Drunken Owls and Other Delights

We keep on planning to take a walk down at Crissy Field on the weekend, but lately whenever the day rolls around, we end up changing our plans! This time I'd just been doing All The Walking all week long so the last thing I wanted to do was More Walking. So instead we did a Trader Joe's run (I was woefully out of the hummus-and-cracker snacks I love so much) and then walked the few blocks down to Geary to pick up sushi for lunch. 

As it stands, I ended up doing a bunch of errands today anyway! They were much needed, including vacuuming and mopping the floors and starting the laundry. May as well get them done, yeah? That way I can slack off a bit tomorrow. The only thing I have planned then is to weed the front sidewalk gardens we have. Those are little Urban Garden squares where they plant small trees for beautification. We've chosen to own those little plots to grow things like lavender and whatnot. One of those trees is super dead and we eventually plan to pull it out and replace it with the Ginormous Marigold Bush that's taking over a corner of our community garden plot up the street, but that's another project for the near future.

Meanwhile, Theadia continues apace. I've pretty much streamlined a few things that were bothering me, eliminating a character that didn't work out and having an existing character (one I like better) take over their scenes instead. I'll still need to finish off the damn novel once and for all, but the closer I get to it this time, the easier I think it'll be for me to do it. What will I do after that? Who knows? But I'm not going to dwell or worry about it.


Hope everyone has a good week ahead!

I'll be honest, I hadn't expected to be so LAZY during this weeklong vacation of ours! That is, it was nice to be able to sleep in for a bit every single day, getting woken up around 7am by the cats and not the alarms. We kept ourselves busy with local shopping and a lot of gardening. We didn't have much planned anyway, so I'm fine by that. I definitely need to get myself up and moving more, though, because I've gotten a bit lazy because of it all.

Our mattress shopping the other day worked out well and we should be getting our new one delivered on Monday. Which is good, because our old one is fourteen years old, sinking in places, and we're starting to slide off the now-squishy edges. We'll just have to herd the cats into the next room so they don't get underfoot of the delivery guys or sneak their way outside.

And speaking of outside, we're both rather proud of ourselves now, having done some heavy weeding yesterday around the tree plots in front of our house and replaced them with a few small borders and a few plants. There's still work to be done like getting a few more borders and perhaps some small gravel to ensure the dirt doesn't wash away, but it does look significantly better!

As for writing...I admit I've been a bit lazy there as well, but I allowed it due to the fact that I needed to debate whether or not the newly inserted scenes in Theadia should be in there after all. They were good, just that something didn't quite feel right, no matter how I tried to get them to fit. Yesterday I finally called it and edited the most recent one out, and might do the same for a few others as well.

Workwise, I see that I'm back to a shorter workweek again (sigh) but this also means that I don't need to go in until Wednesday, so I'll be here for the mattress delivery and can get other errands done that I hadn't gotten to this past week.


Hope everyone has a good week ahead!

Good question, considering I've had the last several days off! It feels weird having this many off in a row, but I've been keeping busy-ish. I've gotten a lot of house cleaning done! I still have a few things to do here and there, but the laundry is finished, dusting and swiffering have been done, groceries have been purchased, the garden has been watered, and the cats have been given more than enough attention throughout the day. I've also gotten a significant amount of revision done for this go-round for Theadia, which includes making much more detailed notes in the few "write this later" chapters I need to insert!

Mind you, I have most of next week off as well (this time on purpose, we're taking a few personal days off), so it feels kind of weird to not be at work so much. I'm pretty sure I'll be exhausted again once I'm back to full time hours again.

Even though my weekends are pretty much only a day and a half of free time (I open Saturday mornings and get out at 2pm), I'm happy with the fact that I still manage to get a lot done in that time! And I even got to sleep in this morning!

Yesterday we headed over to the Petco to buy a new cat tree as the old one is getting quite worn out and flimsy (verdict: Jules is quite happy with it, but Cali is yet to give it much attention). This one has a slightly different footprint so we were able to slide it up against the window, giving me a lot more room behind my desk chair and the ability to access my filing cabinet. And as for today, we did a very-much-needed trip to the grocery store (not mine, but an affiliate) to restock. The great thing is that we're both under the same corporate umbrella so my hard-earned rewards points and associate discounts work there as well, and we ended up saving a ridiculous amount of money. Sweet!

And now it's time for me to get cracking on the writing session. I'm about twenty pages from finishing off this cycle of 'remaster' revisioning of A Division of Souls, so I'm well ahead of schedule for getting this one ready for release. Go me!

The rest of my week isn't so bad...there's only one midshift this week and the rest are opens, and I have Thursday off in which to relax a bit before A and I go on a little midmorning roadtrip down the peninsula to a lovely garden park!

Okay, maybe not fitter, but no longer feeling brought down by allergies, so yay me! And more productive, which is a surprise given that I did a TON of personal stuff on my two days off this week. On Monday I did the much-needed laundry which I hadn't had time for last week, but I also finally got rid of two very big boxes. One had contained A's new treadmill and the other our new mini-freezer (more on that in a moment), which were taking up a lot of room. And while I was at it, yesterday I finally took care of that long-delayed trip to Goodwill to get rid of several boxes of books as well as my old printer (they do e-recycling if they can't fix it) and I once again have a floor in Spare Oom! There's only one box left to get rid of -- the one the new printer came in -- but I'm holding onto it for just a tiny bit longer until I know for sure it's working fine.

