Oli would like you to know that I need to rearrange my desk.

I mean, he’s not wrong, but if you could see the way he tries to get settled in the morning – So he jumps up on the middle right of the desk, behind the Laptop “Stand” (Carcassone on top of a book on top of a board game I have a writing credit one), to the pile of things I have to deal with – some book tape, some paperwork, and what looks like the sealer for big mylar bags, then behind the monitor “stand” (Complete Works of Shakespeare and then a stack of cookbooks through – I don’t normally look back here – muslin?, a 3×5″ spiral notebook, a half-burned candle stack from when my mother was getting a lot of teacher gifts…

…Mom taught 4thish grade for several years, from after I left home ’till she retired, so probably about 4 years ago, and I never actually knew teacher gifts were a thing growing up, but Mom certainly had a lot every time I went home for Christmas.  T. likes the Ferrerro Rochers and I like the containers they come in, but there’s also the scented candles, the mugs, the hot cocoa mixes….

…I kinda like this one, it smells like cinnamon.

Okay, so over the cinnamon candle and the cute corner punch – oh, that’s where that went! – and now he’s to the far back left corner, so he wends his way through two pen cases and a take-out soup container of pens, two books and right now a piece of 2×4 and a box of screws, and then he’s got to deal with my bullet journal, whatever pens I haven’t put away, my keys and cell phone (both of which I sometimes need to get into work programs), and of course, breakfast. Continue reading →

Birthday

Today starts the 4th week of my work-from-home adventure, and tomorrow is my birthday (Happy birthday to my cousin C today, who is a day and a year older than me and is at home with 8-year-old triplets and a child a year or two younger… here’s hoping she’s kept her sanity!). 

(Shh, I know what it says on all my profiles.  That’s … a thing. )

That means Thursday is T’s birthday, and that makes Wednesday the holiday we usually celebrate as Our Birthday.  I often take off either My Birthday or Our Birthday off of work, but I’m sort of wondering what the point is this time. 

I mean, maybe I can find out if one of my favorite Thai places is still open  & doing take-out, that’d be nice. I haven’t had Thai in a while…. Maybe I’ll make myself a cake. 😀 😀

And then make T a cake 2 days later…

Yesterday, I met Mom & Dad halfway at a park at the top of Seneca Lake & we had a rather chilly picnic and a nice walk.  Mom made veganized German Potato Salad (It was really quite good) and the sweet rolls I love and never make because Extra Steps. 

We were a nice Social Distance away from the fishermen fishing up and down the river.  ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_River_(New_York) )

There were also people walking their dogs, people biking, and people doing something that looked like parasailing maybe? Paraskiing?

Ah!  A google tells me it was probably kitesurfing!  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiteboarding

For a windy, grey day before the park even opened, when all the bathrooms and playgrounds were closed, it was a rather busy day at the beach – and everyone kept their distance. 

We’re not going to have picnic weather again this week or next, it looks like, but maybe we can come up with something.

Anyone else marking holidays or landmarks while in lockdown?  How’re you improvising?

Today, in lieu of a work blog post, I’m going to present a couple scenes or snippets from my morning dream, which was weird.

Class was in a huge room -a cathedral? Possibly a former cathedral. It had that feeling.  The professor was unkind, short with anyone.

And as if the words had been presented on a script, I found myself cutting in.  “Professor, if you think that we are idiots, the reasonable thing to do would be to explain things to us when we ask questions. If you continue to berate us, we won’t ask questions, and thus we’ll stay ignorant.”

The professor ignored me completely.

I fled up to the choir loft. Here things become a little obscure, because I believe three things happened at once, but my dreams do like to overlap scenes.

Angels came crashing in from the highest window, from the skylight, and landed in the choir loft.  Other people examined them, finding they were covered in lash marks, dead, fear on their faces.

What could make the angels fear? people murmured.

The man-who-was-courting-dream-me brought me a bag of chocolate and told me he thought I was crazy, but it was all right.

In another place, an Emperor forced a prisoner to tell him who he’d been.

In the Cathedral, the Emperor walked down the stairs and declared himself returned.  He declared the man-who-was-courting-me to be his heir, because such was needed now, in this time of chaos.

The Emperor was back, he declared, and there would be Changes.

