Drunken Owls and Other Delights

Well, it wasn't TOO cold here today, really. Just low 50s and a bit humid so it felt colder than it actually was. We headed over to the Haight for the first time in ages to shop and have brunch. We haven't been there in ages, so it was interesting to see what's changed. The biggest thing is the former Sketchy McDonald's and its parking lot on the corner of Haight and Stanyan are now the location of a sort-of high rise (about ten floors, I think?) that'll offer retail on the ground floor and housing above. It's actually a nice building -- sometimes those new constructions are boring boxy things that look like slightly unshuffled stacks of storage containers -- so I'm curious to see what'll happen there in the next year or so. The rest of the main drag looks its usual bedraggled self, slightly dirty with the permanent funk of weed, but we noted there's been a bit of retail turnaround. A surprisingly large amount of vintage clothing stores have shown up, which could be either a really interesting turn or it could fall flat. Who knows?

Either way, I'm quite happy that I've got today and tomorrow off as I had quite the weird work week. [This, by the way, included TWO power outages. One on New Year's Eve and the other on Saturday. Apparently the first one was a grid issue, but the second was a power-down on purpose due to a gas leak some blocks away. My boss was NOT thrilled.] I have very little planned for tomorrow other than doing some laundry and ripping some of our recent dvd/blu-ray purchases/gifts! 


Hope everyone has a good week ahead!

Very tired today...this is what happens when you do a 5:30am shift, go to the symphony that evening, and then do another 5:30 the next morning. Not exhausted, just low on energy. Thankfully I have the next two days off which means I can just chill and not do much of anything except a few errands. Oh, and I need to set up a time to bring in the car to the dealership for a recall thingie, which I may as well tie in with an oil change/system checkup/etc as well. I'd like to do that on a day off so I can drop the car off (it's on the other side of Golden Gate Park) and just hang out for a while.

In other amusements, I was able to make good on my 'plan' to avoid the registers as much as possible today, heh. We were well-staffed enough that I could do this and just fiddle around with small 'needed-to-be-done-eventually' things in the cash office. Now that I'm home I'm not doing much of anything except doing my Sunday PC cleaning (yes, I'll continue to do this even after doing a factory reset) and catching up on a few of my magazines. I may do some writing tonight if I'm up for it!

In the meantime, not much else to report...really looking forward to these days off!

So apparently February is UI Fail Month, because I've been encountering system and software crashes all around me lately. Granted, the Day Job crashes recently were due to a classic system test that...didn't go so well...and we've been cleaning up the pieces since. I've been trying to buy symphony tickets since yesterday and the site's refusing to accept a gift certificate number. I tried to order a FasTrak doowacky online and the site kept erroring out (but not telling me *where* it happened), so I said hell with it and bought one at Walgreens. I bought a USB plug for my mp3 player that *should* let me play tunes through the speakers (I mean, it's your generic line-in audio connection, right?), but it refuses to work.

Thankfully my PC ald laptop have been behaving quite nicely (knock on wood), so at least I have that.

In other news, It's been clear but ridiculously windy today! Apparently a window pane popped out of the Millennium Tower downtown (that being the slowly-sinking slightly-askew building that's been having issues since before it opened), and I wouldn't be surprised if there have been wires and trees down in and around the city. Very weird weather indeed. Oh! And they're filming the fourth Matrix movie downtown, mostly overnight, so this means that it may or may not affect my commute. Heh.

Other than that, it's been quite a nice weekend!

Happy Winter Solstice!  Yay for longer days ahead!  It's surprisingly clear out in the Richmond this morning, and a bit chilly.  It was in the mid-40s when I woke up this morning and it's getting ever so slightly warmer, but I've got the heat going.  All the Christmas shopping is done, the packages from friends and family have arrived, and we don't have anything else planned other than going to see Into the Spiderverse in Japantown later this morning.  Other than that, we'll just be doing a lot of relaxing.

It does feel weird to be coming into the last-week-and-change of the year.  December flew by so quickly!  I'm not exactly complaining, mind you.  I did get a lot done, prepped myself with future plans, and so on.  There's only a few things left for me to do: coast through the last few days of year for the Day Job (which I'm hoping will be deadski) and make my end of year mixtape and best-of lists.  I may even do what I've been threatening to do the last few weeks: do a bit of a book purge!  I need to clean up our bookshelves in Spare Oom as they're full to overflowing with books I haven't read in years.  (And speaking of cleaning up, I think I need to tidy up Spare Oom closet as well.  There's a lot of my crap in there I could get rid of as well.)

But yeah...lots of long term plans being put in place for 2019.  Looking forward to them.


Hope everyone has a relaxing weekend!