But that's not all! I'm writing daily entries for 750Words again! Right now I'm kind of taking the easy way out by writing -- again -- about music, going through my digital library and revisiting much of the music I listened to while writing the Bridgetown Trilogy. I'm doing this on purpose to help me focus on the remaster of A Division of Souls, and it's definitely working. I've been trying to restart using that site and been having a tough time getting started in the first place, so this was a perfect kick in the butt that I needed. I'm hoping this will also get me restarted on a few other things I've been meaning to restart as well, like the journaling and other creative outlets.

Oh, and I've installed the Squaredle app on my phone, so that should work as a way to distract me from the internets during my work breaks, heh.

Here's to hoping it works!

Okay, so it's only thirteen days into the new month, am I starting the 'fresh month, fresh start' thing this early?? No, not really. Merely that I've finally finished off a few long-term creative things I'd been doing and given myself a few days' rest before starting up with something else. Nothing out of the norm here, really. Even though I'd had a crazy week at the Day Job, it didn't really put me off schedule at all.

So! After a walk around the neighborhood (and to our garden plot to water) and a much-overdue vacuuming of the house (sorry, cats, I know you're terrified of that Noisy Evil Machine Wot Lurks In the Hall Closet), I am ready to do a bit of PC cleaning, houseplant watering, and working on stuff I'd been putting aside. No time like the present! [It does help that I also have tomorrow off, which gives me an extra day to get more writing work done!]

And speaking of restarting fresh, I've been meaning to take the bus and/or walk to and from work lately but the odd schedules and needing the car for shopping purposes have kept me from doing so. I really must do better there. Not just for the exercise but also because I'm just wasting gas at this point. And I keep meaning to restart the stretches/exercises again but I keep getting distracted and forgetting! Not going to beat myself up over it, just going to try to do better is all. Semi-related, I have a word search in my satchel that has not been touched at all that I really should break into during my breaks. All it takes is that next step, yeah? What's keeping me other than passive distraction?

Anyhoo. All this cleaning and moving around has tuckered me out, so time to sit and relax for a bit, and listen to the Blue Angels VOOOOOOOSH over our apartment. 

Hope everyone has a good week!

Let me tell you, it felt wonderful to sleep in two days in a row (well, at least until 8), even if we were prodded by cat paws to get up so kitties could be fed. A couple of days with no huge plans other than a bit of shopping and walking through the park was something I don't give myself nearly as often as I should. Even on my midweek days off, I'm usually up the same time A is so I can have a full day of catching up with writing and other things.

Speaking of writing, I'm at another chapter that seems to be slowing me down. I think it's that I'm not allowing myself to get into the heads of the characters featured in these new scenes, even though I want them to be there. I'm pretty sure it's because I don't really know enough about their jobs as military, even though I am purposely NOT playing their characters as the stereotypical hardass Adonises with ridiculous firepower. That's not the kind of characters they are -- they're your aunt and cousin and brother who signed up and are decidedly not the Lee Greenwood Patriot kind of soldier. It's not a military sf story, nor is it a space opera, like I keep saying. It just happens to have some of that as background and plot.

Aaaanyway. It's Sunday afternoon and I'm chilling in Spare Oom listening to tunes and doing my Sunday chores (laundry, blogging, and so on). Tomorrow is an early open, followed by three midshifts (OOF), but I'll live.

I actually enjoy having a day off in the middle of the week! It's not as enjoyable as having two days off in a row, but it's sort of a 'six of one...' thing, really. Breaking up a five day work week midway through, especially considering I work in retail, is not really a bad thing as it helps me recharge, gives me time to do house errands, and best of all, allows me to spend as long as I want on that day's writing session!

Am I writing right now? Well, no, not yet. I've been giving the cats their requested attention and starting the laundry and realizing I'll need to zip over to the bank for more quarters as I'm doing three loads today. But it's still midmorning and I have the rest of the day ahead of me. I have time!

While I didn't get a chance to take my ten minute breaks outside the last couple of days, I'm not too worried about it. The plus side to having bookkeeping duties at the day job on the weekends is that it takes precedence over register duty unless we are super short-staffed. And the great thing is that's been somewhat rectified with three new hires this past week. I've met two of them and they're really nice and definitely people I don't have to babysit for hours on end. I can leave them alone up front while I do what needs doing in the cash office. 

All that to say that I've had a relatively calm couple of work days to the point where I didn't really need to head outside to detox! Heh. 

It's another wonky work week, this time due to the main bookkeeper taking his own days off, which is only fair, and it's not all that bad either. Only one midshift this time out! So today is my Sunday in which I get to do boring things like laundry and grocery shopping and catching up with blogs, heh.
 

In preparation for our mini-vacation starting tomorrow, we've spent most of today so far (after a tasty brunch at Joe's Coffee Shop) cleaning the apartment. This would include: using the Uproot Clean rake on the two rugs in the living room, a major scrub-down of the shower, washing of bedsheets and blankets, floor mopping, and vacuuming. [I will be starting in on that final one once I catch my breath.] 

And who, you ask, will be watching over our cats in our absence? One of my coworkers will be cat-sitting! They have experience and have confirmed their work schedule fits perfectly on the days we need. They'll be staying here so we're just making sure everything is clean and in working order.

And in between all that, I am of course also doing my weekly PC cleaning, of which I am about two weeks behind on. I'm not too worried considering I've had this new computer for about a month now, but it doesn't hurt to chase out those pesky bugs and fix those weak spots. Thankfully I have not had any PC issues so far other than the occasional internet drop-out (which I've mentioned here before), so it's always good to ensure it doesn't happen anyway!

Am now all sweaty and a bit tired, but it's worth it.