Drunken Owls and Other Delights

WHOOF that was a longass week for the Day Job. Three midshifts followed by two morning opens, and each day had its planned day go awry for the most annoying of reasons. Some days it was front end people getting pulled to do other work. Other days it was someone from a different department coming in late so the person who was supposed to open with me had to take their place, leaving me solo for the first hour. And of course midshifts mean dealing with not one but TWO busy waves (lunchtime with the high school teens and dinner time with the people stopping on the way home from work). Most all of these reasons meant me doing not just my job but someone else's on top of that, so at the end of each day I was exhausted. I can handle the occasional derailment of plans, but not when it's every single flipping day!! Yeesh.

And on top of all that, even though I get to wake up at 6am instead of earlier, it only allows me maybe three hours or so to squeeze in things I'd like to do like blogging, writing sessions and so on. By the time I get home at 8pm on those midshifts, I'm too tired to do anything except jump into bed and read until I eventually fall asleep.

The plus side is that next week is all opening shifts -- which are my favorites and ones that don't entail multiple busy waves or Drop Everything And Do This Instead moments. Tuesday's shift is kinda-sorta a midshift at 10-6.30, but it means I'll still be home for dinner and time to chill before heading to bed. I can handle waking up stupid early because I get out at 2pm al the other days, and have the entire rest of the day for myself, including a midafternoon chill-out. I'm always saying that I prefer these and eventually I'd like to talk to the boss about making that a bit more permanent, but we shall see.

Our weeklong vacation has been very relaxing and enjoyable so far. We spent the last three days up in Bodega Bay just enjoying the scenery, the wildlife, and the blessed silence, but we are now back in the city and plan to do not much of anything except maybe do a bit of shopping and go to the zoo at some point. Can't complain! I do plan on getting a few other things done on the interim considering I have all the time for it.

Also happy that I'm catching up on sleep. The last several weeks have been kind of wonky, between waking up at 4am some days and working until 8pm other days, partly due to a few people being out on leave, but hopefully that'll change soon upon their return. One of my coworkers gladly watched/fed/played with our cats in our absence, and they've updated me on what's going on at the shop (which, apparently, not much of anything new other than a few grumpy people and another person unsurprisingly calling out AGAIN). I'll be honest, I'm glad I now work at a place where I can return after a vacation and not have to worry about spending the next two weeks cleaning up the fallout of any email inboxes!

Meanwhile, today's vacation excitement is to take the bus downtown to explore the brand new IKEA store. Heh.

Dreamwidth is so weird sometimes. I can't seem to tell if it likes or hates my VPN software. Sometimes I'll log in with no problem (like today) and sometimes I'll get a 404 error instead (yesterday). And I don't like leaving the VPN off for too long because I'll forget to turn it back on sometimes.

Anyhoo! It's Friday and I'm listening to KEXP as usual while preparing for another day of writing work and new music releases. It's been kind of an odd couple of days recently because I've stopped writing on the 750Words site (albeit temporarily) while I put Queen Ophelia aside for a few weeks. This has given me some open time which I've been using to completely focus on Theadia, and to remind myself that it's okay to take a bit of time to, y'know, enjoy some silly things like playing a few rounds of FreeCell or reading a few pages of that wrist-breakingly heavy Paul McCartney Lyrics book. I don't necessarily NEED to be productive every single moment of my waking day, yeah?

Thinking lately about the character interaction in Theadia, actually. One of the things that make this book is the importance and necessity of interpersonal relationships, and I'm having fun exploring what I can do with that. Two of the characters (not the title characters) are Space Force co-pilots and bffs, and I decided it would be fun to create something where that kind of close friendship is not just accepted but expected and promoted in that field. Dani and Lee aren't connected romantically in any way, but their connection is just as deep. They're fine with showing emotion and giving and accepting comfort when needed. Unlike Althea and Claudia, who are two besties and utterly in love in that 'already married' way, Dani and Lee's relationship is such that they've set it up so they can wholly trust and depend on each other when it matters most.

Oh, and to make it official here: In my brain I still pronounce it as thee-YAY-dee-a (as Lee likes to say it), but you can pronounce it however you like. THEE-yah DEE-ah is fine, as is thee-YAH-dee-ah. The point is that this is Thea and Dia's universe, and we're all just drawn into it. :)

My solo vacation down in LA is coming to a close when I fly out tomorrow early afternoon. I of course didn't get to hit every single thing I wanted to do, but on the other hand I got a LOT more done than I expected, and I truly enjoyed it! I definitely had to temper myself with the shopping as I only have a carry-on and my satchel (and I didn't want to be THAT person and take up three overhead bins with The Biggest Hard-Shell Suitcase Known to Man), but what I did get is relatively small so I can squeeze it into the nooks and crannies of either bag.