I will be driving A to SFO in a few hours so she can skitter off to London for a week, leaving me to my own devices.  Not that I'm going to be doing much of anything exciting, of course.  I'll do some errands later on today and...yeah, that's about it.  No big plans other than on Thursday evening down the other end of Clement for the neighborhood's annual holiday 'Clementime' street celebration.  (Free beer at Green Apple, woo!)  Other than that?  Yeah, I'm a pretty boring person.

In other news, I've been thinking a lot about the 90s lately, which I find interesting.  Most of you know me as someone who'd been obsessed with the 80s for years, blogging about it, going on about the music, and so on.  I haven't so much dried out on that decade, I think that I've said enough on it for now.  But the 90s?  Why the decade when I was the most bitter and miserable I'd ever been in my life?  To be honest, I think that's *precisely* why I've been thinking about it lately.  I've been doing a lot of thinking about life and I've pretty much blocked most of that decade for multiple reasons.  It was more than just bad relationships, bad friendships, and bad financial decisions.  But I don't think I've ever completely made peace with that time...I had to get my head straight with other things first.  I think I'm able to revisit that time now, and make a little more sense of it.  I know there's a lot in there that I can parse that'll make more sense to me in the present tense. [I do sense a 90s-themed blog series starting in the near future over at Walk in Silence.  Heh.]

So why would I want to do this?  Well, the simple answer is this: I ignored a hell of a lot of personal and emotional stuff that I should have been processing then. I was far too passive, far too reactive.  I know I hid a lot of things from myself out of fear or embarrassment.  So yeah.  Time to come to terms with a few things.

ANYWAY!  Yes, it will be a quiet week here with A off gallivanting in London.  I'll probably stay up too late doing revision work, but I'll try to hit the gym at least a few times!  It's business as usual here at the apartment.


Hope everyone has a good weekend!

A shout-out to anyone who's doing NaNoWriMo this year!  Against my better judgement, I am kinda-sorta working on a project for the hell of it, just to keep my writing juices flowing while I continue to be bogged down in Revision Hell.  I'm not aiming to hit the 50k mark, nor am I aiming to write every single day, as I need to keep my main focus on revising In My Blue World.  My NaNo project happens to be an experiment in writing dystopia; in particular, I'm taking a crack at my "Noah and the Schoolyard" story idea and crossing it with horror anime style (such as Assassination Classroom and the like) to push my boundaries...I'm curious to see how far I can take this. I doubt it'll be worth publishing, but what the hell, right?

Speaking of NaNo, A is also taking part this year!  She's in the living room writing a mystery novel.  I am absolutely convinced that she'll write a best-seller in her first try while I continue to struggle and write crap, because that's the kind of person she is. :p  Seriously, though...it's kind of strange for the house to be this quiet.  Usually I'll have music on and she'll be watching TV, but there's no TV tonight.  Welcome to the dark side!  Heh.


Hope everyone's having a nice weekend!

Coming back from visiting my hometown, I'm reminded of why I used to listen to The Smiths so much in my teens and twenties.  It wasn't so much about the people or the places, but I was struck -- quite heavily, actually -- by how much I've changed over the decades.  Listening to the Smiths while I lived there as a kid and later as an adult (specifically songs like 'Reel Around the Fountain' and 'Back to the Old House', and of course 'How Soon Is Now'), they were a means of escape, much like most of the other alternative rock I listened to at the time.  Years later, I'm nowhere near the person I used to be back then, on a lot of different levels.  Part of it was getting married and A jostling me in the right direction, sure, but a lot of it was deeply embedded wishes, plans and thoughts that I desperately wanted to follow up on and could finally do so.  I remember posting on my old LJ some years ago about finally cutting ties with that part of my life.  And VERY recently I've been making some serious personal changes in my life that has taken me further away from who I once was. 

On the one hand, it was good to see friends and family, but on the other hand, I realized that I really don't have that much of a connection to that humdrum town or much of Massachusetts for that matter.  Even Boston has changed considerably, to the point where I still love the city dearly but it's not the city as I remember it.  (I don't want that city back, mind you -- I'm happy whenever a town or city evolves for the better.)  It's really hard to maintain that connection at this point, because I can't play that old role anymore.  I'm not saddened by this, mind you.  Well, I am to some extent, especially when there is a certain level of stagnancy involved.  But I feel that I've disconnected enough that whatever steps I take next, my past won't influence it.

It's a weird feeling, perhaps even depressing in its own way, but it's also a relief.  I can look forward without looking back.

 

Glad to be back home here in SF.  Hope everyone's having a nice weekend!

It's September 22 and it's now officially autumn, my favorite time of the year!  Even though we don't really get the foliage colors here, and the weather in the hood remains a stubborn low-60s-with-85%-humidity (ouch), I always enjoy this time.  It's the New Englander in me, I get all wistful and creative and nostalgic and all that, heh.

