I've been having procrastination cascade failure lately -- you know, the sort of thing where you are putting off doing X because doing X means you have to immediately worry about Y and Z, and whole bunch of other letters after that like evil dominos. But the snow is (at last) starting to melt, the sun is shining, and these things usually conspire to make me get off my butt and tackle the Big Things I've been avoiding.

( The main Big Thing is my home office. )

TL;DR version: Plor has issues with paper and is really looking forward to the real digital age. And then she thinks about the state of her work Gmail account and wants to cryyyyyy.

ETA: Ahhh... got all the pre-filing done, and about half the actual filing too. Now all that remains is the huge stack of work-related filing (the rest was music/personal life/tax crap related). Tomorrow's goal: finish filing, start figuring out where non-paper things will live, and maybe go shopping for containers for said things. So. Much. Stuff. I hate working from home sometimes.

I thought I should write an actual post instead of just posting/linking to fic and/or whining about fic. So! Here it is!

I've created a fannish Twitter account for myself. So far I have not tweeted one tweet but that may well change. If you want to follow my total lack of tweets, I'm @toomuchplor (obviously) -- and if your Twitter handle is different from your LJ/DW handle let me know so I can figure out who is who. I'm only following like four people right now but I will happily add more!

Later this week I'm off to the States for a work thing, during which I anticipate not much internet time. It's a happy work thing, professional development and all, and I am really looking forward to a much-needed booster shot of inspiration and excitement at this point in our season because I am almost drained of both in the work sense. Anyway, I'll be away Wednesday to Sunday and even though I'm not going anyplace warm I'm still hoping for some kind of relief from Canadia's ongoing arctic conditions. It's MARCH ffs, Canada. STOP IT NOW.

Things I am enjoying today:

This article about THard's tats linked by cherrybina. So much to love here, especially the image of his poor mum saying "my beautiful boy" after he gets his first tattoo.

This interview with THard, in which he gets a little riled (mostly in the second half) by some kind of blatantly invasive questions. I just want to give him a hug and a cookie afterwards. In a non-invasive way, if possible.

The fact that lately and I spent about an hour extensively researching THard's curly right pinkie finger after xenakis made the delightful observation that both he and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (he who is the model for Steinway!Eames in many ways) share this little quirk. Here is xenakis's comment (and subsequent squeefest with lately on the subject.) You can best see THard's curly pinkie in the video linked directly above. (Our deep investigations led us to conclude that it's rare to find THard showing off said curly pinkie which led us to then conclude that he might be a little self-conscious about it because there are lots of photos of his LEFT HAND and almost NONE of his right, which in turn led to us saying "AAAAAAAAWWWWW MONKEY" for another ten minutes. WE LOVE YOUR CURLY PINKIE TOM. DON'T HIDE IT FROM US BB.)

So, Steinway. This is how Steinway is going right now, in summary:

Lately: Write for me, damn you.

Me: I CAAAAAAAAAAN'T
I HAAAAAAAAATE EVERYTHINNNNNNNNNNG
I HAAAAAAAAATE YOUUUUUUUUUUUU
I HAAAAAAAAATE STEINWAYYYYYYYYYYYY
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Lately: How can I help?

Me: YOU CAAAAAAAAAAN'T
EVERYTHING SUUUUUUUUUCKS
FUUUUUUUUUUUCK MY LIIIIIIIIIIIIFE
I WILL NEVER FINISH THIS OR WRITE ANOTHER WORD
FUCK YOU STEINWAY FUCK YOU SO HARD

Lately: Tell me to leave you alone if that helps.

Me: No, it's okay. :0)
I just hate everything and want to die. Everything I write in this 'verse is total crap.
BUT I'M FINE OK

Lately: So, THard's pinkie, huh?

Me:....[no answer for 40 minutes]

Me: So, I wrote 1000 words just now. Some of them maybe don't suck too bad.

Repeat this every day for the last three weeks and you get a glimpse into how Steinway is going for me. (This is broken up by me periodically writing and posting other fic with great energy while Lately says things like "EXCUSE ME YOU HAVE 10,000 WORDS OF STEINWAY JUST SITTING THERE USELESS. NOT THAT I AM COMPLAINING.")

