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Posts Tagged ‘personal’

OTC Medicine Anonymous

Today is sucking a little bit, because I’ve stopped taking medication. It’s a little masochistic, but a confluence of things over the last two months or so has had me downing a wide array of over-the-counter drugs, and I’m not real happy with that. So, time to detox. I’m moderately stuffed up and headachy and so on, but it’s subsided to a level I can live with, in trade for not pummeling my system with chemicals.

(Please note that I would not be doing this if I had in fact been diagnosed with strep; I would be taking my mold pills like a good little girl, because I am all about killing bacterial infections D-E-D, and in a manner which does not promote antibiotic resistance. But this appears to be a viral infection, so if I can live without clockwork doses of Advil, I will. I’m not feverish, just a bit achy.)

So. Lots of liquids is the order of the day.

I’m rather annoyed to have more or less lost my week to this business. I haven’t been completely unproductive, but the balance has swung much further toward that end of the spectrum than I’d like. Fortunately, my copy-edit for Ashes isn’t slated to arrive until early February, so I’ll have a chance to finish the things I wanted to do in January.

Oh! Speaking of which! I don’t think I’m on the website yet, but I will be at VeriCon at the end of the month. If you’re in the Boston area, come by Harvard for the fun.

Dude, this thing is HUGE.

I know that by the standards of modern monitor-dom, what’s sitting in front of me is kind of old-fashioned and poky. But there’s a 19-inch LCD on my desk now, and man, it’s going to take a while to get used to it.

Many thanks to kurayami_hime, who couriered it from Dallas, and to my parents, who donated it to the cause of bringing their daughter’s computer setup into the 21st century.

I can see, like, an entire page in Wordperfect now. Seeing as how I write in 12-point Times New Roman instead of standard manuscript format largely because it allows me to see more of the text at once, this is a non-trivial benefit. Also, there’s no longer a monitor stand taking up a chunk of desk — this one sits high enough on its own — and while I’ll miss the middle-shelf space the stand provided, it’s probably a good thing, given my propensity for losing things into the dusty back reaches of that shelf. Hey, now I’ve got space to put a book on the desk in front of me! Such luxury we have here at Castle N, Home Office Edition.

The cleaning of the Augean office got about four-fifths done and then stalled; I do need to finish it. But not tonight, nor tomorrow neither — not with the stupid respiratory bug that has camped out in my sinuses. My energy is reserved for getting some revision done tonight.

Mush!

what I have done so far in 2009

Spent time at a party with some new friends and some people I hope might become friends.

Slept in.

Made plans for dinner with old friends.

Ate macaroni and cheese, my favorite comfort food.

Come up with some ideas for ANHoD.

Watched the end of season one of House with kniedzw.

Taken a hot bath.

Done research on Mesoamerica for “Chrysalis.”

Revised part of the Sekrit Revision Projekt.

They say you should begin as you mean to go on; I’m pretty happy with how it’s gone so far.

Bye, 2008. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

This year . . . has not been what I would call great.

I recognize that it could have been so very much worse. To pick just one example out of the cornucopia of possibilities: sure, kniedzw lost his job, but he got a new one quite rapidly, and it pays better and has one-eighth the commute. I am very well aware that the stresses I suffered this year were mostly low- to mid-grade; they were, to use adjective degree as the yardstick, bad and occasionally worse, but never worst.

Having said that? This year had a lot of stress, just kind of grinding along near-constantly, and man, I am so ready for it to be done. Of course, just because a line of braniacs from Pope Gregory XIII on back decided that the calendar should flip over around now doesn’t mean that anything is going to change — and yet, the symbol is a powerful one. People are going to wake up on January 1st with a subconscious sense that the world has been reset, that something has ended, and it’s time for something new to begin. I am very ready to hit that reset button.

It didn’t all suck. The class I taught this spring was an enormous challenge, but it was also the single most rewarding semester of my teaching career. Once I’ve had a little more time to get over my screaming NO I DON’T WANNA reaction to grading, I would be very glad to teach creative writing again, especially spec fic. And my honeymoon was pure delight: two of the most relaxing weeks of my life, and certainly the blue-ribbon winners for this year. I’m happy to be in San Mateo, even if I do miss my B-town friends, and I could list for you many smaller bright points.

