender" because she's moved and you don't have her forwarding address ...

And you notice the return address is actualfacts friggin Elsinore ...
(except they spell it Helsingør because they're not Shakespeare)

And then you remember you're going to be in Denmark next week so you translate "Return to Sender" into Danish and make a mental note to drop it in a Danish postbox when you go for groceries.

Ten years ago this scenario would have been unthinkably foreign, and now it's perfectly normal. And yet I'm still haunted by thoughts of leaving it. I am quite clearly out of my mind.

(But when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.)

I think I tend to be on a fairly even keel, emotionally – admittedly this is mainly due to a lack of emotion rather than any sort of hard-won balance, but still, I rarely have to struggle with self-regulation or the fallout of an outburst.* Occasionally I am very happy, or sad in a quiet way, but anger – real anger, not peevishness or frustration – is almost unknown.

But every so often ...

Someone will say something ...

And I feel the magma deep down inside go

...
. . . blorp

And I have to excuse myself in a hurry.

ADDENDUM
When I get angry, I get inarticulate. Luckily A.L. Kennedy has put into clear, calm words exactly the disjointed syllables I would have ineffectually spewed last night if I hadn't run away: The Trolley Problem

*The fallout of not being emotionally responsive enough, on the other hand ...

Well, that's the mystery of my intense Monday-night insomnia solved, then – that cold I've been fighting off since Calgary has finally landed! On one hand, any cold is a bother, but on the other, it's not as bad as it could be, it gives me the excuse finally to have the congee at the local Hong Kong diner, and it more or less forces me to wade through the glacier of photos I took in New Zealand, as that's about all I'm up to, cognitively. So! You can look forward to some of those in the near future.

Meantime, I'm very grateful for the stockpile of NyQuil (and off-brand equivalents) amassed over the years from my and others' trips across the Atlantic – not only do I have more than enough to see me through the current trouble, but I got to give some to a friend who is suffering with The Real Thing. So a big thank you to the friends and family who have complied with my rather odd request when they ask if there's anything they can bring. It's worth so much more than all the Trader Joe's snacks put together.

Current Mood: laid low

Way way back when I lived in Vancouver, and was first seeking to arrange transport to visit my family on the Island, I discovered a shuttle van service that took passengers between the ferry terminal and the small towns up the coast. They were a savvy little outfit with a handful of 8-seat vans and drivers apparently earning a spare buck in a part-time job.

Subsequent years saw the number of routes and frequency of vans improve, and they upgraded to big crew vans with custom paint jobs and everything. When I moved to LA I'd still come up for Thanksgiving every year*, often making the trip from home to LAX to YVR to the Horseshoe Bay ferry to Nanaimo and onto the IslandLink bus all in one day. Checking in to the van with the very down-home sounding driver, with all the college students and hippies, was the moment I really felt I'd escaped the event horizon of LA.

As much as the business undertook service and fleet improvements, it never stopped being a scrappy little local business. The drivers were still odd-job men, retirees, or between gigs (one was an ambulance driver who picked up bus trips on his off days). My destination was on the main route between towns, and once or twice the driver agreed to drop me off more or less at my cousins' house, rather than one of the designated drop-off points. Usually I couldn't remember the exact address (the number's a bit hard to see from the street anyway) but between us we worked out where it was by shared landmarks – "between the Community Hall and the bend at the egg farm" got us close enough, except for the one time the driver actually lived on the nearest crossroad and knew exactly where to stop. And these drivers would actually drop me off, on a rural highway, usually in the dark, because we both knew where we were and it worked best for everyone – they trusted me to know what I was doing, and not sue them; I trusted them not to take advantage of my trust. None of us knew each other, but it was the sort of small-town arrangement that makes a strong case for the social contract.

I've been going back to that address approximately once a year for 18 years now. I have never lived there – never stayed longer than a week, even – but it's been the most constant location in my life, so in a funny sort of way it feels a bit like home, for a given value of home. The easygoing local familiarity of the IslandLink Bus has been part of that for most of those 18 years: if you're on this unpretentious ride, you must be a local, and are treated with the sort of kindly disregard with which locals are treated. I've just booked my bus tickets for Christmas, and am looking forward to the offhand welcome of the bus driver as a significant signpost on the way 'home.' Somewhere I've never lived, I'm made to feel more like a 'local' than most of the places I've legally resided. I know that if I moved there, in a short while I'd probably feel less at home than when I just catch a ride from the boat, but for a few days every year I belong somewhere, and that's worth far more than the fare.

*Canadian Thanksgiving is the second Monday in October. As Disney movies were usually U.S. Thanksgiving-ish releases while I was working there, their wrap parties were usually held that weekend. I went to the Bolt wrap party, which ~~was fun~~ had giant bowls of prawns, and the Frog party because it was my first film, but after that decided it was more important to go back for Thanksgiving; I missed all the others, which I can't say I ever regretted.

Erratum: It's 18 years I've been going back there, not 22. You should never trust me with numbers, ever.

Things I have done this week:

completed student evaluations for my teaching in Denmark
had lunch with a VIP (taking most of the day, in effect)
booked SO MUCH AIR TRAVEL (I am killing the planet I love, I'm sorry, this won't last much longer I promise)
thinned bookshelf and donated excess to library
read and wrote and thought a lot about John Lasseter
completed artwork for a commission
cooked a lot of food (why am I cooking so much, I don't know, it's not really necessary)
did surprise scanning for freelance job from this summer, then packaging up work from said job so they can pick it up and scan it themselves
tidied, turned my back and the mess returned pretty much instantly, tidied again
replaced my rear tire and tube
attended a meeting about glass doors

Work I have done on The Book this week:

diddly-squat

So of course I am feeling colossally unproductive.

This is why I keep a diary of what I actually accomplished every day, because unless I have an actual itemized record of what I did, I can't remember doing anything, and despair at wasting my time. Of course, it is possible to fritter one's life away just keeping house, without being idle per se, but I need to be reminded that I'm actually getting valuable things done even if the balance on The Big Job is a deficit.

Now to transfer the intellectual comprehension of this into something like a feeling, an antacid for that gnawing dissatisfaction ...

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Tealin

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December 2023

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CONTORTED PASTA

~ Random Thoughts and Scribblings ~

Entries tagged with life

Let's Talk About Menstruation

Technology

To-Do

Addiction to Repetition

International Banking, Part IV

International Banking, Part III

International Banking, Part II

International Banking

A Day in the Life

Sublimated Nerves

Dansk

A Very Interesting Friday

And the Painted Ponies Go Up and Down

Co-Incidence

Time and Perception

Life in Europe

The Forbidden Emotion

All Will Be Revealed

IslandLink

Productivity

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December 2023

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