Quickly

I have 19 minutes to post something before going to work. (I start at noon on Fridays to accomodate a meditation/discussion group thing that Susan runs in SL at 10am my time.)

Work has been utterly crazy lately. The concrete work is falling behind schedule, the steelwork is being held up by the façade contractors who can't get themselves organized, they are being held up by the electrical engineers who keep discovering new things that need to be cabled up. That we have been asking the steelwork and façade contractors since February to send us detail plans for approval is somehow irrelevant to the fact that they cannot send their unapproved plans for fabrication today. And all of this is of course the architects' fault.

Anyway.

I had a really nice day so far. Went to bed early last night (before midnight, for the first time in ages), got up early, went to the post office to collect two books from Amazon, and took them downtown to my favourite cafe on a nameless square to open. Perfectly blue sky, gentle breeze, birdsong, temperature around 28°C which is in my opinion all it ever needs to be.

I bought two books on virtual worlds, which will feed into Susan's workshop this summer. Zach Waggoner's "My avatar, my self" is about the construction of identity in real and virtual worlds, and how these affect each other. Edward Castronova's "Exodus to the Virtual World" seems to be primarily about how RL and VL will be affected by the withdrawal of the time and money that we VL'ers are not spending in our RL environments. It seems like he will have a lot to say about happiness too:

For every happy, fulfilled person, how many are there who are bored, frustrated, unappreciated, defeated, unhappy? There's quite a lot of self-medication going on. Whatever people learn in schools, it doesn't seem to be leading to stable homes, happy childhoods, and emotionally grounded adult lives.

I'll be in Canada in less than a month. Sis and BIL are getting married this summer, after twenty-five years together. There will be a small but select ceremony and celebration, with only the most immediate of family in attendance. Various other plans are afoot too, including a further meditation retreat in Halifax (after Malta, and in the place of San Francisco in April).

Harpier cries, 'tis time, 'tis time.