But 2008 has managed to simultaneously vanish into thin air and overstay its welcome. Roll on, 2009, and may you be better than your predecessor.

progress of the progressing

Computer switchover achieved. I dealt with all the data before Christmas, but now I’ve got the physical setup in place. It’s not quite ideal; I need to replace my keyboard (the old one being non-USB, the USB loaner being non-ergonomic), and I decided to just stick my laptop on the monitor stand rather than mess with making it recognize my dinosaur of a CRT, but it’s working.

And the office itself is approaching something like clean! Which is not the victory it looks like, since, well, that cleanliness was achieved by creating a mighty stack of Papers To Be Sorted, but the psychological effect is not to be discounted. Now I’m going to go downstairs and Sort What Needs Sorting while watching Prince Caspian on our shiny new Blu-Ray player. (This was the big “Santa present” for kniedzw; mine was a new digital camera, replacing the one that went belly-up in Athens.)

I’m feeling like I might be able to get real work done tonight.

the Augean office

Today I am undertaking one of the labors of Hercules, which is to clean my office.

When we moved, I spent a couple of weeks operating off my laptop in various places: my parents’ house, my brother’s house, my own empty townhouse, waiting for our belongings to arrive. Finally they did, and I set up my office, and all seemed to be well.

But my desktop developed a chronic inability to hold a connection to our wireless network, which is a non-trivial problem for me; so much of what I do requires me to be looking things up on the internet, not to mention all the e-mail and such. (Plus we keep our music on a media server, so without wireless, I can’t listen to anything without stupid and suboptimal workarounds involving my iPod and portable speakers.) As a result, I increasingly found myself working on my laptop downstairs. This is both ergonimcally unsound and a recipe for disaster in my office, as I kept chucking stuff in here and never really dealing with it. Three months after opening the first box in this room, it had gone from ideal to uninhabitable.

Which has had a seriously detrimental effect on my ability to get work done. Last month I was within a sneeze of buying a new computer — as the root problem of this all was the wireless issue — but I decided to postpone such a big purchase for a while, and instead to shift over to Puck, my faithful little Vaio, as my main computer. The goal is to have this place cleaned up in the next three days, so that I can start out 2009 with a nice, habitable office, a computer that works as it should, and all the other things that encourage productivity.

Wish me luck. We’re not quite at the level of “the Ark of the Covenant could be in here somewhere” clutter, but it’s close. It’s long past time to get this shit sorted out, and get me back to something resembling stability.

weeeeeeeird . . . .

So that’s what the backs of my teeth feel like.

Thirteen years ago, my orthodontist popped my braces off and glued a pair of permanent retainers to my incisors, top and bottom: two little wires, cemented in place, to keep my bite stable. When I went to college, I started bugging him to take them off, with no success; by the time I went to grad school, they had become such a fact of life I never gave them much thought at all.

Today, having had a dentist tell me I really ought to replace them with removable retainers, I had those wires taken out. For the first time in thirteen years, I can feel the backs of my teeth.

My mouth has become alien territory.

blast to the past

So I went to my ten-year high school reunion last week.

The short form is that there isn’t too much interesting to say; there weren’t any CIA spooks or hired assassins after me, and the whole event was hosted at a club rather than at the school, so Grosse Pointe Blank hijinks were not terribly likely. There were some people there I was glad to see, a bunch more I would have liked to see but didn’t come, and (thanks to the size of my graduating class) a giant crowd of people I wouldn’t have recognized ten years ago, either.

But it does encourage a bit of reflection. I don’t think I’ve changed very much in ten years, you see. Not so much because I’m still invested in who I was in high school — at least I don’t think that’s the case — but rather, I figured out quite a long time ago who I wanted to be after high school. What’s happened since then is, I’ve gotten better at being that person. I liked fantasy novels: my taste in them has improved. I liked certain kinds of art: I have the money to buy nicer examples of it now. I wanted to be a writer: I have three books in print. Music (in the performance sense) has sadly left my life, as has dance, but there’s no sense that I’ve “outgrown” them; the love is still there. I’ve gotten back into fencing. My hair is still long. <g> I’m just better at being me.

I can live with that.

Anybody have exciting high-school reunion stories? Did any of you rush off to reinvent yourselves after you escaped the madhouse?

It’s raining right now.

Like, actual water falling from the sky.

