Meh.

There are days (today, for instance) when even apparently simple tasks (e.g. calling up to get a phone line reconnected) seem just too difficult to deal with. I don't know where to start.

There have been pleasant events recently, and there is big news to tell, but I'm just too far down to talk about that now.

It occurs to me that this is perhaps the start of the anticipated downturn following the retreat in Halifax last month (post-euphoric stress disorder, if you like), as happened this winter after the Malta retreat. As such, I should know from experience that it's nothing new and nothing to take too seriously. I will try to keep that in mind.

Sorry to be such a wet blanket.

Woodpecker

Wondering how to
count the syllables of "&"
drove from my mind the

slow soft tap-tap-tap of a
woodpecker in the cool mist.

Or: Don't let a technology distract you from the use you wished to make of it.

Life is going well, mostly, but still far too much work. Haven't had a day off since February 25th, 71 hours last week. One more week of this madness, then we'll be done.

Weather is warming up, but I've said that before so I will say no more. Birds are active, the goldenrod is in bloom, crocuses came and went. And so it goes.

Awake, part damn and blast

There is an especial poignancy to being awake at 3:30 on a day when I need to rise at 5:00.

One of these years I will learn to go to bed eight hours before I need to get out of bed, on days when I will be travelling. Not that this would help me now, of course, but it might generally be a useful thing to do.

As I mentioned last time, I am indeed about to fly to Malta for a short week (until Saturday) for a real-life meeting of Susan's Second Life meditation group. But I'm too damned tired to tell you about that. I must somehow get back to sleep.

[Updated nine hours later] I did manage to sleep another hour, rose at 5am, was at the airport at 6:22, and went to the gate to wait for my flight. And waited and waited and waited. And waited some more. Until finally at 9:15, two hours and ten minutes after it should have departed, the flight was cancelled. Stood in line for nearly two hours to rebook my tickets, got an evening flight on Air Malta. Now briefly home for breakfast and gathering a few things I forgot, before my sure-to-be-delightful six hour layover in FFM. Bah bloody humbug. Two inches of snow and the country grinds to a halt.

Grim

Utterly miserable day yesterday: blood pressure near zero, jittery nerves, cold hands and feet and general shivering, constant nausea and diarrhoea. I spent most of the day in bed, at least sixteen hours asleep. Today is better but not good.

On answering a good question

Dale asked, "Why do you guys *do* this to yourselves? Isn't life hard enough already?"

Why, indeed, do we do this to ourselves? In my case, I was trying to use NaBloPoMo as a jumper cable to recharge my batteries which had gone flat sometime this last year.

I had hoped that writing every day would help me recover some of the joy that leached out of blogging during this year. That hasn't happened, this posting-every-day routine remains a burdensome duty which I will hereby lay down. (NaBloPoMo that is, I shall continue to blog at semi-random intervals.)

I was also hoping to recover some of the joy that had leached out of my life during this year. I have been living in monochrome for quite a few months now, maybe most of the year. I can't tell you when the colours went missing, I hadn't noticed until quite recently. I had thought that my malaise was situational: everything will be fine once I get the competition finished, once I get the scripts written, once I get the database sorted out. Well, those things have come to pass and I am not fine, and the world is still mostly grey.

Oddly enough, this comes at a time when I am actually working on the state of my soul, trying to bootstrap myself into calm and happiness. My alternative, now principal, Second Life avatar (whose name is not Susan) joined a meditation and discussion group in SL, and the three of us (SL-Udge, Susan and the blogging Udge who is also the physical Me) have been trying out the practices, with much talking and listening and feeling and thinking. It is having an effect, slowly but certainly. That I have spotted the greyness in me is due to the inward looking-and-listening that we have been doing. It is also in large measure due to the assistance and encouragement of many dear SL friends, even if they might have thought that they were asking me to help them. I am very grateful for your kindness and your company, my dears.

I don't know what happens next. I have work to do and enough spirit to get out of bed each morning, I have friends physical and virtual to stand by. For now, I guess that will have to be enough.

