miscellany

unplugged productivity & a kitty in the sunshine

Things I accomplished in my week of little-to-no internets, an unnumbered list.

  • Finished knitting the huge, boa-esque scarf that I have been working on for ages. Photos forthcoming. Of course, now that it is finished it is too warm outside to wear it. I have lousy knitting karma.
  • Read Shaun Tan’s Tales From Outer Suburbia on recommendation from Carey. I was a Tan fan already but this book is lovely bits of whimsical wonderment and I loved it to pieces. A perfect blend of words & pictures. This is going to be one of those books I read over & over, I can tell.
  • Managed to get a whole lot of revising done, including reworking a large part of the ending. I came up with the changes while completely hopped up on Sudafed and unable to breathe properly, but so far they still seem to work. Draft is still a mess, but it’s starting to look novel-shaped again. Sort of. If you squint.
  • Did not manage to properly get rid of this stupid cold. Am mostly better, but still congested. It is the cold that will not die no matter how much tea and vitamin C I give it. It makes me sad. *cough*

In other news, it’s disturbingly spring-like here. We had the windows open yesterday. It kind of freaked me out.

Tessa is enjoying the sunshine.

tessa sunshine march 2010

By erin, ago

unplugging, sort of

I’m taking this week off from the internet. Mostly. I’ll be checking my e-mail but that’s about it.

Originally I’d intended to do this in order to cocoon myself into the Revisionland Hotel and get large amounts of stuff done rather than little bits and pieces.

Now I have the added bonus of also trying to rid myself of a horrendous head cold that’s been making me a miserable monkey all weekend. I hardly ever get sick and I don’t even remember the last time I felt this ill. My ears hurt.

So I shall be crawling into cups of tea and gargling with cayenne pepper (it works, seriously) and I will be back on Friday with flax-goldens.

If you need me for anything or the internet blows up or you want to send me virtual vitamin C, feel free to e-mail me.

Love & kisses,

e.

By erin, ago

{cancer horoscope for week of february 18, 2010}

Once again, Rob Brezsny makes me feel better about my life:

“Jane Austen was the spinster daughter of a clergyman who led an uneventful life,” wrote Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Guardian. “She just happened to write half a dozen flawless masterpieces, which came perfectly formed, not from experience but from imagination.” Most of us don’t have anything close to the inconceivably potent imagination that Austen possessed. But I believe 2010 will be a year when you can access at least a portion of that wondrous capacity. You’ll be able to fantasize about vast possibilities in exquisite detail. You will have great skill at smashing your way free of limiting expectations through the power of your expansive vision. And the coming weeks will be a time when it should all kick into high gear.

By erin, ago

iWednesday

I spent a large portion of the afternoon mesmerized by the shininess of the Apple iPad. Even though it has a horrible, horrible name. For about an hour I seriously considered getting one, since we were planning on replacing our MacBook later this year anyway and we don’t use it for that much. And it seemed like it would be a good happy medium between my iPhone lust and my AT&T loathing.

And then I realized since it’s app-based I can’t really do anything useful on it and would be deprived of my beloved Scrivener. So I am going to have to ignore the shiny for now. Someone call me when it runs OS X.

In better news, I tested USPS requested package pickup today and it seems to have worked just fine, so I now have an alternative to walking to the post office in the snow when I have something larger than print envelope sized to mail.

And we are rolling toward the end of our epic LOST re-watch. Season 5 is a lot more, um, inconsistent than I’d remembered. Still good, just missing something. But I know the finale will make me cry again, so maybe I’ll forgive the inconsistencies in a few days.

Still in revisionland, of course. I’m not sure I’m going to have a finished(ish) draft by as early in February as I’d wanted, but it’s starting to look novel-shaped again, which is something. It still needs massive amounts of work but the structure is getting there and that’s making my brain hurt marginally less.

Bucket, as always, remains unimpressed.

unimpressed bucket 2010

By erin, ago

monday miscellany

  • As an addendum to the Fluevog-o-rama post, the boy would like me to mention that he does not have two pairs of vogs, he has three. I forgot about his shiny dress shoes with the diamond pattern that Googling has not helped me find a link or name of the style. They’re shiny, though. I should talk him into letting me do a photo retrospective of his shoes, too.
  • We finished re-watching Season 4 of LOST today. The entire finale is kind of brilliant. I still love Frank. They need to make a movie out of The Hunger Games soon because Tania Raymonde needs to be Katniss. I’m excited to re-watch S5. Also, my crush on Michael Emerson is pure & true & knows no bounds.
  • I’m still in revisionland, which mostly consists of writing down snatches of new scenes in a notebook while breaking down my previous draft in Scrivener. It’s a mess right now, but the new version is starting to have shape, so that’s something.
  • I’m weirdly obsessed with antlers lately, have I mentioned that? I recently got this necklace and I rather love it. I’ve been favorite-ing actual vintage antlers on Etsy, too, but people keep buying them before I get a chance to mull over where I might put them. (I do have one random antler hanging out on one of the bookshelves in the studio already.)
  • I don’t think I’m going to be able to catch the A.R.T.’s production of Gatz, unfortunately, but I’m loving getting bits of The Great Gatsby via @ARTGatz on Twitter. It’s making me want to re-read the book, which I haven’t read since high school.
By erin, ago