I watched the man I loved – by this point I was no longer me, outside of that person, but we’ll stick with “I” for the moment – walk out to greet the crowd, a smaller crowd at a rural church.  He’d been adorned, wearing the golden headpiece and torque of a pharaoh, although his lovely curly hair was still visible.

(Was the scene where a ninja-warrior girl broke in and stole some clothes from a statue, the golden headcloth and the complicated torque and some clattering head-beads, was that part of the dream, or was that in something I watched?)

“He’s not all that good looking,” murmured Missandei in my ear, but I disagreed.  He was perfect – but the Emperor had stolen him from me to make him a god.

I was watching as the now-High-King-and-Savior (the man who had courted me) took off the headpiece.  “Is this what you did to them?” he asks the Emperor, in private. “When you came the last time? Did you trick them into making them think you were a god?”

“I did what was necessary,” the Emperor told him.  “And so will you.”

The overarching story appeared to be one of someone who ruled over a huge empire but rarely made a showing, who used trickery a la Wizard of Oz and special effects when he needed to, especially on backwards worlds.

And then, of course, I woke up.

I miss small talk.

I didn’t realize this until Monday, Tuesday, when people were walking, running, jogging by and I would be far more chatty than I normally am with strangers-walking. And then picking up pizza last night (we have finally run out of things that Must Be Cooked in our fridge), and I wanted to talk talk talk.

Not about anything important. Not to form any meaningful connection.  Just to chat.  Just to have intercourse with another human being that was in no way Important, or tricky, or anything. Just Chatting.

(Husband is not great at Chatting.  Even social media these days is fraught with traps, although cat pictures are safe everywhere (which is good; Oli has taken to camping out on my desk and sometimes directly in front of my laptop camera) and my realization yesterday that I could make masks and skirts that met was met with lots of favorites… but little interaction, even at the small talk level.

I want to chat with people about how their day was and what they had for dinner, you know?  What their cats are doing even when I don’t care, so I can talk about what my cat is doing (sleeping on the back of the chair next to me, like she does every morning; Theo is stalking the house looking for something and Oli is probably looking for more food.).  Or you know, what our plans are for the weekend (Same thing we do every night, Pinky.) or the yard chores we can do now that the snow is hopefully gone.

We need to repair our garden beds. I suppose at some point we’ll actually have to GO to Lowes, since they do not deliver peat moss, even when you’re having a fridge and a lawn roller delivered.

Oh, and then of course we’re going to roll our lawn (roll your own… ♪♫) and we bought lawn timbers (we had to measure our lawn to buy a fridge!).

And firewood.

And more firewood.

Last night was moving firewood to clear a spot to put the car in the Spare Driveway (so our house has 2 driveways – one in front of the garage, and then, 50-100 feet away, one in front of the house.  The garage one is currently, and often, filled with firewood.) so the ‘fridge could be delivered.

So!  What are you up to?

What are you doing this coming weekend?

How’re your yards, if you have them?  How’re your cats?

How are you doing with socialization and interaction?

Did anyone else scroll through two weeks of XKCD comics to find the CORRECT coronavirus comic?1

…OH that’s part of why I keep listening to podcasts.

NOISE

Mines

It’s time to address the cubic elephant in the room:

Minecraft. 

I have been playing a lot of Minecraft. 

The rail line I’m building on our shared server is pretty amazing; the giant room I’m carving out at the bottom of my mine is, um, well, giant, and sometimes I just take a day and build a rail station. 

It’s pretty cool. 

The struggle is keeping it at reasonable levels, and I’m not entirely sure I succeed all the time, but I have check lists of things I want to get done every day – x number of work tasks, x number of things for my web pages, for the house – and as long as I keep those in check, I’m not all that worried. 

One of the things is all those meetings. 

When I’m in a meeting that I need to be at but that’s about it, there’s a lot of sitting-there time and minecraft is a good way to help me focus the rest of my mind on what’s being said. 

Doing actual work means I’m distracted, doing writing is nearly impossible. 

When IRL in meetings, I did drawing.  Maps.

At home, it’s minecraft.

It has a sort of positive/negative effect in that it feels productive. So I feel like I’m getting something done, which is a great feeling, and sometimes with this treading-water feeling work is giving me, is a great thing.  

