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unforthSo, looking back over LJ land, I see that I've not really had anything to post recently except quick comments, political and economic stuff, and memes. I haven't actually written about events and such in life since the end of July! I've been meaning to for ages, and now I find it's the end of September...sigh. So, um, life!
Work is one of the main things I've been doing, or, in some cases, not doing. I've been having some relatively serious procrastination issues - I'm getting everything done no problem, but I have some stuff hanging on the horizon and for some reason I haven't been able to get it together to get started. I never life feeling paralyzed, so this has been a little frustrating to me, but I'm slowly working on it - I got some stuff out today related to this, so hopefully, I'm getting there. :) Other than that, early fall is a super slow season in the grants world, so we don't have any big projects looming in that regard. Instead, all of our annual progress reports are due. I've already completed one, which was due on August 31st, and we have another two due on the 6th that I'm not really involved in, and 5 due on the 31st, all of which I'm responsible for - that's the big thing on the horizon that I've not been doing. Still, I think part of what's going on is that it's weird to have everything basically under control. Like most people, I just don't work as well when there aren't any deadlines and/or the deadline is far away - I end up always feeling like there is something I should be doing, yet not quite having the energy to just go and do it. :)
Meanwhile, I was doing pretty well keeping on top of my writing until mid August, when for no obvious reason I completely lost all of the energy that powered me through the first 120k of this story. I think a big part of this was caused by baseball, and the fact that due to the way I was living my life I'd taken to writing in the evening. I don't LIKE writing the evening, I don't feel like I do as a good a job when I write in the evening, and recently, I've just had no energy what so ever at night (noticing a recurring theme? energy level has been a big problem for me recently, and I'm not sure why). However, now that the baseball season is over, I have high hopes about getting going on my writing again. I had a long talk with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xaniquen about the project, and I'm thinking increasingly that once I finish the first draft I'm gonna chop it to little bits and rewrite the whole book as a trilogy of young adult novels. This'll take a fair amount of reworking of the two main characters, but over all the more I've thought about and in particular after we spoke about it, I think it's doable and might even be necessary. Still, nothing is going to happen until I finish the first draft, a draft which has me rather daunted right now. Today or tomorrow, though, I'm getting back on the wagon and trying to make a go of it - again.
Plans to reapply to graduate school proceed slowly. I did the research on the program, confirmed that it's a good idea, and figured out what I'd need to do. So far, though, I haven't done any of it - I need to retake the GRE, and get a couple of recommendations from god-knows-where, and then come up with a super awesome essay which explains why I want to study something that I'm not actually entirely sure that I do want to study. Still, the degree will be very helpful to me in terms of my job, so I think it's a good decision. Urban Education, here I come!
August was a really, really busy month. I attended two different weddings (the marriage ofxaniquen to pandorasage, and the wedding of mistress_sin to her boy - I was the maid of honor at that one!) which involved trips in to Jersey - which including pretty much the hardest drive I've EVER done, when the rain got so heavy on I95 that I couldn't see the lines on the road at noon - and to Binghamton. Both were very nice events, and I'm glad that I was able to be a part of them. At xaniquen's, I got to reconnect with Brett, who I hadn't seen in like, 3 years, and chat with Kev, who I see a couple times a year. Meanwhile, at mistress_sin's shindig, I got to, you know, have responsibilities and all that, but really, as far as maid of honor experiences go, I got off way easy, I hardly had to do anything. The wedding was outdoors, and we lucked out - the weather was gorgeous, all the flowers were blooming around the gazebo, and none of the family members allowed their antagonisms to get in the way of the happy event.
The other big event for me every August is Gencon. This year, I didn't place a single game - perhaps to balance out for the fact that I played four or so at Origins. The main thing I did was hang out with a bunch of the Bloomington folks - I helpedkniedzw clean his apartment, chatted with moonartemis72 about her upcoming nuptials, spent more time with moonandserpent than I ever did when I actually lived there (and enjoyed the time very much!), and bonded a bit with oddsboy. sapphohestia made a lot of fun of me for constantly running off to photograph cosplayers, though thanks to being with her, I actually got photographed myself a few times, apparently entirely because I was also a girl, who happened to be with a girl who was in costume. Very odd, that. I had a great time, though - I really over came a fear of mine. In the past I've always said I wanted to photograph more of the people in costume, but I always chickened out when it actually came time to pester them and ask them to stop so that I could take their picture. This year, though, I got really good at just going ahead and asking, and the result was that I got a whole lot of very fun shots. I think my plan for next year is clear!
