Life, a Bit Less Ordinary
Apr. 8th, 2010 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unforthSo I haven't posted a general update on my life since January 27th, apparently. As I've done a lot since then, I guess it's time to post a general update on the last 2 and a half months. (gah!)
Let me start this by saying that I have no idea what happened to winter. I feel like I just turned around, and suddenly it was spring (and, if the weather yesterday and today is any indication, it's now suddenly summer, but that's not a result of busy-ness.)
February was a busy month. I spent a lot of time working, gearing up for the Teaching American History grants which were due on March 22nd, but I also spent some time traveling. I went to Bloomington for Valentine's Day (and completely hermitted at Oz' - basically, only those who happened to encounter me actually saw me, and I didn't tell anyone I was in town - I was pretty blasted from working in Jan and Feb. It was a nice visit. We didn't do much - we had a lovely Valentine's Day dinner at Sweetgrass, ate a lot of yummy food overall, went for a hike in the snow, and generally had a nice time. I couldn't believe how much it snowed while I was there, it was pretty awesome. We also watched a ton of the Olympics - I watched more of the Olympics this year than I've ever watched before, and I really enjoyed it. I never realized how fricken awesome biathlon really was. I even watched curling.
Another highlight of February was the snow we had in NYC, which gave me the opportunity to go for a stupidly long walk and take a zillion pictures, some of which seem to have turned out pretty well.
Hmm...I'm noticing even as I start this post that my brain is failing to organize the things that happened in any kind of useful order, so instead I'm just going to babble about the things that stand out to me about the last couple months.
In and amongst the weeds, I managed to get to two live shows, one by Motion City Soundtrack and the other by Alkaline Trio.
The MCS show was okay, though the night had some hitches - I forgot my camera battery (but remembered my camera) for one. The openers were This Providence, Set Your Goals and the Swellers. The Swellers didn't make much impression on my one way or the other; This Providence reminded me of The Academy Is... but not in a way that I liked, and Set Your Goals reminded me of Rise Against, in a very good way. I'd say of all four performers, they were probably my fav at that show, and they got added to the list of bands to listen to more of. MCS wasn't at their best, they seemed a little lackluster - but that might just be that after the shows in December, anything would pale by comparison - those really were the best live music I've ever seen. Still, they played a lot of stuff off their new album (which is AMAZING) - and they played all of my favorites. I squeed when they played A Lifeless Ordinary, which has become one of my favorite songs ever:
And they also played Worker Bee, Delirium, Her Words Destroyed My Planet, and Disappear. They didn't play $#^$& (not quite the correct set of symbols, but that is essentially the name of the song) that I recall, but it's been a while, and they didn't play Stand Too Close, which made me a little sad but should have been expected as it's not as high energy. They also played some fan favorites (Future Freaks Me Out, I think they played LGFUAD, a few others)...I made the mistake of not actually writing down the set list afterwards, because I'd already heard them play most of what they did. All in all, I was happy I went, though it made me worry that maybe I wouldn't find concerts as awesome now that I'd done the ones in Chicago, which were extra awesome.
This fear was dispelled by the Alkaline Trio show. I was surprisingly unenthusiastic about this concert: it was at a time when I was very busy, I was tired, I was worried it wouldn't rock, and at that point I'd only just started listening to their new album and was shockingly displeased with it - not that it was awful, just that it was completely lack-luster. (It's grown on me since then, though it's still not my favorite of their albums, that'd have to be either Crimson or Good Mourning.) The openers were Cursive and The Dear and Departed. The D&D were decent, but I really didn't like Cursive - they just had a style that wasn't to my taste - it happens. :)
This setlist I did write down. According to the list I wrote that night, they played:
Crawl, '97, Blue in the Face (which was played acoustic, and was awesome); This Addiction, Fatally Yours, Nose Over Tail, Goodbye Forever, Blue Carolina, In Vein, Dine Dine My Darling, Emma, Sadie, Dead on the Floor, I'm Fine, Mercy Me, Continental, Lead Poisoning, and Armageddon. (in no particular order) It was a really great show, and the crowd was decent. I got some pics, though not many that were any good, and I thought they played a nice balance of new stuff and old stuff - though I wish they'd played another song or two from Agony and Irony (only In Vein - wished they'd played Calling All Skeletons...). They didn't play a lot of my favorites, but it worked out. Anyway, I've come out with Lead Poisoning as by FAR my favorite song on the new album, so it was awesome that they played it.