A and I have been talking about updating our resumes lately.  Neither of us have updated ours in years (my last iteration was in 2014, hers MUCH earlier than that).  She's been taking some online job search workshops and doing some research on the many and various companies that have corporate HQs here in the city.  I did a very brief update to mine a few days ago but realize that I'm going to need to completely rewrite and revise it.  I'll be looking into that over the next few weeks.  Since I have a good solid bank background at this point, I've been thinking of looking further into that field.  In the city, of course.  I've also made peace with the fact that I might have to start commuting and working outside the home.  As I'd said yesterday on my Bridgetown blog, it upended my initial plans and threw me for a loop, but I can still make this work.  It'll be tough, but I can make it happen.  I just need a goal, a clear mind, and a lot of determination.

Yeah, I know... I go through this phase a lot, don't I?  Deciding to change, I get all excited about it, make big plans...and then it wears off and I'm back to my static, stoic self again a month or so later.  Well... I'm hoping to change that as well.  I'm bloody sick of that cycle.  It makes me miserable and depressed and I hate it.  It's me sliding back into the same damn comfort zone again and again and it gets me nowhere.  It's not where I should be.  It's not where I want to be.  It's not where I need to be.

It's scary as hell and I'm constantly feeling like a fraud and that I don't know what I'm doing and that I'm just deluding myself...but right now I'm determined to tell that voice in my head to shut the fuck up for once.  It's far past time for me to make these changes.

Well...!  That got dark quickly.  No worries, my friends...all is well here, and I'm stubborn as hell.  Things are moving in the right direction now. :)


Hope everyone has a good week! :)
 

Woo!  At this time next Saturday, we'll be getting ourselves squared away for our London trip.  Our flight is in the early evening, so we'll most likely do some minimal grocery shopping (so we're not completely barren when we come back) and perhaps hit the gym before heading out.  A. likes to be packed and ready to go a good few days ahead of time, so we'll probably take care of that on Thursday the latest.  I'm definitely planning on bringing the nice camera (though I'm not sure if I'm going to bring the new lens), my tablet (for IMBW revision work) and of course my mp3 players (duh), but I'm probably going to be somewhat minimal this time out.  I know we'll be hitting Waterstones so I can buy the new Becky Chambers book (yay!) so I'm probably not going to bring any books to read.  Okay, maybe one.  We'll see.

Speaking of IMBW... I'm still a bit nervous about it, because while there are some strong scenes and ideas, there are still some weak spots that I need to do a LOT of work on.  Of course, I'm at the 'oh god this all SUCKS' point of the novel writing process, so I'm going to need to soldier through it and do the best I can.  I know what needs to be fixed and how to do it, it's just a matter of doing it.  At this point I've pushed the release to sometime in October to give myself enough time to finish it.  [The stickers on my freebie cards will say 'coming autumn 2018' to keep it sufficiently vague.]

So what about the Apartment Complex story?  Heh.  I should probably get started on combining the 'what I have so far' of the story in Word form so I can gather it together, which will give me more to read during our trip.  This current version is working out so much better than I'd expected, which makes me blissfully happy.  The moment I'd decided NOT to force it in a specific direction and just let it flow naturally, it started to spill out of me.  I believe one of the main reasons for this is that I'd decided *not* to hold back with certain aspects of the story.  This one's very much about relationships: filial, parental, romantic, and communal.  Every scene/chapter focuses on the relationship between the featured characters in some way.  And I STILL don't have a title for it!  Eesh.  But the plus side is that it's evolving in a great way and I'm really looking forward to making this book one of my best. :)

Hope everyone has a nice weekend! 

Yesterday was a search for sunlight.  It's been overcast/foggy here in the city, and A. requested we go on a road trip somewhere where it was warm and clear.  So!  We drove down to Fry's in Palo Alto (I picked up a new lens for my nice camera that was a lot cheaper than I'd expected!) and drove back up via El Camino Real.  Quite a nice drive, and it was nice to be out where it was a warm 80 degrees instead of an overly humid 65.

Also yesterday, instead of working on any writing, I spent a good three or so hours making the template for the postcards for In My Blue World.  This took a little longer than expected, but I'm really happy with the result, especially since I chose to purchase another Shutterstock photo for the back instead of having it white with text and a smaller cover image.  Interestingly it took the same amount of time for me to come up with the blurb text on the back as it did to tweak the picture!  But it's done, so now I just need to give it one last once-over and then order a pack of them that I can use for future cons and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, this afternoon we'll be heading over to the Castro to see Yellow Submarine at the Castro Theater.  I've been wanting to go there for ages and now I have a good reason! Yay!  This will make the third time I've seen that movie on the big screen... I saw it at the Brattle in Cambridge back in 1999 when they released a major remaster of it, and the other was around the corner at the 4 Star a few years back (not sure of the reason for that one -- I think it was another format release?).  This one will be for the 50th anniversary.  Looking forward to it!

Then it's back to normal at the Day Job, and squeaking in as much writing work as I can...!


Hope everyone has a good week!