Drunken Owls and Other Delights

Alas, we have missed the cherry blossom festival at Japantown this year. Last week was a washout due to it raining all that weekend, and as for this weekend, I had to work on Saturday and today ended up being an 'I have just enough energy to do some much-needed gardening but that's it' day. Ah well...I would have enjoyed it, but I probably would have enjoyed it more had I not been feeling so lethargic this past week.

I'm certain it's mostly due to allergies. They've been hitting me pretty hard over the last couple of years, something that hasn't happend in ages. They used to hit me pretty hard back in my MA days due to all the pine pollen, but here it's very rarely immobilizing. I even ended up calling out one day as I'd woken up to the worst sinus migraine I'd had in quite some time. I guess that's what happens as you get older...?

I also think there's a little bit of that leftover sense of urgency from my former store that I need to purge once and for all. More and more I'm catching myself stressing out over the need to be on top of everything at every moment of my shift, when clearly I DO NOT NEED TO at this other store. One, we have other people that are able to answer the phone when it rings, or do general maintenance and cleaning, or do a special project. Two, and more importantly, not once have I been given the sense that I absolutely MUST be active at all times. I look around at my other coworkers and notice that yeah, there are busy moments, but when there aren't, they don't seem to be as wound up as I sometimes am. It's just expected that everyone pulls their weight to some degree, and that is clearly evident here, much more so than my old store.

So yeah, some of this exhaustion I think comes from finally allowing myself to dial it back, and my body is finally realizing just how overworked it's been over the last few years, and responding in kind. It's a work in progress, I suppose. I'll find that balance eventually.

As it happens, many things in the neighborhood and nearby park must be blooming this week, as my allergies have kicked in and laid me out the last few days. They don't hit me all that often, at least not to this degree...sometimes I'll just get a migraine, but sometimes I'll just be one big head full of snot and chapped lips for a few days. I rarely call out from work, so when I do it's for valid reasons, and there was no way I'd be able to do an eight hour retail shift without needing to dose up on Airborne and Alavert. [It seems there were three other employees that also called out today, so perhaps I dodged a bullet because otherwise I'd most likely have had to do triple the work to fill their gaps.] Hopefully I will be up and running, or at least not as laid out, come Friday and Saturday when I have my weekend bookkeeping shifts.

Ah yes. We're at the back end of this cold where I'm feeling marginally better, but my lips are chapped, my sinuses are still blocked, and I just want this to be OVER. I'm also annoyed that this came to me just a few days after I'd pulled my neck muscles somehow and had to deal with the pain for almost a week. Basically some part of me has been feeling like sh*t since late January. I'm not sure if I caught this from being in an enclosed courtroom for jury duty (even though I wore my mask 95% of the time), or one of my managers who also had a cold recently. BLEH! 

But yes, I am slowly on the mend. I've been taking Airborne and Sudafed and Advil when needed and attempting to keep rested, though waking up every hour on the hour last night because my throat was bone dry from breathing through my mouth wasn't helping. Hopefully I'll get some more rest tonight. I also have tomorrow off to take it easy!

So what else have I been up to lately? Well, I've started up on the 'remaster' of A Division of Souls and it's coming along quite nicely. Mostly just some cosmetic fixes and further editing, but nothing major to work on. At least not yet, anyway! I don't believe I need to do any, but I'm preparing myself just in case. I've got two chapters down so far, which isn't bad for a week and a half's worth of work. That means I should be quite on schedule for the September rerelease.





Hope everyone has as good week ahead!

So we've been having some weird weather of our own here in the Bay Area, and currently it's rainy and windy with signs that it'll probably stay that way for most of the day.  Which means that anything currently blooming out there is blowing my way and getting me all stuffed up.  Bleh!

Anyway...it's a new month, which means I get to take a quick look at my writing processes and see where I'm lacking and where I can do a bit of tweaking.  I've been doing this sort of thing over the last few months, not so much as a business-minded 'how can I maximize productivity' but more along the lines of a personal 'how can I stop wasting my time doing pointless things' project.  I like to streamline things so I can get it done quickly and easily, and I've always done this both in creative projects as well as the Day Job.  [In fact, I've been doing a bit of that with the Day Job as well...I've come to the realization that I'm busting my ass as much as my coworkers are, and I think I've actually been pushing myself harder than I really need to, so I've been lightening my load where I can.  I'm still getting the work done, I'm just no longer killing myself in the process.]

March plans to be quite busy on multiple fronts:

--FOGCon is the 9th - 11th, and I have two panels set up... one is a reading (I'm hoping to road-test some Apartment Complex Story passages) and another is a talk on self-publishing.  I had a lot of fun doing this last year and hope to do it again in the future.  Side note: it amuses me that I'm on the same reading panel as two big names: Katharine Kerr and Ellen Klages.  Woo,go me! :p ]

--Two visits to the East Bay campus for the Day Job on the 8th and the 22nd.  One's a group get-together and the other is the quarterly 'celebration of success' meeting (I always eyeroll when I have to refer to it as such).  

--SF will have a 'March for Our Lives' on the 24th, for the Parkland school kids.  A. and I definitely plan to be there to show our support.

Other than that...hopefully I can get some work in there!

Hope everyone's having a good week!