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Even in a little thing  Brisbane is warmer than Canberra. I know this because the host of this month's blog carnival has done something particularly witty with the Carnival and that means her brains are working and that means the cold has not frozen them. Check it out for yourself. Tonight is the night of much sleep. It has been a vast day in so many ways. Lots of troubleshooting. I intend to troubleshoot my own life through hot water bottles and bed and leaving my alarm clock in my handbag. Have a nice evening, everyone. I am not a geek. If I say this often enough, it will be true. Just because I read certain books and have played certain games makes me well-rounded, not a specialist in such things. It's not that I don't want to be a geek. It's just that really and truly, I'm not one. I lack advanced geekly skills and I even more sadly lack advanced geekly obsessions. I'm revisiting the whole of Stargate, for instance, but I will never remember episode names or birthdays. I want to be a folkdancer too, and folkdancing has to be on hold for a bit. Even when it wasn't on hold I lacked a certain je ne sais quoi. I have a letter to prove it. I can dance Bulgarian rhythms with great exactness, but I look imprecise when I do so. Also, just for the record, just because I own three skulls (four, including the one I carry my brains in) and one of them is disarticulated and in a 1903 box next to a nineteenth century book containing household hints and next to some handmade lace and Indian arrowheads (not scavenged - I discussed techniques with the maker - why don't I ever use this knowledge in my writing?) does not make me a Goth. All the food history and cooking doesn't make me a chef, as anyone knows who has tried one of my less-successful experiments. I can cook better than I can play computer games and way better than I can emanate gloom, but I'm still not cheflike. Besides, chefs don't tell nice people that they're eating caterpillars when really, they're eating dried white mulberries. Add everything together, and what you get is a Gillian. This Gillian is about to take an hour off to watch The House of Eliott and to read another volume of Ex Machina. The combination is sure to resolve any incipient identity crisis. PS If you think this post might be tongue in cheek then you're entirely correct. I wrote 350 really words about the effects of haunting on one of my characters, late last night and as a result I had interesting dreams. Not - oddly- about ghosts. I see many interesting dreams in my future because I do most of my fiction late. murasaki_1966 has alerted me to the highly important fact that some crucial elements of Middle Earth are not, in fact, in New Zealand.
I've done eight of the labours of Hercules. I found the last of my tax and will post it tomorrow on the way to teaching. I've got one pile to go, but the worst is done. I've even done most of the work associated with most of the piles, *and* I've set up more space for holding cookbooks and maybe found a solution to my rug problem (not that I admitted I had a rug propblem, until I found a possible solution). My lounge room still looks a bit burdened with paper, but I can't do anything else until after the teaching section of the week is over. I'm pretty sure that I've taken care of all the urgent stuff, though. This is just as well, given I didn't get to lunchtime until 3 pm and haven't so much as begun to tackle the problem of my kitchen yet. The problem of my kitchen is dirty dishes. PS When I needed a break I bottled last year's medlar liqueur. This made just enough space in my library so that I can make and store more liqueur. This is entirely essential, because fresh medlars are coming my way very shortly. Very, very shortly. Pialligo Apples might have some left after I've bought half the crop - you'll have to ring and ask, though. Today I feel somewhat Herculean. Over the past five days, a bunch of friends have come through my place. Some just dropped in, others visited and then we went out and did things (my winter grocery shop, yay!). Several of them commented - politely - on the amount of paper I had round. It's the middle of a period of high work for me and my lounge room is also my office. So paper makes sense. Since I have several things going at once (various writing projects, two types of current teaching plus upcoming teaching and various papers that other people want advice on, plus everything financial, which is almost all out of the way now, but not quite) the paper is spread out. There isn't nearly as much as there was a few weeks ago, because I've been working very hard to get the whole thing under control. What the paper was, was sorted. I could go straight to the bit I was working on and just pick up where I left off. Yesterday I had intended to finish three lots of things and today another two and to diminsh the paper so that I could get through the teaching period without any worries about outstanding other matters. They were very close to being finished, after all, and there wasn't much work in them, and then all those papers could be cleared away and I could heave a sigh of relief. It was a nice theory. I haven't done any of it. What I'm doing instead is trying to find everything. I think most of my visitors must have