Work has been eating my life. Not that it’s been terribly stressful or that I’ve been working horribly long hours: there’s just this big chunk carved out of every day that I’ve had to myself for the last six months, and yet the cleaning and cooking and exercise and necessary mental vegetation time all still have to be done. I’ve been fallow, outside work: reading more and making less, putting things into my brain but not having much come out, so that I haven’t been doing much knitting or writing or chatting online. I assume it will wear off over time, since I’ve done all those things while working full-time before. (However, the whole thing has left me with a certain amount of awe for people who work fulltime and write books at the same time. Also, I’m grateful that most of our bills are set up to be automatically paid, or else can be paid with a few clicks online.)
I think fitting in exercise is getting slightly easier, or maybe I’m just having a good week; today I biked to work for the second day in a row, and yesterday I not only biked in, and walked to and from the client site during the day but also erged 10km and then cleaned bathrooms. Go me.
Today’s high spots were quadruple: first, Keen approved my warranty claim on sandals that have developed a slice where the strap connects to the sole, despite the fact that I bought them in the Netherlands and don’t have the receipt. They gave me a credit for the full cost of the sandals, good on their online store. I think I’ll probably end up with the same style, but buying online also means I get to decide which I want of the 19 colors it comes in. (As long as I’m placing an order, I may also replace the winter clogs I’ve worn for years and years that are starting to come apart at the sole. I like the idea of rewarding their good customer service.) Second, I felt like I did real contributing work today, on exactly what they hired me for. I was given a request by the manager of our biggest program to come up with a proposal for something important, with a somewhat silly deadline, and I pulled an initial draft together in an hour and have already got his general buy-in to my ideas. Now we just need to get everyone else to agree (this will be the time challenge) and present it to the customer in a week or so. Moreover, I think it hangs together and makes sense. Third, it turns out that the skiffy woman at work whom I like is also a spinner; we’re going to head out at lunch one day soon so I can take her to the local yarn shop. And fourth, yesterday was Book Day for a friend of mine – Shira Glassman’s The Second Mango is for same at Prizm Books and Amazon. The premise is interesting and I like that it’s loosely Jewish in the way that so much fantasy set in Ye Olden Tymes is loosely Christian. I haven’t read it so can’t vouch directly, but either way it’s fun to see my friend so excited 🙂
I will read it soon, because I’m almost out of Mercy Thompson books. Mercy is the heroine; the author is Patricia Briggs, and they’re firmly in the urban fantasy camp, with werewolves, vampires, assorted fae, and a shapechanging coyote who is Not a Were, Thank You Very Much.. I decided to read them after the aforementioned work-friend told me I was going with her to Orycon and that Briggs was the guest of honor. I like them very much, for most of the sam reasons I like Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels series, but it’s an odd thing; the two series have a lot in common, but I’m now on the seventh of these, having inhaled them all inside about a week (sing hey! for having disposable income again). Yet I find the Kate Daniels books require a bit of emotional fortitude for me, in the same way that say, Barbara Hambly’s Ben January books do, or anything by Elizabeth Bear, and so I don’t read them all that often. I can’t figure out what’s different and why this series feels more like comfort reading, with no entry barrier. I like the main character and her friends, and she generally ends up fairly battered by the end of each book. Characters do grow and change in the books; they aren’t meant to be heavy, but they aren’t fluff either. I’m not sure where the difference is. Simpler plots?