Today I'm passive-aggressively back to work, the kind of thing you can only do working from home.  I've been alternating procrastinatory-type internet activities with writing emails and booking venues and checking schedules, but I'm doing all of this in my pyjamas, and none of it with good cheer.  Boo, New Year.  This is why I've never liked you.

Still, I've had a fairly nice holiday break -- lots of time spent playing with my niblings (borrowed from a friend, the generic term one uses for nieces/nephews, derived from siblings) and assorted other children, as well as occasionally talking to other grown-ups.  I also got to reconnect a little with my former roommate, who's been living out of town for a couple of years but has had a couple of medical issues come up over the last several months which have forced her to slow things down and spend time with friends, which is a yay for both of us, medical issues aside.

The next half-year looks to be a busy one.  First up we have a couple of major productions that will be equal parts stress-making and artistically rewarding.  I'll be travelling for work quite a bit starting in March and going right through August.  I'm only hoping the travelling will involve visits with my long-lost iykwim and perhaps even my longer-lost sparktastic (in the farthest-flung Atlantic province and the UK, respectively).  Mixed in there are the third birthdays of my two nieces (three years old already!  What?) and the first birthday of my nephew, and my dear dad's retirement after more than forty years of working in the public sector.  I'm more than five years out of grad school and only now am I getting that sense of endless time passage that working people experience; I'm starting to lose the seasonal feeling of school that's been my way of marking time since I was a little kid, and it's not because my work doesn't have seasons, because it definitely does!  It's because that gap between the close of one season and the start of the next has disappeared and seasons have started to overlap and it all feels continuous and cyclical and endless.  I'm exhausted just thinking about it. 

I need coffee, in fact.

Sometime in the next day or so I will need to do a year-end fic round-up. I haven't done one of those since 2008 2007, believe it or not. I have been fandom-absent for a while but this year I have over a dozen fics to contemplate, most all of which I wrote in the past five months, yay!

In the meantime, drinking a nice chardonnay and answering comments and feeling generally pretty happy. I have some laid-back New Year's plans (the only kind I usually have, truth be told) that look to be fun. My car was making suspicious noises the last month or so, so much so that I had put off getting the snow tires on fearing that this would be the fateful final trip to the garage for my 2003 vehicle. Thank god I took it in this week, because it turns out the suspicious noises were from a broken part from a repair done just last spring and it's still under warranty, which means free fixing! Whoo!

Next week I'm properly back to work, though of course I have a grant application to bang together tomorrow because it wouldn't be the holidays if I didn't have some stupid thing due. (Who makes December 31 a deadline, I ask you? Jerks, that's who!)

And that's about all I have to say this fine evening. Whoo!

My parents totally rocked the unexpected awesome gift category this year and bought me an iPad, something I would never ever buy for myself and something that is made of win.  It's my dad's final year of work before retirement so I think this was the final gift hurrah before things get a little more modest (which is absolutely fine with me, I'm 32 for chrissakes! But iPad!!!)  Other than the iPad awesomeness, I got a grand total of 3 gifts, two of which were cheques (yaye moneys!) and one of which was a custom designed calendar of my sweet niece and nephew done up by their mom, my SIL, who is a professional graphic designer.  Kind of an awesome DIY haul, though I will most likely be totally mature and boring and put the cheques towards condo renos or a new (to me) car -- sorely needed as the 2003 PT is requiring me to spend $1000 a tune-up the last couple of years. 

Still, I am having fun downloading (mostly free) iPad apps and oohing and aahing over the fact that my living room now looks like Apple threw up on it, what with my MacBook Pro (work computer, technically), my Apple TV (my present to myself this fall), my ye olde iPod Touch (1st gen, yes), and now the awesome little iPad.  Yay for Apple Store barf everywhere!  I am such a whore for this company, whoo.

What did y'all get?  And does anyone have any suggestions for awesome iPad apps?  I'm even willing to spend money if they are good ones, I swear.

The dreaded last-minute Christmas knitting project is finished and currently flung over my loveseat.  Tomorrow I'll look it over for loose threads and then stuff it into a gift bag only to have it pulled back out again hours later by my almost-three-year-old niece who will probably be all, "A SWEATER?  THANKS, AUNTIE LAMESAUCE."  But I bask for now in the sweet glow of accomplishment.