cleared just a little bit of paper out from where it bugged them, quietly and without telling me. What I found last night when I have woke up from my grand fatigue was three big piles. The papers hadn't just been moved (which, frankly, wouldn't have been a problem) - they had been moved into a tidy state, where pieces of research jostled with research material jostled with novel jostled with teaching jostled with tax jostled with stuff left out because it was urgent but didn't fit in any category. I didn't even want to look at it then. Too many crowded thoughts shoved randomly into three big piles. To be honest, I don't really want to look at it today, but I have to. I'm only relieved that the tax papers were almost all away before friends dropped in. The urgent stuff from my accountant (that was going to go out yesterday) is somewhere in all the papers, though the envelope ready for it wasn't moved - I'm just going to have to find it and then send it when I can and hope it's not too late. Today I'm gradually diminishing and sorting those piles and finding everything again. The good thing is that I've already located my teaching materials for Wednesday and most of my teaching materials for Tuesday. None of this is the end of the world. It does make me wonder though, if people who don't work at home just assume that home offices are paperless or organisation free? I'm turning into a dormouse. It's as if someone swapped most of my background pain for fatigue. There's nothing wrong with sleep and there's something really nice about untouched pain relievers. I haven't done much apart from sleep and hunt stove and shop this weekend. Thanks to Jennie I have a cupboard full of things like rice so that no matter how much I far decline into dormousitudinousness I shall get through winter. Also thanks to Jennie, the stove is identified and can be bought once the arcane rituals of installation have been worked out. Apparently one needs a special electrician for such a task. Imagine, in a few weeks time, I might have a working stove! It won't be a fancy piece, but it will fit the available space and take up the available money (part of my retirement savings, if the truth be known). There are some skills I'll have to relearn, like roasting and baking. A microwave/convection oven cooks so very differently to a normal one, you see. The rest of my weekend was mainly dreams. I just had a really interesting talk with my mother. I wish I could tell you it all, but most of it is really for family only. It's the sort of deep stuff that one goes into, after a funeral (which went well, BTW). We did, however, compare the management of chronic illness with the management of the aches and pains of advancing age. There are a lot of similarities. My thought was that managing either is like teaching a classroom of year ten boys (age fifteen and full of recalcitrance and originality and hormones and follow-the-sheep-into-idiocy). My mother is going to consider this deeply through her medical appointments next week and get back to me. She's an ex-teacher and has taught many groups of year ten boys in her time. My argument was that a pasing grade is when we are able to lead a carefully managed but full life and a fail means giving up. Her answer was "We'll see." Thank you, everyone, for your kind thoughts. I should have gone to Sydney and the funeral today, but I couldn't face it. I couldn't face testing more drinks, either. I'm sure I've done something with my day besides folding two sheets, but the day is gone and I can't recall where. I've drifted in and out of thoughts of Auntie Nyn, and most of the day has shaped itself around that. Thinking back, today was folded (with the sheets) into lots of little segments. Two notable things (both related to fiction) and everything else was mundane. Not unhappy, just mundane. Some of it was very good, in fact, just not extraordinary. This was just as well. I'm emotionally fatigued and I only just realised it. I also have a cold, but there's nothing special about that. It is winter, after all. Tomorrow is a much bigger day. At the beginning of winter a friend helps me stock my pantry so that I can cope with all the colds and flus I get. We restock tomorrow. We will also look at stoves, in the hope that I can find one to replace my 93% dead one (the stove is entirely dead and so is the grill, but I still have 2 working electric elements) with reconfiguring the kitchen. This means that tomorrow I will feel energetic, whether I am or not. Either that, or I will curl into an afternoon nap when it's all over. I cancelled today. Too much headcold (lots of sneezing, very good for certain muscles) and too much need to sleep. Right now, the screen is dancing a little jig before my eyes, so I know I'm not over it yet. I ought to like it when the computer screen makes me sea-sick, because then I can write about seasickness with great heart and feeling, but today I am supposed to be redoing an introduction for an editor who is - alas - completely right about what needs fixing. I do not want seasickness in the introduction. This means I'm doing sincere and careful thought in front of DVDs (The House of Eliot has costume notes for anyone thinking about Conflux clothes) Because the TV doesn't do jigs. |
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