My Blue Castle

I'm looking at my work to do list and thinking DO NOT WANT. It's not even that I'm super tired, I just am disinterested in doing work junk today it seems. Not to mention how I always get distracted on Wednesday by the new scrapbook video that comes out by my favorite scrapbooker. I just watched it and now I want to run home and scrap.

But I'm going to try and do a LOT of that next week. Making a list of stuff to scrap and some other fun crafty things I can do. 

Also in an attempt to make something out of vacationing alone at home, I am thinking I might declare next week BREAKFAST FOODS WEEK... and eat a lot of eggy, oatmealy, toasty yummy things. 

Is it Friday yet?

So Jinx the wonder cat snapped a couple slats of the blinds in the windows next to my bed. I had to take the curtains down because he kept climbing them and bending the curtain rod down until it nearly snapped. So there's just the blinds. And since my bed is up against the windows, I do need the privacy of them. So I'm wondering if I got some of that privacy film and put that up. Cat proofing my house. ugh. not my favorite thing. I guess I can tape up the broken slats for now, and when I'm off work next week figure out something. 

He was extra crabby this morning, probably in his mind because with the time change I was an hour later feeding him. I can't wait to see how grouchy he is when I finally get home late tonight after a dinner. He's sort of hilarious when totally pissed. He gets up on his back paws/feet and sort of hop runs at me his front paws like a bear paddling and windmilling. Hello little dervish. Then he'll lie in wait under the dining room table and pounce at me as I walk by. Silly kitteh.

Otherwise, wrisomifu is going well. Ten minutes of writing a day seems achievable so far. Granted its only day five. 

Library is good. I'm not super busy at the moment which is a nice change. And there's every possibility I might soon have a job description. If you're keeping score I've worked over here in the Humanities Library for 17 months now. Would be nice to know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing, yes?! When my current supervisor retires at the end of the year I get taken over by a supervisor in another department. So I'll be interested to see how that changes things, if it does. Mostly all my supervisor does, in a supervisory capacity is approve my monthly timesheet and be the person I email if I'm taking a sick day. Well, and the pesky annual evaluation. More than that remains to be seen. 

Since I left my lunch sitting at home in the kitchen I'm eating Halloween candy for lunch and contemplating trying to just hold out for super yummy big dinner. Well see. I'll probably do down to the cafe for some apples and cheese at some point. Or maybe soup.  So that's my Monday. How's yours?

Survived with only a few power flickers ... the worst when (according my my Facebook sources) a transformer caught fire. The orange flickers across the sky were fairly spectacular. Not that I noticed them until my Mom called (they live about a mile away from me) and said "hey what's going on over there?"

Work is open and I'm sort of annoyed about it. No other local schools are open, but we've got 40,000 kids here and I suppose we've got to occupy their minds or something. 

About to get some coffee and make some decisions about my job. They're reorganizing and now I get to decide whether I want to be mostly the collection maintenance person ... or if I want to be mostly the web design and departmental secretary dealing with ordering things and whatnot. I think to get away from the equipment orders and since the web design stuff isn't my favorite I am leaning towards the collection end of things. Means tying myself to endless spreadsheets and statistics, but ultimately more interesting than endless page updates and orders for paperclips and pens ...

*puts on thinking cap*

Had my usual Saturday night date with my couch last night. Started off trying to watch an early Morse episode on YouTube via my TV which was a pain in the ass as the video kept locking up. But I got through it though it was probably my least favorite one so far, pull of post WWII anti-Japanese stuff I could have done without.

Although I realize just now that it makes my next viewing choice totally ironic. I zapped over to Netflix and wandered around for AGES trying to find something I wanted to watch. Ended up re-watching the original Japanese version of "Shall We Dance" which is SO much better than that Richard Gere/J Lo version. Although Susan Sarandon's wife character does end up better off in that version!

But then I was still drinking rum and still wandering around looking for anything that looked promising. Netflix instant has a LOT of crap on it. But I lucked into a winner of a movie called "Weekend," which I think was a Sundance indy, but its a lovely M/M kind-of-sort-of-a happy ending romance that was utterly captivating. For evidence I submit the trailer:



(or alternately, this slightly longer slightly better version of the trailer)

There were a couple sex scenes and a LOT of drugs. But its a lovely little thing even when it makes your heart hurt.

Also, someone please cast Chris New as Tom Hardy's little brother in something, okay? But now back to my laundry and hunkering down for whatever parts of Sandy come this far inland to the middle of Pennsylvania!

So I may have mentioned it's data gathering week at the library. Fun fact: the route we have to walk to cover every area in our part of the library works out to about about 1/2 a mile. And someone is walking it every hour each day this week. When they tell you computers could do our job... I say not until every item and every person is RFID chipped. Then, maybe computers can do what we do.

Going to rest up now from my measly single turn at the counting 1/2 mile and think about what the cheapest lunch that's still halfway healthy I can procure from the cafe downstairs. Was just too tired from being sick all day to pack a lunch last night. Though I'm still craving pizza and cake!

If my cat was my kid, he'd be the kid hanging out behind the 7-11 getting high off of aerosol cans of whathaveyou ... I woke up to what I can only in retrospect conclude was the cat licking my hair spray bottle. Then when I got up to give him his breakfast he hacked up foamy stuff, so I only put down a little dry food. He also likes to pull my hair out of my hair brush and eat it. GROSS CAT. Oh, and before I figured out what was going on, as a kitten, he used to eat used dryer sheets. My little junkie cat. He's going to be STARVING when I get home from work. Hopefully he feels better. And I add hair products to the list of things to put away from pesky curious cats!