On the other hand, if I feel like I’m getting something done on the computer when the dishes still need to be done…

(The dishes are done.  The floor has been vacuumed.  Today’s task is cleaning the area around the fridge and the entry way to the house and then cleaning it some more.  And then a little more)

We get a new fridge tomorrow!!!

Lipstick

 If you know me in person – which few people reading this do – you know that I rarely wear make-up.  In the last decade, I think I’ve had my makeup done for two weddings and once done something for a LARP.

It’s not that I don’t like the idea of it, it’s that I learned only basic makeup back in the late 80s, early 90s and back then, having ‘cheap skin’ as I do (sensitive skin) everything itched and a bunch of it made me break out.  Not a good look, especially not in your early teens. 

Top that with the fact that I tend to shower, get dressed, leave for work. (Shower, get dressed, log in), and there’s not a lot of makeup going on. 

But I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but we all look sort of weird on camera. 

Mr. Thorn has been suggesting that I try lipstick for a while, because it’s an “easy” (easy for him to say; I NEVER got the hang of lipstick) way to look more professional.  And I’ve been going, “yeah, yeah, sure, some time.”

This time, well.  I really need to get some back lighting for the camera.  I may need to get less Oli-butt on my camera too. But I’d love to look less flat-faced and washed out and, short of losing 80 pounds (working on it) and getting a tan (ha. ha, ha ha.  Ha.), I’m going to need some tricks. 

So I guess I’m going to be learning how to put on lipstick.  At least I have lots and lots and lots of time with nobody but Mr. T, who’s already seen me at best and worst, to see me.   

Anyone have any favorite video tutorials on this? Or tips?

I’m also considering how to hide the consistent, I mean like part of my face consistent, bags under my eyes.  And wishing I’d gotten my eyebrows waxed and a haircut before this whole thing started, instead of putting it off because I didn’t really feel like leaving the house, but at least with that, we’re all in about the same boat. 

(I think I have a box of hair dye somewhere…)

What’re your pet peeves about being on camera?

Is anyone still reading these? Am I talking to myself? I mean, this started as a “live journal” back in the dark ages when livejournal was still invite-only and ad-free, so I suppose that’s not a bad idea, since I’m writing them in part to keep me sane. 😀

Anyone know what makeup looks best on camera?

Or how to deal with looking quite as pallid as I actually am?

 What I noticed most this morning was “how is this the beginning of my 4th week of work from home?  Seriously? I’ve been doing this for nearly a month?”

Well, okay, 3 weeks minus a day down does not make for a whole month, but you get the point.  It all sort of blurs together. 

I mean, I’m not known for having a sense of time – a good one or any sense, really – and this is exacerbated by not having different things at work.  Like, I’m not taking Soylent to work 2 days a week and having tacos on Thursday because that’s fish taco day…  

(I miss the lunch people!)

And the differentiation of the weekends is, as mentioned before, not all that strong. 

But there’s also nothing URGENT going on in work stuff, there’s nothing pressing at me other than a whole lot of meetings and webinars and then meetings. 

So “and then we had to start moving ice packs into the fridge” is a lot more notable than “and then there was more meetings and I did some more basic work.”

Speaking of, we’re getting a new fridge on the 9th,which ought to mark time a little.  I consulted with friends who had bought a new fridge, decided “more than the stimulus check for both of us” was too much for a fridge in our situation, but took some advice, looked for a dual compresser, ’cause we’ve had trouble keeping the fridge and freezer in balance, and ended up with a Samsung “entry level” (if these are entry level, what the heck is the $400 fridge we bought the first time?) stainless steel (!) fridge. I’ll let you know how we like it on Friday. 

How are you keeping the days separate?

And at what point does a fridge stop being entry level, and is it before it costs more than $3000?

Mope

Mope

 Yesterday was pretty much a loss in terms of work, because I took a half-day and then spent a bit too much OF said half-day…

…researching refrigerators. 

Ours is dying slowly, which means everything in the freezer is still frozen but everything in the fridge is… just not quite cold enough.  We’ve loaded it up with ice packs from the chest freezer (hey! a plus to getting all those ice packs – my MS drugs come packed in ice in foam coolers, every 3 months ) so we’re not in immediate danger of losing anything, but it’s time for a new fridge. 