The biggest surprise is the amount of driving I did and I only used a half a tank of gas!  I drove out to visit queenoftheskies , drove the entire length of Wilshire Boulevard to Santa Monica (and drove all the way back via Sunset Boulevard), drove all the way to Burbank for the zoo and the WB tour...and of course drove up from LAX and will do the same on the way back. I think it's partly that I avoided highways for the most part, but I have to say this car definitely has great mileage!

The room itself is quite nice. The building, Museum Tower Apartments, is still in the process of being renovated but for the most part their work has been unobtrusive. (They're working mostly on the bottom levels now.) It's essentially a studio apartment with a full kitchenette. While I was up in Hollywood I'd decided to stop at the Trader Joe's there and buy me some real food so I'd save money and not eat crap the entire time. Simple readymade stuff like salads and juice and cereal, but it worked out just fine. There's also no maid service (the room is kinda sorta rented out via ElevenApartels, and they'll do a cursory clean-up after I check out), so it was up to me to keep the place clean and organized for the most part. Which of course appeals to my obsession with cleaning things! Heh. Seriously, though...I would definitely recommend this place. Even despite the construction going on here and pretty much everywhere else in the neighborhood (or the rest of the city, for that matter), it's nice and well-kept and close to everything, including numerous highways.  And VERY cheap, compared to some of the other fancy hotels we've stayed at here!

ANYHOO.

Tomorrow will be my return home, and Friday will be Day One of BayCon!  Can't wait! :D

It's been a nice relaxing weekend here, not doing much of anything at all.  A good walk through the neighborhood, some minor grocery shopping, and a call home to Mom, and that's about it.  Can't complain!

I do need to start working a bit on the panels I'll be on at BayCon in a few weekends, though.  This one's going to be a bit interesting, as these panels aren't exactly the ones I normally sign up for.  Two of them are of my own making: one dealing with the idea of mentors in the Star Wars universe (A's idea, actually), and another focusing on science fiction and fantasy in music within the last few decades (which I'm actually kind of surprised got accepted!).  The third is another interesting one: returning to a created world after spending time away from it (which of course I'll talk about the Mendaihu Universe).  No panels on self-publishing or doing readings this time out!  So yeah... gotta prepare for those!

As for the 750Words project from the other day...that seems to be going well so far.  I'd forgotten that the old one on my joncwriter email is a free account because I joined way back in 2012 (when they went to a paying site, the old users were grandfathered in as lifetime free), so when I set up the GMail-tied one, I had to pay.  It's only $5 a month, and the site is so worth it, considering I use it nearly every single day.  It's only been a few days, but I can definitely feel a difference, because I'm forcing myself NOT to focus on the book-as-whole, only on the scenes at hand.  I'm going to keep going with it until further notice then.

Not much else to report here.  Hope everyone had a a good weekend, and Happy Mother's Day! :)

So yeah, it seems I've been avoiding an internet presence for the last few weeks. I didn't so much plan it as it just happened that way. Aside from my last few LJ posts and a few comments here and there on the Twitterverse, I've pretty much been internetting rather passively as of late.

You know what? I don't mind.

It's kind of interesting, really...there are days when I pop onto Twitter and read all the funny and/or interesting conversations I may have missed out on and feel like I'm late for the party, but at the same time--does it really matter? Yes, it's fun conversation, and it's always fun to be a part of it as it happens (and it always feels forced to add a silly comment well after the hilarity has passed), but it's just light conversation. Sometimes I feel like I'm missing out on being a part of something, but then I remember--this is how it felt before the internet, my friend. We didn't always have Instant Camaraderie in affordable value packs. So it's not worth fretting over. I'll pop in and say hi, make the occasional comment, share the occasional link, post the occasional blog entry, but it's not vital.


A lot of the internetting has actually been doing music research for Walk in Silence, but I've also been doing a lot of goofing off, on purpose--relaxing, playing around, letting my mind wander, just having fun. Getting it out of my system, calming my brain down, centering my chakra, whatever you want to call it. I'm almost always trying to focus on something, do something, think something almost every waking minute, and it's been ages since I've taken it easy (not including vacations of course). It's been awhile since I've had passive enjoyment.

That's not to say I've been lazy, of course. Emm and I have been going to the gym on a relatively normal schedule, and we do a LOT of walking on the weekends. In fact, we walked a whopping 7.47 miles today, probably enough for me to have walked off my quite large brunch at the Hawaiian restaurant on Clement. While I still have that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I should be doing something creative or constructive, I remember that I'm usually sitting on my duff for eight hours a day at a job where I rarely have a second's mental peace. Getting out and seeing the city for a few hours is better than solitary confinement in front of a computer screen.

It's good to get out every once in a while. See the real world instead of just the virtual one.