The other big event at Gencon this year was my ability to spend massively more than I had budgeted. On the car ride there, I commented tomistress_sin about a piece of artwork that I remembered from the previous year, and said that if Wayne Reynolds still had that one, I'd buy it, and damn the price. Well, I ended up having to put my money where my mouth was - he had it, and I thought about it a bunch, and then went for it, so now I own the original of this piece, the Sorceress from Paizo's Pathfinder books. Meanwhile, I also broke down and bought an expensive Stephanie Pui-Mun Law original (this one). Stephanie Law is the reason I started collecting art in the first place - I have, like, 5 of her originals or something at this point - and every year I've wanted to get one of her big ones and ended up not doing so - so this year I did. All in all, it ended up being a really bad idea, I really didn't have the money, and it caused me problems all August and is still causing me problems now, but I just remind myself that you only live once, and you might as well enjoy it, and if that means blowing the bank from time to time, well, try not to make a habit of it. :)
Other than that, I feel like I did TONS in August, but looking back now I can't think of all that much else that I spent the time doing. I went to some museums, did some work stuff, went to a few baseball games, but that was about it. :)
I can't figure out if September has gone really, really quickly or super slow. Certainly, last Monday feels like it was about a month ago. I've mostly spent the month doing work and being astonished at how many days can pass with me doing very little. I've been doing a bit more museum-going, which has been fun, including a couple of trips to the Met, a visit to MoMA to catch an exhibit about Dali before it closed, a visit to the AMNH, and an afternoon spent at the Central Park Zoo, but over all things have been dog dull. I've been fighting a battle with my desire for sweet foods and mostly losing. I've watched the Mets crash and burn for the second year running. I've started playing DDR again. I've dealt with the dogs fleas. I've had some back and forth with one of our clients. That kind of thing.
The only big event I've had this month was last weekend, when I drove out to Columbus and spent the weekend with my brother and sister-in-law. The purpose of this visit was simple: my sister-in-law, who walks about as much as I do (more, in the past!) asked me if I'd like to do the New Albany Walking Classic with her. The event was last Sunday, and she and I woke up bright and early and walked a half marathon! We got medals and everything. According to the official results, we did the whole thing in 3 hours, 27 minutes, and 4 seconds (though, amusingly, the timer said it was 3:33 when we crossed - we didn't start at 0, though, we were about 10 minutes behind). That put our pace at 15 min 48 sec mile - which is considerably faster than we had predicted, we had expected to maintain a pace of about 16 - 17 minute miles. Yay! (I hadn't actually looked up the results before just now). All in all, it was a nice weekend. I got to meet some of Ben's friends and actually spend time with them - we played loads of Rock Band. I'd only played once before, but it turns out I have something of an aptitude for the drums, and no one else wanted to play them, so I played the drums a whole lot. :) Kirsten and I spent a lot of time together, too - my brother is having problems with his back, so he stayed home while she and I did stuff. I got to go to Hartstone Pottery, which I'd heard a lot about but never visited, and got some super cheap remaindered stuff. On Monday morning, she and I went for massages, and it was utterly wonderful. Finally, at the tail end of the trip, I picked upmistress_sin and then we went a bit out of the way to meet my dad for dinner, which was also nice - I hadn't seen him since early August. It really is so close, I need to be better about getting out there. :)
Recently, I've really felt like I'm juggling. I have a lot of things I either want to do or need to do, and the truth is, I could almost definitely find the time in the day to do all of them, but I think the effort of switching and doing a little bit of so many different things is really draining, and the end result is that every time I successfully integrate another thing, I end up dropping another. This is getting frustrating, but I can't help but feel that if I keep at it, I'll get there. :) Things I want to:
