Yeah, still alive.
I kind of fell off the Internet there for a couple of weeks. Not blogging, barely making use of any other communications tech. Still reading a lot of stuff, but all input, no output.
This was not a planned thing, I just found that my real life was taking up too much time for me to support a vibrant virtual life at the same time: getting up to speed on the new jobFor the last two days in particular, I have been absolutely loving the new job–both on its own merits, and because it is illustrating to me how dysfunctional my concept of “normal” and “expected” in the workplace had creepingly become at the previous one., still trying to get a household establishedSeveral rooms still unfurnished–some furniture coming this week, some hopefully next week, stacks of framed art waiting to be hung, and, of course, the book issue. On top of that, I really need to get a plumber to sort out the guest bathroom, and we should get a painter in to do the soon-to-be-library before I start putting up shelves in there., trying to be a good husbandDr. Wife’s birthday was in there–among other things, got her tickets to see the Little House On The Prairie musical, which she saw with Sarah on the weekend, while I savaged Toronto’s specialty book shops. and dadI think the best thing Sarah and I did during my Internet break was go the Our Body exhibit at the Children’s Museum. That’s probably a post of its own., seeing family that are now within “drop in” distance, trying to do some cultural stuffThe best of these was going to see Karl Schroeder talk in his Writer-In-Residence role at the Toronto Public Library. Got to hear some of the not-even-done-yet fifth Virga book, and then got to hear some really bleak–but interesting and insightful–forecasting about the future for novelists, as well slightly less bleak, but no less insightful, meditations on the notion of identity., socializingI had a real blast this past Saturday at an old school drink-up Chris Butcher organized in Toronto. Nothing like going out to drink and talk with people you’ve never met (but some of whom have been peripherally in your virtual social sphere for nearly a decade), and having it work., finishing some mind-bendingly-tedious cleanup of virtual thingsI have finished the project of cleaning the tags of all the CDs I finished ripping before the move. I now have all the mp3s representing rips of my physical CDs fully tagged and sorted. 2939 “albums”, 37683 tracks, representing 2610 hours, 1 minute, and 23 seconds of music–that’s about 109 solid days to get through. I am still enjoying the “oh I forgot about this” game. The prospect of trying to apply the same degree of order to my “downloads” folder daunts me., and starting some tedious-but-weirdly fun cleanup of physical thingsThis, of course, refers primarily to the process of unpacking, sorting, and shelving my books. I have decided while doing this to actually also make a catalogue of the books–ostensibly for insurance reasons, but in reality because I am an OCD collector type, and the idea appeals to me. Trish bought me the software to manage the collection a while back, and I set myself up with a barcode scanner that really speeds entering ISBNs. So far I’ve only built a few shelves, enough for my mass-market paperback fiction. Just tonight I finished unpacking, sorting, cataloguing, and shelving those books. I started with the MMPBs because they’re the smallest part of the collection, so it was a less daunting task, but also because I never did unpack the paperbacks I moved to Halifax, so I’m seeing some of these books again for the first time in a decade. That added a lot of the fun of the whole thing. I have just over 1300 of them–pictures later.
I think I’m starting to get my stride hereThis may be a case of “famous last words”., and so I believe you can expect a return to our normal service nowUnless I actually give in to the urge to go tinker with the footnotes plugin so that it will support footnotes in footnotes…because that would make this kind of thing funnier..
