Drunken Owls and Other Delights

I am most definitely NOT going to think of my inability to sleep last night as a portent. It was simply New Year's Eve, with all the noisy nonsense that goes along with it, including neighborhood bros letting off fireworks and small and very annoyed doggos down the hall barking in response, and the fact that it was super chilly in the low 40s, cold enough that our cats joined us on the bed creating some slightly uncomfortable sleeping positions. Today's shift at work wasn't a portent either, I was just flipping exhausted from said lack of sleep. That's all.

So! All calendars have been set up or hung on the wall, the whiteboard schedule has been updated, and Spare Oom is in a relatively clean state thanks to A organizing the giveaway/donation piles today. The two blogs have been updated (I am taking the first couple of weeks off just because I just felt like it), this here blog is updated now, and I've chosen not to force myself to write at 750Words if I'm not up for it or have nothing to say or work on.

I do, however, have some plans for this year, both personal and creative, which I will most likely get to at a later time when I'm a bit more awake and energetic!

The new year is here! 

A few resolutions I have in mind:

--Make a concerted effort to minimize my social media habits. More to the point, to do a Twitter deep clean. I've been decent enough about minimizing my use of it, but I can do better...unfollow users I don't pay attention to, immediate-block trolls and rude users I don't know, and try to avoid the Trending tab as often as possible. And most importantly, to stop using it so much during my breaks at work!

--Related to the last point above: better utilize my downtime at work with creative things -- read an ebook on my phone, write notes for the MU4 project, write poetry and lyrics, that sort of thing. This is mainly for MU4, however...I want to dedicate as much time as I can to it.

--Related to work: considering the shop is eight blocks from our apartment, there's really no reason for me not to walk to work. Okay, there are a few: bad weather, super early or super late hours, and the fact that it's at the top of a hill...but I've been a bit lazy about it. I'll either take the bus (which drops me right out front but costs me $2.50) or drive up (which is really just a waste unless I'm doing some major shopping after shift. Working retail has definitely gotten me in much better shape, so why not continue that with a walk to and from work? It only takes ten minutes, so I see no reason why not.

--I'd said over at Welcome to Bridgetown the other day: on a personal note, I want 2023 to be a time for exploration and expansion. I spent the last two years cleaning out the emotional and personal detritus and building a better foundation, so it's time for me to figure out what's to go in its place. I have a few ideas, of course...more on that at a later time.

I don't have many resolutions to work on this time out, but they're all major ones, and I'm looking forward to making them a reality!


Hope you all have a wonderful and positive 2023!

These first couple of days of the year always feel like a prologue when they start on a weekend like this. We had New Year's Eve and Day off in addition to the weekend so it's an extended vacation in a way. I used to love it when school semesters started like this. It gave me that extra day or so to work on anything I left to the last minute (which, being me, was almost sure to happen). We did quite a bit of walking over those few days, usually to work off all the holiday feasts we'd had! Heh. And today we headed down the other end of the neighborhood for a bit of shopping. I bought a new wireless keyboard because the one that came with my PC is seriously starting to stick, even though I've cleaned it numerous times. Now I just need to make sure I don't get any crumbs in it!

Meanwhile, I put the Christmas tree away yesterday, but with it being a new and much taller fake tree, I had to figure out where to put it as it would definitely not fit under the bed. This meant emptying out Spare Oom closet and reorganizing a good portion of it. It took a lot of sweat and a few hours of creative Jenga, but it's a lot more accessible now. I moved all of A's stuff (yarn stash and canning items) to the side where she can get at it much easier, and I took out the three big boxes that contain the remains of my CD and cassette collection.

This ties in with my next non-writing project:

--Go through the items that were in the two wooden storage boxes (mostly personal crap). Throw away/recycle stuff I don't want/need and keep the remainder in small storage boxes (the fewer the better)
--Go through the cds and cassettes that I no longer want and set them aside for bringing to Amoeba for store credit or Goodwill donation. Put them in some semblance of order while I'm at it. [Side note: I know I have a few cds that have dvds attached, so I may rip those as well.)
--Put the remaining cds in the wooden storage boxes, with the remaining cassettes (mostly all personal mixtapes, natch) on top.
--Donate any leftover clothes/books/etc to Goodwill

...and of course, keep that corner of the room clean, because that area frequently builds up with "to be mailed/donated/traded in" items. I need to keep on top of that more often. But yeah, that was a major step I wanted to hit. The issue was that I had so many other steps to take beforehand (mailing out Christmas packages, book/clothing/etc donations, throwing away extraneous crap).

SO! As for the writing...

I'll be continuing the blogging, journaling and daily words as normal, and get myself immersed in the new fiction projects I want to tackle. I can't really say I have a block, because I know how to work past the issues I've had the last few weeks on them, but...it's the actual work that I need to get stuck in. And as always, "just STFU and DO it" tends to work well for me.