1. Work (success!!)
2. Write (recently, fail!)
3. Exercise (success, mostly!)
4. Study Japanese (fail!)
5. Read (fail!)
6. Get out of the House and Do Stuff (slightly less success than I'd like, but still success)
7. Apply to Grad School (currently, fail)
8. Watch TV (recently, way too much success)
9. Play Video Games (only success in the last couple of days)
10. Meet People (epic fail!)
11. Hang Out With the People I Already Know (mixed success)
12. Keep the Apartment Clean (partial success)
Really, it's not a huge list, and so it's frustrating that I can't seem to figure out how to make it all happen. But I'm getting better - the list of successes has been increasing recently, and I think it will continue to now that baseball won't be eating every night of my life. :)
Exercise has remained one of the more successful parts of my life. I'm still walking a ton. Dieting has been slipping a bit recently, but I haven't been gaining any weight (I'm eating more, but still not too much, so I think it's okay) and, in fact, I think I'm still losing weight very slowly. That suits me fine, and I think that if I can maintain that I'll be very happy. I've been getting to eat a lot of the things I'd like to eat recently, so while I'm not adhering as closely to a diet as perhaps I might want to, I've kind of decided that if I'm happy, it doesn't fricken matter. :) Otherwise, my health has been good, with the only addendum being what I've already mentioned - my energy levels have been low, I've been very tired recently, and I have no clue why. I think some of it might just be that I need more to keep my occupied. As I've noticed many times in the past, the busier I am, the more I get done - being busy with one thing tends to make me more productive in every aspect of my life, even the ones in which I'm not currently busy, whereas being pretty low key tends to lower my over all productivity in every regard. Again, I have high hopes that if I step things up a bit, I'll be able to get all of the ball up in the air despite the low energy levels that have left me a lump on the couch far too many evenings.
That's about it from NYC. A minor side note, as I've said about a zillion times to the people who spend time with me, is that I've been shocked by the extent to which I miss Japan. It blows my mind that it was a year ago when I was there, and I'm really jonesing to go back. The current plan is to leave next summer immediately after Origins and return just before Gencon. I'll see if I can pull it off - right now, I couldn't afford that plan. But I'm GOING back, I'll MAKE it happen. :)
Work is one of the main things I've been doing, or, in some cases, not doing. I've been having some relatively serious procrastination issues - I'm getting everything done no problem, but I have some stuff hanging on the horizon and for some reason I haven't been able to get it together to get started. I never life feeling paralyzed, so this has been a little frustrating to me, but I'm slowly working on it - I got some stuff out today related to this, so hopefully, I'm getting there. :) Other than that, early fall is a super slow season in the grants world, so we don't have any big projects looming in that regard. Instead, all of our annual progress reports are due. I've already completed one, which was due on August 31st, and we have another two due on the 6th that I'm not really involved in, and 5 due on the 31st, all of which I'm responsible for - that's the big thing on the horizon that I've not been doing. Still, I think part of what's going on is that it's weird to have everything basically under control. Like most people, I just don't work as well when there aren't any deadlines and/or the deadline is far away - I end up always feeling like there is something I should be doing, yet not quite having the energy to just go and do it. :)
Meanwhile, I was doing pretty well keeping on top of my writing until mid August, when for no obvious reason I completely lost all of the energy that powered me through the first 120k of this story. I think a big part of this was caused by baseball, and the fact that due to the way I was living my life I'd taken to writing in the evening. I don't LIKE writing the evening, I don't feel like I do as a good a job when I write in the evening, and recently, I've just had no energy what so ever at night (noticing a recurring theme? energy level has been a big problem for me recently, and I'm not sure why). However, now that the baseball season is over, I have high hopes about getting going on my writing again. I had a long talk with
xaniquen about the project, and I'm thinking increasingly that once I finish the first draft I'm gonna chop it to little bits and rewrite the whole book as a trilogy of young adult novels. This'll take a fair amount of reworking of the two main characters, but over all the more I've thought about and in particular after we spoke about it, I think it's doable and might even be necessary. Still, nothing is going to happen until I finish the first draft, a draft which has me rather daunted right now. Today or tomorrow, though, I'm getting back on the wagon and trying to make a go of it - again.Plans to reapply to graduate school proceed slowly. I did the research on the program, confirmed that it's a good idea, and figured out what I'd need to do. So far, though, I haven't done any of it - I need to retake the GRE, and get a couple of recommendations from god-knows-where, and then come up with a super awesome essay which explains why I want to study something that I'm not actually entirely sure that I do want to study. Still, the degree will be very helpful to me in terms of my job, so I think it's a good decision. Urban Education, here I come!