I'm trying to convince my dog that there is such a thing as the Christmas Cat.  Gotta love dogs, they are so gullible this way.  He's now keeping watch in my picture window emitting the occasional low-pitched warning "rrrf."  The Christmas Cat is obviously not welcome in our small yard, that evil fucker.

So -- what do I have to say other than the above nonsense?  Nothing whatsoever. 

Hope everyone who celebrates it has a lovely Christmas and everyone who doesn't has a lovely weekend.  I will be spending the next day or two with my parents, my grandmother, and my brother and family.  There will be shouting arguments over who left the baby unattended and where the toddler's socks went and also why no one is helping to SET the bloody TABLE goddammit and all that nice traditional Christmas stuff.  I have slotted into the "fewest presents ever" category of the family now that I'm the lovely spinster aunt so I will probably spend a good part of tomorrow helping care for my niece and nephew and entertaining them with their new toys.  It's like parenting without any of the glory (or responsibility, thank fuck.)

Love you all.  So glad I've stumbled back into fandom this year.  Mwah.

I'm typing this with sore hands and fingers, having knocked out an entire (child's) sweater in the last 72 hours. (Here's a link to the pattern if you're curious.)  It wouldn't have been so bad but it was a relatively bulky yarn on relatively small needles and there is a buttload of cabling (which I do without a cable needle because I am lazy) all of which adds up to ouchie hands.  It's kind of funny that I took piano lessons for 16 plus years and in that time did festivals and exams and a degree in music with piano as my secondary instrument and I never once in all that time practiced enough to give myself tendinitis and now I've managed to do it with intensive knitting over the course of only 3 days.  It's all a teachable moment in the end: "Plor will not tackle ambitious Christmas knitting less than four days before Christmas."

I know there are a few other knitters out there on my flist/reading circle/whatever and I'm curious if any of you has ever designed a pattern, like formally in the sense of releasing your pattern to the public -- maybe even for profit?  I've got a mitten design that I decided to work up into a proper pattern but I'm stuck on the part where I have the thing tested by someone to make sure it makes sense to others.

I was poking around the Ravelry forums looking to see what the process is for having a pattern tester and it's all terribly formal, like "thou shalt provide thy tester with a Time Frame and thy tester shall abide by this Time Frame and yea, thou shalt smite them with knitting needles of iron if thy tester does not provide appropriate and timely feedback" and I'm left sitting there thinking wistfully of beta readers in fandom and thinking that no one will leave me "Track Changes" notes like "squee!" and "you have a comma problem, you idiot" in the margins of a document that reads K43 K2tog K15 etc.  Why isn't knitting more like fandom?  WHY?

Anyway, that is my knitting-related rant.  I wish I had less tendinitis so I could knock out a Xmas Eve fic today but sadly today will be spent lining this sweater and setting a zipper and that sort of thing.  Hope all of you have a happy Christmas or whatever you plan to do with your holiday weekend.  I'll be icing my hands and hoping my almost-3-year-old niece appreciates that Auntie Plor has crippled herself for her sake.

p.s. I just chose "sore" as my mood for this post and of course it has McKay *bleeding from a head wound and smiling* in the icon.  You know you are a whiny hypochondriac when Rodney McKay's being a braver little toaster than you.  Sigh.

Drive-by post to say -- I miss that thing called "downtime".  Got back last night from a weekend away and am about to depart for another day and night.   All of this while trying to pull together a project for work by cobbling together rural 3G and borrowed Wi Fi from the road.

Today will be my fourth in a row working with high school kids!  I AM SO TIRED AND OLD OMG.

Okay, I just *may* have spent some significant procrastinatory time this morning looking at pictures of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy and getting a little wrapped up in all the awesome yet hilarious hotness.  What can I say?  sparktastic is a horrible, horrible enabler.  And has all the good crack, too.