I'd talk about work, as that's one of the main things I did in Feb and March, but it's not terribly interesting. There was some annoying politics, but I'm in a good mood and it's over now, so screw that, and it was a lot of work - I wrote three proposals, helped write a fourth, and edited and supported and wrote sections of a fifth. The last couple weeks in particular were pretty rough, but a funny side effect has been that for the first time in a long time, I've entered the weeks after something like that feeling great. Pretty much since they day they were submitted, I've felt like a million bucks (with a couple not so good days, inevitably.) The key is, they all got done, so I'm just not worried about it right now.
On the more fun end of things, I got to spend a week in Paris in and amidst the madness. While this might sound utterly impractical - and probably was - it did make a small amount of sense: with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
schenker28 living there, it was an inexpensive trip (with internet access the whole time!) Furthermore, I had originally planned to go in April, but it turned out I could save a couple hundred dollars by going in the winter, so I decided to go for it. The trip was sort of a mixed bag. I worked a bit while I was there, though not as much as I needed to. I got to do the main things I wanted to, and it was awesome to get to spend a week with E., but it turned out to really not feel like enough time. Beyond that, I had airport drama on both ends of the trip - 18 hours before departure, one of my flights was canceled, and I had to book a different and later one. Then, my initial flight left so late that even had the flight NOT been canceled, I'd have missed it. On the way back, my connection ended up so close that I had to speed walk and jog across the Madrid airport. Still, it was awesome to get to go there if only for a few days, and I've finally managed to finish a once-over of the entire Louvre, though it took another two full days there. :) Dear god is that museum HUGE and made of awesome...I basically used the trip as a way to catch up and finish the things I wished I could have spent more time doing last time I was there - and that's exactly what I did - two days at the Louvre, a day at the Musee de l'Armee, and a day at the Musee d'Orsay. I spent the remaining day wandering the city with E., which was also a lot of fun. :)
Of course, when I came back, I was crazy busy.
ozziel was in town for his spring break, which happened to coincide with the week before the grants were due. It was a pretty rough week, and I spent two days of it in particularly as close to being a basket case as I generally get, so I figure if we made it through that week without breaking up, we must be doing something right. We didn't get to do much, unfortunately - I'd hoped we could go out a bit, catch the St. Patrick's Day parade, and that sort of thing - but it didn't really work out - though we did get to go to the Intrepid. It was nice, both to see how much he dug it, and also to be there without my camera - I had already thoroughly photographed it, so I could sit back and just enjoy the museum this time. :) The only down side was that the day he left was the day the grants were due or, put another way, the day before I achieved freedom. Ah well. We won't see each other again until April 30th, but there's nothing for it - my month ended up just busy enough that I couldn't go sooner than that, which is a pity.