. . . I now live in a place where this is an event worthy of comment.

In other words, winter is coming — but not George R. R. Martin oh my god the Others are going to come over the Wall and kill everybody winter; just Bay Area “okay, time for the year’s precipitation” winter. I’m living in wet season/dry season territory now, and this is the first rain I’ve seen since moving here.

In totally unrelated news, Monster House is kind of an awesome movie.

cognitive dissonance

Yesterday, heading up to SF for dinner with jaylake, zellandyne, and a variety of other people whose LJ usernames I did not catch because they were all new acquaintances, I had an odd bit of cognitive dissonance.

Drive to Millbrae, park, wait around on the platform. Get on Caltrain. Sit down, pop in headphones, stare out the window —

And I’m in England.

Because, according to my subconscious, England is the only place in the world with trains. Or at least the only place I ever ride them. Ergo, if I am on a train, I must be in England.

My subconscious thought this was perfectly acceptable logic.

In which the moving castle moves house

Castle N 3.0 is up and running!

Well, not running. Groaning under the weight of boxes, perhaps. But our stuff is here; I’m sitting on my own couch, facing my own TV, and nothing is obviously missing, though as we unpack we may find something has gone astray. Right now, though, I ain’t worried about that.

(Unless the thing that has gone astray is the DVD player. kniedzw and I are bound and determined to be mindless couch potatoes tonight, if we can possibly manage it.)

It’ll take a while to settle in. But at least now we can start.

Update #2

Next up, housing.

We managed to finish packing in time for the movers’ arrival last week (though I had to abandon kniedzw to the task of handling them, since by then I was on my way to Dallas). More importantly, we managed — right before he left — to secure a sublease for our apartment, which we were on the hook for through April. Praise Be to the gods of housing, indeed. This is particularly worth noting because the subleaser we had lined up backed off at the last instant, leaving us with nothing. (I was caught somewhere between despair and murderous rage when I found that out, because I got the e-mail at 4:30 in the morning, right before we left to drive to the hospital for my father’s surgery. Can you say bad timing?) Anyway, all is well.

So now our stuff is somewhere in the Midwest, on its way here, and in the meantime we’re living at my brother’s house, which is where kniedzw has been all this summer. Our new place has a number of lovely things going for it, chief of which are the three skylights in the upstairs ceiling; combine that with big windows in the master bedroom and living room, and high ceilings and big rooms in general, and I am a happy cat with many sunbeams to nap in. (Once I have furniture instead of just a floor, that is.) My office is noticeably pink in the daytime, though, owing to the sun on the red roof tiles across the courtyard. Oh well. I can put up with pink.

Even better, it’s within walking distance of all kinds of fantabulous things. (Yes, d_aulnoy, such things do exist in California. Just not the part of it you’re living in.) After six years in a town with no Vietnamese food whatsoever, I now live within two minutes of some — most of those two minutes being spent getting out of and around my own apartment complex; if I could leap over the roof I’d be there in less than a minute. Had lunch there yesterday, and it wasn’t great, but you know what? There’s another one a block away, and more if I go looking. Yes, I am in the land of Asian Food Galore, particularly if you’re looking for Japanese. The Japanese population in San Mateo is dense enough that the restaurants don’t even have to call themselves “Royal Tokyo” or “Mr. Sushi;” they can be more obscure things like “Kaimuki” or even just “Liquid.” Y’know, like a normal restaurant, that can call itself whatever sounds nice.

Wandered on foot around downtown San Mateo for a little while this afternoon. It’s quite pleasant, and there’s Shakespeare in the Park this weekend, which always makes me look kindly on a town. (It’s Pericles, no less; this place has enough confidence in its outdoor Shakespeare to do the less-familiar plays.) The movie theatre is damned expensive, but it’s within walking distance, and it doesn’t suck like the Kerasotes monopoly in Bloomington, so hey.

More to come on this topic, I’m sure, once I actually start moving in.

First in a series

Didja miss me?

I haven’t been out of Internet access, but I’ve lacked the energy to post. Which has, of course, resulted in an incredible build-up of things I ought to or would like to post about. Rather than cramming them all in one monstrously long entry that nobody would read, I’m going to tackle one general topic at a time.