In non-Inception-related news, I sort of took a week off last week.  I say "sort of" because I work from home and that means that I work more or less constantly, with slightly more effort to actually be productive during normal office hours and slightly more effort to stay away from work things during non-office hours.  So last week was less of a week off and more of a week where I didn't answer (most) email and didn't answer the "office phone" (i.e. a non-descript cheapo cell phone) when it rang.  Which led to me spending most of yesterday frantically working to catch up.  Whoo.  Also, I ended up having to go out of town overnight covering for a friend, which is not technically part of my job but was still work.  And also, going to rehearsal on Thursday.  See what I mean when I say "sort of"?  I'm lame.

There's a new Mexican restaurant chain here called "Burrito Libre".  Yes, you read that right.  I haven't (yet) eaten there but the name never fails to make me giggle.  It sounds like a weird dirty euphemism.  "I gotta go liberate my burrito, if you know what I mean."  I can't figure out if it's a bathroom euphemism or a masturbation euphemism, though.  Could go either way.

I broke my wrist – just a little greenstick fracture, the kind that barely needs a cast – when I was 2 or 3 years old.  I don't particularly remember the accident itself, though I have a clear memory of the minutes leading up to it, and of the hospital plastering room afterwards, but my body remembers it.  I'm almost thirty years past that little minor fracture and to this day, when I'm upset, I feel it in the base of my throat as everyone else describes, but also as a painful random pulse of pain spiking up into my right thumb and down the side of my radius. 

I even associate the feeling with a sort of shameful self-pity, probably because I cried and whined a lot (too much, my parents say) as a little girl and was usually told that I was making a fuss over nothing.

[As an interesting aside, the same thing happened, I'm told, when I broke my wrist initially.  I fell off a piece of playground equipment, landed on my wrist, and wailed and carried on for minutes afterwards.  My older brother and I were in a summer play group, and even when he told the leaders with all sincerity that even his whiny baby sister didn't usually cry this much, the leaders in their wisdom told us both that I was fine and I should stop crying.  Eventually, I guess I did.  It wasn't until hours later, playing out in the back yard, that I took a second tumble – whiny and clumsy, I guess – and hit the same place on my wrist and screamed an unholy scream.  My mom came to take a look and found that my wrist was purple-black around the place it had been fractured.  Vindication!]

I don't think I've ever told anyone that before, but that's where I feel pain physically when I'm hurting emotionally.  Isn't it weird, the places our bodies choose to carry trauma?

Anyone have a weird thing they've never told to anyone before?  Anonymous comments turned on and IP logging off, if anyone wants to share without sharing their identity too.

Tonight I finally did that thing where you go through your underwear drawer and toss every single pair of gonch that you kind of hate wearing when you're too close to laundry day.  (It's been a few years since I did that, so it was a large purge, probably a third of a garbage bag.)  I don't know why I'm so lame at clutter-busting when I'm totally not a pack-rat.  I actually love getting rid of shit, it's like a high for me.  (Just ask sparktastic, the consummate stuff-keeper, who has more than once convinced me not to toss every scrap of writing from my teen and childhood years -- and even with her convincing, I'm down to one small finely-filtered box of the stuff.)  I think laziness is my worst enemy, because at heart I'm a total minimalist.  Whenever I move (shudder) I have weeks-long fantasies about owning only two or three boxes of stuff.  I love being portable, and yet I somehow find myself accumulating layers of clutter like sediment settling out from my life.  I dream of a day when I consistently put things away in their proper place and get rid of excess stuff as soon as it arrives in my place.

Speaking of my place, tonight I picked out some laminate flooring for my condo.  The carpet in most of the place was brand-new when I moved in almost three years ago but my darling dog has since taken some unfortunate liberties with its once-off-white surface.  Having a dog with periodic lapses in his housebreaking skills is not compatible with carpet, in other words, and it's time for a change.  Here's hoping the renovation process -- installing said laminate, as well as new swanky lino and counters in the kitchen and bathroom -- goes as smoothly as possible.  It's my first major home improvement project.  Crazy.  *bites nails*

sparktastic is trying to lure me into Inception fandom but, having seen the movie, I'm afraid it is much too angst-prone for the likes of me.  I am the one who occasionally feels the need to make SGA sillier than it is in canon, after all, and felt stifled by the lack of goofiness in Smallville.  Smallville.  I'll let that one sink in for a while.  Still, I have read a little fic at her urging -- and of course JGL is unholy hot.  Is there room in the fandom for fic where it rains frogs and the boys talk about bums and have contests making slingshots out of condoms?  And it's not dreamlike and symbolic of some psychological truth?  Hrm.  *is mistrustful*

Wow, okay, it's been way too long since I poked my head in here. Suffice it to say, RL has been hectic and fandom has been far away from my mind most of the time. But it is now summer and I have scads of wonderfully free time in which to procrastinate.