I'm done.

Blah

Sorry, I just can't be bothered today.

Ten down, twenty to go.

Four more days

Grim, grim. The only ray of light is that we are on track to be finished a day early! The plans work (the disposition of rooms is clear and sensible) and the presentation set has been designed. All that remains is to do the actual drawings (hollow laughter).

Miserable weather, hot and muggy.

Blah.

Six more days

... until we hand in the competition. Bad day today, came home utterly fed up with the job, the project and the architects. Wondering now whether my attitude is justified or merely self-indulgent.

Storms today over much of Germany: trees knocked down, trucks blown off the highway, flooding. One sharp, intense downburst in Stuttgart, we got off quite lightly.

Time for some more pleasing diversions.

Definitely Spring

Public Service Announcement: The chestnut trees have leafed out, the magnolias are budding. Pictures in the very near future.

Coughing, tired. Rain. Blah.

That is all.

Facing the facts

Being an attempt to hold my own hand.

Wrote a letter to my landlady's lawyers this morning, acknowledging her right to throw me out and stating that I will clear the apartment and give them the keys. It feels better to be taking action, even this action, than to sit and wait for the sixteen-ton weight to fall.

Today's xkcd is relevant, not so much for the forgetting as for the final frame.

In the interests of keeping the historical record straight (future biographers will thank me) I should mention that I slept about two hours on Thursday night after opening the letter from my landlady's lawyers. I didn't get up to blog it as usual, because I was far too fraught with fear and worry to compose anything sensible.

And now, to work in Rose Street.

Blah.

Being a grumbling whine.

Feeling quite grotty today, thick raspy lungs and a very sore throat. I fear a nasty cold or virus is arriving. This is probably due to spending the day with Slim and Larry at the zoo on Sunday (after Slim and I had planned to go for an afternoon walk while Larry was with his father's new family). The other kids came down with a virus infection which worried Slim enough for her to bring him back home early, but not enough to protect me—or his kindergarten fellows—from the infection. Her standards are quite remarkably one-sided: her kid must go to kindergarten when he is probably carrying a virus, because she's a working single mother and cannot stay home with him, but other parents' kids must stay home from kindergarten when they are probably carrying a virus, because she's a working single mother and cannot afford for him to get sick and have to stay home.

Anyway. To bed, hopefully this will all blow over with careful rest and feeding. Wish me luck.

Blah

Feeling a bit miserable and sorry for myself these days, what with Christmas looming over us, and fiftieth birthdays being celebrated and my own beginning to cast a shadow over next summer, and my mother's seventy-fifth birthday today and my father's upcoming eightieth birthday in May. So much time gone by, poured away in idleness and inattention. Blah.

Go read Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech A hunger for books (courtesy of Jean).

Go see Harold and Maude (courtesy of Zhoen).

Go see this week's secrets, some of which are just heartrending. (Do watch the video.)

Tuesday trivia

No word from the competition organizers yesterday, that means either than we were among the losers or that we got another third prize.

Translating, listening to Arvo Pärt's "Arbos," cooking lunch. Grey day, outside and in.

I've been meaning for some time to write about my coffee habit and the new espresso maker in the office. It's a Saeco Incanto Deluxe (extremely lousy website so no link, I've written and told them off for bad style and worse customer-contact practices), a very cute and efficient machine of the do-it-all-for-you kind. And quite thoughtfully designed too, so as to encourage maintenance and cleaning: the water tank and the coffee-bean holder and the drip catcher and the internal garbage can into which the used grounds are dumped all need filling or emptying at roughly the same time. The user learns to do all four tasks in one operation, thus keeping the machine clean and happy. Recommended.

The espresso and cappuccino that it makes are surprisingly tasty (for an automatic), nearly as good as proper hand-pumped. I noticed that having it in the office reduced my coffee intake by about 80%, and this has carried over to my home office: I find the stuff from my drip-filter machine quite unappealing. Probably much healthier this way.

Now if I could only get G and U to stop screwing up its pump by filling it with bottled mineral water...