Just got back from a 20 minutes desk shift. It's data gathering week at the library so every half hour we have to send someone to walk all seven levels of our books stacks (plus a handful of other rooms under our purview) and count how many people are there. Thankfully I got deputized to watch the desk and the desk staff person did the walking. So I just got to stand there and stare at students working away. I'm okay with that :)

Officially I had a 3 1/2 day weekend, but Thursday afternoon was taken up with our 1937 radio play. Then Friday I was in a car for 4+ hours with my parents (oh god) going to a family funeral. One of my mother's cousins. World's longest, ramblyest come to jesus euology ever. Mostly I just had to shut out the voices in my head screaming about how that'll be me some day burying my parents. ALALALALLALALALALA. Was so wiped out when I got home -- mostly from other people's emotions -- that I kind of went to bed at 4 pm, and got up around 7 to eat and watch tv and then went right back to bed. Cue more laying around the house on Saturday!

But Sunday I got out of the house and met a couple friends at our mutual friend's bookstore for Sunday brunch. They always have a musician performing from 12 - 2 for them, and it was a really nice time eating a yummy Monte Cristo sandwich until I horrifically up-dumped (as they say around here) my giant mint mocha coffee all over the floor and partly on my friend. OH GOD. You can't take me anywhere. And when I got home I found maple syrup dribbled all down my front!! Sigh.

But back to work today and with the goal of getting things back on track. Oh, plus a new online scrapbook class starts today. I am ADDICTED to the teacher's scrapbooking videos. I'd kind of sad. But they're AWESOME :))))

And now off to stalk my Lewis Secret Santa gift-ee :)

So ... I will have heat tonight when I get home! Getting the paperwork transferred over from my former parental landlord(s) to me ended up being a big THING which is why it took until now to get it done. I am looking forward to not having to huddle in front of my little electric heater for warmth. At least until it gets REALLY cold and I fire up the pellet stove ... when I'll have to move to the wing chair and huddle in front of the stove for warmth! But that pellet stove cuts my yearly heating bill in half, so it's worth lugging in 40 pound bags of pellets from the garage daily. Although every year I say I'm going to get a little red wagon and wheel them in! :)

My brain is being much nicer to me yesterday and today. Hopefully I'm coming out of whatever fog that was, cause it wasn't nice there. 

Resurrected movie monday last night and took myself to see Argo. Which I really enjoyed, both for the spy-y bits and the meta movie bits. I mean, it's totally predictable in all the ways movies always are, but I was still gripping my seat arms hoping the plane got off that runway in time. And all that fake sci-fi was just too funny. Totally period appropriate and all that but delightfully wacky! Anyone who doesn't giggle over casting Adrienne Barbeau as a be-gowned and head-dressed sci-fi character called "Serksi the Gallactic Witch" just isn't trying hard enough :))

Some night I'm going to sneak into a second movie and feel wicked. But I look around and think "how would they know?" 

But now it's lunchtime and I've accomplished crossing off two things from today's todo list, so things are looking up!! Hooray!

My head hurts too much to attempt actual work before I go off in a bit for my weekly desk shift where I get to interact with actual people. So, I'm wondering (wandering?) ...

are deer getting less shy? It used to be quite rare that I'd ever see any deer, but the last couple months there are two or three fields I drive past on my way to and from work, and its not uncommon almost daily to see anywhere from one to a whole bunch of deer hanging out in those fields. They are somewhat shielded by the trees around them, but most of the fields border a four lane highway. And there are the deer, hanging out, nibbling or napping or whatever.

Lovely to watch, but odd never the less.

okay, going away to try and will my headache away before I have to go and interact with students. ugh.

Taking a break from a scrapbook page while I figure out where to go next with it, and thinking about eating something. My parents are away for the next few days, and its amazing how much more relaxing it is knowing that I won't have to call my mother every day and report my every movement to her. It's strange. I shouldn't mind calling to check in every day, but somehow it's draining knowing she's sitting there waiting for me to report in at a certain time (and no later) every day and that I'm more or less expected to tell here everything that I'm doing.

I don't always. Movie Mondays (not that there have been any of those lately) I've kept for myself. Well, anyway, it's a weird dynamic, and it's nice to be free of it (mostly, she'll call and check in at some point) for a few days.

But now lunch, and maybe Merlin...

So somewhere I think I saw someone challenging others to poetry every day in October, and I thought, "hey cool, I love to do found poems. I should do that. Yeah, that lasted one day. :| But maybe I can do 31 poems in 31 days and still make it mean something. But hey, I've done one poem so far. Not strictly a found poem. But I did use a page out of the same romance novel I've been using for years now for these things as the starting point. Then it sort of went places from there. And dude it's depressing. But at any rate I did SOMETHING ...

Somehow the word "seven" at the top of the page turned into the title "event horizon"

Gazing in the mirror
That Sunday morning
His
Mortifying
Extraordinary
Professed affection
Brought a glow to her cheeks.

But it wasn't long
Before
He simply
Learned to look through her
And then he was gone
Leaving her
Crumpled
And shattered.

more later as I write them. I keep going back and forth on leaving the word mortifying in there. it seems wrong somehow in combination with the other stuff in that first part, but I really like the combination of opposites that 'mortifying extraordinary' makes...