My writing brain is atrophied and pathetic, alas. If any of you who still have me flisted and still want to read SGA have mini ficlet ideas I would gladly collect prompts. The only fic ideas I seem to have at the moment are epic and ridiculous.

Also, would welcome any updates of a fannish or personal nature you'd care to share. Sorry I am a lame LJ friend. Working on that.

So part of my new job (BTW, hai hai hai flist! I read you, I do! I just have zero energy for posting these days!) involves working with parents of children aged 8 and up. And while I've always had distaste for the abstract notion of "helicopter parenting" I'm now being forced to deal with it face to face. Allow me to illustrate:

Parent #1, to Parent #2 (sincerely, and very calmly): I don't know if my 10 year old can handle a weekend retreat at a camp 20 minutes out of town. Five nights out of seven, she's crawling into bed with me as it is. Must just be her age, I guess!

And then:

Parent #3, to me: We'll hold off on committing to the group with a registration form. I want to be sure that this is a good environment for my [11 and 14 year old] boys socially. We've had to pull out of groups before because they weren't making friends. [NB: home schooled kids. Shocking, huh?]

I'm also administrating the communications system for these lovely parents and got chewed out tonight by a parent who "had to find out about an event though my daughter's FACEBOOK". This, even though she is on our mailing list, had a son in our choir last year and therefore had access to our schedules at any time online, and has, in fact, received no fewer than three emails with information about the event. Gee, I wonder how her kids are going to turn out? JESUS.

Thankfully, for every insane control-freak parent out there, we have a nice reasonable helpful parent. But man, the crazy ones make me shake my head. Do parents not realize that the goal of parenting is, in fact, to make sure your child can fend for itself eventually? And that maybe one should start with things like the ability to sleep alone after a decade, or the ability to interact with peers socially, or -- GOD.

[/vent]

Remember how I said that thing, about how RL swallows me whole on occasion? Yep, it's one of those months.

Love you and miss you, lovely online people!

At four a.m. on Sunday (wait, it gets better) I'll be heading to the airport enroute to seven days and nights in Hawaii. I haven't been to Hawaii since I was five years old -- and that visit was tacked on the end of a trip to New Zealand, so suffice it to say I really don't have a strong memory of the place.

Anyway, this is a whole-family vacation, as in it's me and my parents and my two older brothers, their respective wives and baby daughters. Let me tell you, it's going to be HILARIOUS fun to be the, oh, seventh (ninth?) wheel in that grouping. But still, it's been a good while since I had a totally relaxation-oriented holiday and I intend to make the most of it!

I have no idea if there will be internet on the other end, so in case there is not (and it would probably be really good for me if that's the situation) adios until May 5th! We're getting a late blast of winter here in Alberta so I'm happy to be away from it. Here's hoping there will be no more snow in May (don't laugh, it has HAPPENED.)

P.S. This means I will miss the open beta launch of DW so my DW journal will drop back into free account blah-ness until I can get back and buy into a paid account. Sad. But worth it.

At four a.m. on Sunday (wait, it gets better) I'll be heading to the airport enroute to seven days and nights in Hawaii. I haven't been to Hawaii since I was five years old -- and that visit was tacked on the end of a trip to New Zealand, so suffice it to say I really don't have a strong memory of the place.

Anyway, this is a whole-family vacation, as in it's me and my parents and my two older brothers, their respective wives and baby daughters. Let me tell you, it's going to be HILARIOUS fun to be the, oh, seventh (ninth?) wheel in that grouping. But still, it's been a good while since I had a totally relaxation-oriented holiday and I intend to make the most of it!

I have no idea if there will be internet on the other end, so in case there is not (and it would probably be really good for me if that's the situation) adios until May 5th! We're getting a late blast of winter here in Alberta so I'm happy to be away from it. Here's hoping there will be no more snow in May (don't laugh, it has HAPPENED.)