I’ve even picked one out!  Now I just have to make the Lowes system let me buy it. 

Warning, after this, this post gets into the pandemic stuff and gets a little depressed. 

Continue reading →

Skillz

 It seems my most useful skill at work currently is my ability to work from home and my practice dealing with my boss remotely.  

Well, possibly not the most useful; but with a desk set-up and my own office space, I seem to be doing better than a number of my co-workers.  

Kunama asked about skills I use in work, and I’m going to talk first about one I don’t get enough use out of right now – Excel. 

I am pretty darn good at excel, but those skills are sadly not needed nearly as much at this job as they were at the last (Trade-offs.  This job is not driving me insane. You know, plusses and minuses.) One year at my old job, my boss gave me an unwitting birthday present of creating a spreadsheet that literally took me the whole day to make. It was great. 

My wordcount spreadsheet is more complicated than anything I have to make in this job. 

/melodramatic woe

On the other hand: copyediting!  I am seriously listed as copyeditor on a formal journal and that is a reasonably large portion of my job (not enough, the editors move slow and the reviewers move slower).  I am learning LaTeX (slowly) and learning enough statistics to be able to tell if something is a typo or just Written in Stats. I regularly copyedit my boss’s proposals, fancy emails, and the like as well. 

Lately, it seems my most useful skill at work comes from LARPing. 

Specifically, Vampire LARP, playing politics with handfuls of other nerds pretending to be centuries-old vampires. 

There’s a lot of learning how to say what you’re saying without saying it going on in that sort of politicking environment, and there’s a lot of learning to listen to what people aren’t saying in response. 

(It leaked into Fae Apoc more than a little, which is unsurprising considering I was fresh from 10+ years of actively playing the game when I created Fae Apoc.)

The Dean talks. The Vice-President of the Uni talks. The President of the Uni sends e-mails. The Associate Deans talk. 

And I listen between the lines a lot. 

(I think I like the copyediting more.)

How are you doing with your job skills? How are they translating to the current situation?

Inspiration

Sitting through faculty meetings on Zoom, where I don’t have to watch what my face is doing and most of the time they’re not aware I’m there — it’s very, ah, educational. 

Riffing off of something Kunama asked, I’m thinking about ways my jobs make their way into my writing. 

The first thing that comes to mind is the library at Wells College, where I worked for a blessed, awesome, 9 months.  Well, I worked in the Book Arts Center, but half of some of my days were spent doing very little in the library while working for another associate Dean. 

The architect of that place was allergic to right angles and to floors that lined up and, like a split-level that we once tried to rent, it just kept going and going, up, up, up.  You never really knew where you were, but you were definitely somewhere, probably. 

That library had made its way into more than a few stories. 

https://www.wells.edu/library

So’ve the facilities staff at my current university job, who are basically elves.  They are startled when you see them, they do magic when your back is turned — especially the groundskeepers. 

Watching them trim the ivy to exactly the right amount is both amazing and amusing. 

And, while the faculty at the unnamed university in my The Trouble With Chickens stories are, ah, well, they’re a little more bloodthirsty than those at the university of my job, there’s definitely a bit of leakage there. 

Actually, in general, you’ll find that there’s a lot of academia in my writing when I’m working in academia.  It’s more of a trope than when, say, I was an admin for a software company. 

(After these faculty meetings, the professors at several fictional universities might be getting a bit darker…)

Oh! Oh, a story I never finished and only posted one bit of — but some maps, I posted some maps! — Portal Bound, https://www.patreon.com/posts/portal-bound-17977388 — this was inspired both by my experiences working in libraries (First at the SUNY I did my first 2 years of college at, then the Rundel Library/Central LIbrary of Rochester & Monroe County  in, ah, Rochester (NY), https://roccitylibrary.org/location/central/, then the aforementioned Wells LIbrary) and by the architecture of the university I work at now. 

I think I’ve taken the question and run sideways and backwards with it, but hey, I got a post that isn’t about my pajama pants!

Does your work or previous workplaces show up in your art? In your hobbies?

(Like me, have you found yourself staring at a building wondering “how do I do that in Minecraft?”?)