Hope everyone has a wonderful 2021!

Here we go.

I spent a good portion of 2019 disconnected from a lot of things. Not so much out of a desperate need to escape, but more to clear my head and do a lot of introspective thinking about personal things.

I needed to learn how to trust myself better -- to trust my instincts, my emotions, my thoughts and ideas, without outside influence. And by that, I really mean that I needed to learn how to do things and feel emotions and make decisions for my own happiness and not necessarily to please others.

That was one hell of a long-standing barrier that I had to break down, one that I'd had since I was a pre-teen, and one that took a lot of stubborn will to break down and keep down. It wasn't anything I was forced into, mind you; this was my own decision as a young kid, and one that helped me in some respects but truly hindered me in others. It was a survival instinct that evolved into a security blanket and finally into a lazy habit.

I spent most of 2019 not just learning all that, and not just learning to keep that old barrier away, but also learning what makes me happy in the first place. What kind of person do I want and need to be? What are my true emotions (that is, not reactive to stimuli)? What do I need to do to become this person I should really be?

All of this without the constant worry of "what will others think of me" or "will it make so-and-so mad at me" or even the worst of the self-confidence questions, "do I really want this in the first place?" I won't ask that anymore. It's not me anymore.

I spent most of 2019 learning who that person is.  I'm going to spend 2020 becoming that person in real life.

Life has been moving pretty fast lately.  The Day Job has been keeping me consistently busy -- not to the point of exhaustion, at least not just yet, thankfully -- so I haven't been doing too much work as of late.  I'm still of two minds on that.  Part of me is relishing the relaxation and downtime of just goofing off and having a bit of fun, but part of me is also really frustrated that I'm not getting nearly as much done with my books as I'd like.

That said...I have been consistent with my blogs, I've been slowly fleshing out the Apartment Complex story, I have my 2018 calendars ready to go, all the Christmas shopping is done and the packages are out and away, the house is clean, and errands are caught up.  Oh -- and I did a reread of Meet the Lidwells for its last revision, plus I have a perfect idea for the cover that just needs some photography.  So it's not as if I've been sitting on my backside all day doing nothing.

I guess this means that I'll be thinking about what I want to do for new year's resolutions in the next few days or so.  I've got a few things in mind already...some personal things, some writing-related things.  I'll most likely blog about them when we get closer to the end of next week.  Which reminds me...I'm gonna need to make my year-end compilations pretty soon!

Woo! The new year is here! A. and I had a quiet NYE, staying in and having a few drinks while watching multiple episodes of The Avengers (the show gets more ridiculous and hilarious the more I watch it). I may have also done a bit of TPoM editing as well. We were both in bed by 10 and did our usual bit of bedtime reading until we finally passed out around eleven. We were of course woken back up an hour later by the city's fireworks (both the official ones on the Embarcadero and the countless illegal ones in the neighborhood) and a few bros on the roof woohoo-ing. Hello 2016! Now shut up and let us sleep. We're old. :p

Yesterday we went for a long walk around the neighborhood, as it was a gorgeous day for it...not a cloud in the sky. We walked up Lake to about 4th Avenue, cut over to Clement, and stopped for lunch at Koja, a relatively new restaurant of fusion Korean-Japanese cuisine. We'd heard great reviews, and were not let down. Their umami fries (waffle-cut and drenched with pulled pork, coconut milk, sriracha, and onions) were amazing! Definitely a place to hit again. After that, we headed over to Green Apple Books, where I found a used copy of the new Greil Marcus book I've been looking for (he's my favorite music writer) and the new Maile Meloy YA book, which I didn't know was out. The rest of the day was spent about the house. I may have spent New Year's Day doing boring errands such as laundry and doing a bit of cleanup in Spare Oom. We also watched the classic movie Charade with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. That movie was so much more fun than I remembered it being!

But! I also spent it doing a lot of writing-related things as well. January 1st is always when I update the writing schedule whiteboard above my desk, so I thought about what I wanted to put up there. Two of my longterm projects (Books 2 and 3 in the trilogy) will finally be finished and released out into the wild later this year, so I chose to leave them off. Instead I focused on newer projects: the Walk in Silence book, hitting daily practice words, and maintaining a schedule for my two WordPress blogs. [After WiS is released, my next focus will be on the new Mendaihu Universe novel (and possible side stories).] I purposely left the weekends open for the time being, as I was planning on using those as either days off or project catch-up. And of course post here at the LJ.

After updating the whiteboard, I made good on it: I wrote 900 practice words, updated my personal journal, wrote a few WiS pages, and updated the WiS blog. Once I got into the rhythm, I just kept going with it. I even had time at the end to sit back and goof off a bit at the end of the evening. Yay!

Looking forward to this year...it's going to be busy, but in an extremely good way. :)