***

First off, health. As some of you know, my father went in for bypass surgery last week, and I flew home for it. He is doing very well — out of the hospital already, with only minor complications so far, knock on wood. So that’s one of my stressors deleted off the list.

Speaking of stress, though — funny story. My father gets out of surgery, I go in to see him, and come very close to passing out next to his bed. Which is odd, because I’m not generally a squeamish person, and standing in the ICU did not distress me in ways that typically result in fainting. Then I remember that I’ve been having problems with light-headedness lately, for about a week or two. When we get home that night, my mother trots out a home blood pressure cuff, in order to test a theory.

Now, I know those aren’t the most accurate things in the world, but even with a margin of error, 84/43 is kind of on the low side.

I’ve always had fairly low blood pressure; 100/60 is my usual. 84/43 is putting me in the territory of the bridesmaid who fainted at my wedding. (I suddenly understand how these things happen. And hey, add it to the list of things I can write about effectively.) Anyway, this is something I will consult a doctor about if it continues, but right now I’m curious. I mean, I thought stress was supposed to raise one’s blood pressure, not lower it. Does anybody have insight on/experience with this? Is it likely to be connected to a blood sugar issue? I’ve never had problems with hypoglycemia, but I kept testing myself with that cuff, and food most definitely affects the results.

I really don’t know what to make of this, except for a detached, intellectual interest every time my head goes kind of floaty and I feel like I’ve been hyperventilating.

So, yeah. Anybody with useful info on this matter, feel free to offer it in comments. I am, as I said, quite curious.

This article explains so much of my condition these days.

I have been up for three hours, but I have yet to make it out the front door to run the errands I need to carry out today. Deciding on dinner is hard, and what’s easiest tends to win. I spend my free time reading mindless comfort books, and have no social life because making that happen requires decisions, and those take energy.

Could this be because I spend my days organizing and packing the house (and doing things like picking a moving company) and my nights writing a brain-intensive book? While also trying to assemble enough of a committee to walk out of here with my master’s?

Nah.

It doesn’t fix the problem to have scientists tell me “you’ve got a limited amount of decision-making capacity and it gets harder the more you do it,” but it makes me feel better about being a lazy slug for whom picking which Netflix movie to watch seems like an awful amount of work.

ave atque vale

A surprise phone call tonight from my cousin, who lives in Florida was in the area for various things, suggesting that now might be a good time for the hand-off I had e-mailed him about months ago.

That abruptly, my French horn was gone.

It isn’t my horn; it never was. It belongs to my cousin, who played it professionally before giving that over in favor of the bass. And it isn’t abrupt. I haven’t played with an ensemble since the Lowell House 1812 Overture, Arts First weekend of my senior year; I haven’t played regularly since before that. I brought the horn with me to Indiana, where it has sat, unplayed, for six years. I’ve known that I won’t be playing with an orchestra or wind ensemble again. And back in February, I contacted him to say that I should probably give it back.

I don’t know how long I had it. They gave me a single horn when we started in sixth grade, because that’s how you start off; with the training wheels. Then they upgrade you to the double horn: another valve, another layer of tubing. (Way more heavy.) Did I play a school horn at first? I think I must have, before my cousin gave me the horn he used to play, a Holton that was — so the story went — one of three or four played by some famous musician at the Holton factory, but not the one he chose to take. Good enough for him to try, though. More than good enough for me.

Three years of high school, certainly. Three years of college, before I stopped. Probably at least a year or two more than that. Long enough for me to get sentimental.

It isn’t the object. It’s the admission that I’m done: I may still remember fingerings of pieces long gone, and listen instinctively for the horn line in any piece of music that has one — why do you think I love film scores so much? — but I’m not going to play again. I’ve lost my embouchure, and probably half the abs that used to support me on the high notes. (I used to still have decent abs, even after I stopped dancing, which I think must have been caused by propelling air through more than four yards of brass.)

Why did I pick this instrument? I don’t know. My mother always wanted to play it. One of my teachers told us years later that we had all been steered toward it because we had good faces, but that was before the orthodontist got hold of me. I don’t recall making the choice.

But anybody who did band in high school knows the types. Me? I’m not a trumpet player, or a flute, a clarinet, a drummer. I am very much a horn player.

It’s hard to let go of the symbols and tools of something that used to be such a part of your life.

Dear Mom and Dad: if you get rid of the piano before I get my own, I will cry.