August was a really, really busy month. I attended two different weddings (the marriage of
xaniquen to pandorasage, and the wedding of mistress_sin to her boy - I was the maid of honor at that one!) which involved trips in to Jersey - which including pretty much the hardest drive I've EVER done, when the rain got so heavy on I95 that I couldn't see the lines on the road at noon - and to Binghamton. Both were very nice events, and I'm glad that I was able to be a part of them. At xaniquen's, I got to reconnect with Brett, who I hadn't seen in like, 3 years, and chat with Kev, who I see a couple times a year. Meanwhile, at mistress_sin's shindig, I got to, you know, have responsibilities and all that, but really, as far as maid of honor experiences go, I got off way easy, I hardly had to do anything. The wedding was outdoors, and we lucked out - the weather was gorgeous, all the flowers were blooming around the gazebo, and none of the family members allowed their antagonisms to get in the way of the happy event. The other big event for me every August is Gencon. This year, I didn't place a single game - perhaps to balance out for the fact that I played four or so at Origins. The main thing I did was hang out with a bunch of the Bloomington folks - I helped
kniedzw clean his apartment, chatted with moonartemis72 about her upcoming nuptials, spent more time with moonandserpent than I ever did when I actually lived there (and enjoyed the time very much!), and bonded a bit with oddsboy. sapphohestia made a lot of fun of me for constantly running off to photograph cosplayers, though thanks to being with her, I actually got photographed myself a few times, apparently entirely because I was also a girl, who happened to be with a girl who was in costume. Very odd, that. I had a great time, though - I really over came a fear of mine. In the past I've always said I wanted to photograph more of the people in costume, but I always chickened out when it actually came time to pester them and ask them to stop so that I could take their picture. This year, though, I got really good at just going ahead and asking, and the result was that I got a whole lot of very fun shots. I think my plan for next year is clear!The other big event at Gencon this year was my ability to spend massively more than I had budgeted. On the car ride there, I commented to
mistress_sin about a piece of artwork that I remembered from the previous year, and said that if Wayne Reynolds still had that one, I'd buy it, and damn the price. Well, I ended up having to put my money where my mouth was - he had it, and I thought about it a bunch, and then went for it, so now I own the original of this piece, the Sorceress from Paizo's Pathfinder books. Meanwhile, I also broke down and bought an expensive Stephanie Pui-Mun Law original (this one). Stephanie Law is the reason I started collecting art in the first place - I have, like, 5 of her originals or something at this point - and every year I've wanted to get one of her big ones and ended up not doing so - so this year I did. All in all, it ended up being a really bad idea, I really didn't have the money, and it caused me problems all August and is still causing me problems now, but I just remind myself that you only live once, and you might as well enjoy it, and if that means blowing the bank from time to time, well, try not to make a habit of it. :)Other than that, I feel like I did TONS in August, but looking back now I can't think of all that much else that I spent the time doing. I went to some museums, did some work stuff, went to a few baseball games, but that was about it. :)
I can't figure out if September has gone really, really quickly or super slow. Certainly, last Monday feels like it was about a month ago. I've mostly spent the month doing work and being astonished at how many days can pass with me doing very little. I've been doing a bit more museum-going, which has been fun, including a couple of trips to the Met, a visit to MoMA to catch an exhibit about Dali before it closed, a visit to the AMNH, and an afternoon spent at the Central Park Zoo, but over all things have been dog dull. I've been fighting a battle with my desire for sweet foods and mostly losing. I've watched the Mets crash and burn for the second year running. I've started playing DDR again. I've dealt with the dogs fleas. I've had some back and forth with one of our clients. That kind of thing.
The only big event I've had this month was last weekend, when I drove out to Columbus and spent the weekend with my brother and sister-in-law. The purpose of this visit was simple: my sister-in-law, who walks about as much as I do (more, in the past!) asked me if I'd like to do the New Albany Walking Classic with her. The event was last Sunday, and she and I woke up bright and early and walked a half marathon! We got medals and everything. According to the official results, we did the whole thing in 3 hours, 27 minutes, and 4 seconds (though, amusingly, the timer said it was 3:33 when we crossed - we didn't start at 0, though, we were about 10 minutes behind). That put our pace at 15 min 48 sec mile - which is considerably faster than we had predicted, we had expected to maintain a pace of about 16 - 17 minute miles. Yay! (I hadn't actually looked up the results before just now). All in all, it was a nice weekend. I got to meet some of Ben's friends and actually spend time with them - we played loads of Rock Band. I'd only played once before, but it turns out I have something of an aptitude for the drums, and no one else wanted to play them, so I played the drums a whole lot. :) Kirsten and I spent a lot of time together, too - my brother is having problems with his back, so he stayed home while she and I did stuff. I got to go to Hartstone Pottery, which I'd heard a lot about but never visited, and got some super cheap remaindered stuff. On Monday morning, she and I went for massages, and it was utterly wonderful. Finally, at the tail end of the trip, I picked up
mistress_sin and then we went a bit out of the way to meet my dad for dinner, which was also nice - I hadn't seen him since early August. It really is so close, I need to be better about getting out there. :)Recently, I've really felt like I'm juggling. I have a lot of things I either want to do or need to do, and the truth is, I could almost definitely find the time in the day to do all of them, but I think the effort of switching and doing a little bit of so many different things is really draining, and the end result is that every time I successfully integrate another thing, I end up dropping another. This is getting frustrating, but I can't help but feel that if I keep at it, I'll get there. :) Things I want to:
1. Work (success!!)
2. Write (recently, fail!)
3. Exercise (success, mostly!)
4. Study Japanese (fail!)
5. Read (fail!)
6. Get out of the House and Do Stuff (slightly less success than I'd like, but still success)
7. Apply to Grad School (currently, fail)
8. Watch TV (recently, way too much success)
9. Play Video Games (only success in the last couple of days)
10. Meet People (epic fail!)
11. Hang Out With the People I Already Know (mixed success)
12. Keep the Apartment Clean (partial success)
Really, it's not a huge list, and so it's frustrating that I can't seem to figure out how to make it all happen. But I'm getting better - the list of successes has been increasing recently, and I think it will continue to now that baseball won't be eating every night of my life. :)
Exercise has remained one of the more successful parts of my life. I'm still walking a ton. Dieting has been slipping a bit recently, but I haven't been gaining any weight (I'm eating more, but still not too much, so I think it's okay) and, in fact, I think I'm still losing weight very slowly. That suits me fine, and I think that if I can maintain that I'll be very happy. I've been getting to eat a lot of the things I'd like to eat recently, so while I'm not adhering as closely to a diet as perhaps I might want to, I've kind of decided that if I'm happy, it doesn't fricken matter. :) Otherwise, my health has been good, with the only addendum being what I've already mentioned - my energy levels have been low, I've been very tired recently, and I have no clue why. I think some of it might just be that I need more to keep my occupied. As I've noticed many times in the past, the busier I am, the more I get done - being busy with one thing tends to make me more productive in every aspect of my life, even the ones in which I'm not currently busy, whereas being pretty low key tends to lower my over all productivity in every regard. Again, I have high hopes that if I step things up a bit, I'll be able to get all of the ball up in the air despite the low energy levels that have left me a lump on the couch far too many evenings.
That's about it from NYC. A minor side note, as I've said about a zillion times to the people who spend time with me, is that I've been shocked by the extent to which I miss Japan. It blows my mind that it was a year ago when I was there, and I'm really jonesing to go back. The current plan is to leave next summer immediately after Origins and return just before Gencon. I'll see if I can pull it off - right now, I couldn't afford that plan. But I'm GOING back, I'll MAKE it happen. :)
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-29 05:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2008-09-30 12:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2008-09-30 01:47 pm (UTC)It sounds like you're doing a good job keeping up with the important stuff though, and finding some time for relaxation. You'll work everything out, I'm sure.
Thanks for sharing the convention pics. I haven't been to one in ages, so it is nice to at least see bits.
Oh and yay for no fleas!!