I got to do a few touristy things around the city in the last couple months. I made it to an exhibit at the Met about Samurai and Japanese weaponry and armor the day before it closed. It was a pretty awesome exhibit (I even bought the book!) though the thing that stands out to me looking back was a Japanese family that was there. They had a very young kid, who kept looking at the katana blades and going, "abunai!" (which means "dangerous") - which had to be the cutest thing I've seen in recent memory, I kept laughing whenever they were near me. I also went to the Orchid Show with my mom last year. This is an event at the Botanical Gardens that I look forward to every year, but I was a little disappointed this year - a lot of it seemed similar to last year, and I wish they would display some other, different orchids - there are so many varieties. I was hoping that while we were there, the spring flowers would be blooming, but only a few early starters were going. I'm planning to go over there again early next week, though, as given the weather we've had this week I'm sure that it's in full blossom now. :)
Etsy hasn't been going as well as I'd hope, but I think that's mostly my fault. I've made back about half of what I invested to get started, which ain't shabby, and I just haven't been doing any marketing, with the result that I've only sold a couple things in the last month or so. Still, I've got two new patterns (the brontosaurus and the peacock) to edit and try to sell, and I'm still pretty optimistic that things will end up working out. Certainly, it takes so little effort on a day-to-day basis that I see no reason to not keep making the attempt. :)
In terms of stuff on the side, I've been pretty productive the last couple weeks. I've been practicing my drums (though not as much as I should) - and at my last lesson we started working on a REAL song, which is super exciting and harder than I would have imagined...or maybe it's not...I started working on my novel again on April 1st, right on my personal schedule, and it's going okay - though having re-read the second half of the book, I'm a little horrified by just how much work I think it needs. Even the chapter I'm editing right now, which was one of the better ones, has hardly an untouched sentence, and I completely cut half of it and will need to rewrite it completely new. Despite that, I'm pretty cheerful about it, too, as it's nice to be moving again even if it's scary just how much there is to do. The other personal thing I've really been meaning to work on is my photo collection. I'd really gotten lazy about labeling things, but the last few weeks I've started to get through some sets. It's slow going, just cause there's so much, but I figure if I keep chipping away at it, I might never catch up but at least I'll be on top of things. :)
My exercise stuff has been going quite well. Though I ate kinda crappy in March and therefore gained about a pound, I'm now back where I was when that started. I recently switched to a 3 day on/1 day off schedule, and it's not going quite as well as I would hope. I've only been doing it a couple weeks, but this last time I had to take two days off because of a pain in my leg that had me worrying that it might become long term - I really want to avoid the kind of problem that ends up requiring that I take a week off to recover - but when I woke up yesterday morning, it felt okay, and I've finished a day two today - so we'll see how tomorrow goes, and if one day proves to be enough to recover. I'm starting to think that for the first few weeks, while my body adapts to the stepped-up schedule, I might have to do 3 days on/1 day off/3 days on/2 days off - this wouldn't represent more than I was doing before, but it might get me conditioned enough to just do 3 on/1 off. :) I continue to beat old records, and I continue to be amazed at how I can't seem to find the limit despite this being my 6th month of exercise. :)
I'm very excited to have baseball starting up again. It's funny how empty my evenings feel during the off-season.ultimabaka and I decided to buy a 15 game pack of tickets, which included Opening Day. They weren't terribly expensive (on a game-to-game basis) and this'll be the most games I've gone to in any season (I'll be at 13 at least - I've got conflicts with two of the dates...). Opening day was AWESOME. We both brought our dads, and it was a great game - the Mets owned the day easily. We also got bonus tickets to the Mets 2010 Workout, which turns out to be a low-key event held the day before opening day. I got my first start of a sunburn for the year, and hung out, and generally had a nice time. I have no idea how this season will go (my prediction is that we'll have about a 500 season - win about as many as we lose - but who knows? there are so many variables...) but I'm still glad that it's on.
I thought of something else I wanted to discuss in this post: money. In the January post, I discussed how I was keeping a detailed budget for the first time in my life. I've maintained that since then, and it's been really helpful. Every few days, I update my excel sheet to reflect what I've spent, and by keeping on top of this, I always know how much money I have. Furthermore, at the beginning of each month, I deduct ALL of my bills from my "total," even those that don't clear til the end of the month, thus ensuring that I know how much I "actually" have, not how much the bank says I have - so that I don't forget what is going to be deducted. To top it off, I recently created an "upcoming expenses" tab, where I track things I KNOW I'm going to have to buy - ie, a badge to Origins on June, all my expenses for Gencon in August, that kinda thing. This means that I now KNOW how expensive May is going to be, because of the various expenses I'll have, and I should be careful in April to try to have some funds left. And, at the end of each month, I sort all the expenses in to categories and then enter them as tallies on one sheet. Thus, I know I spent $44.09 on books in January, $54.54 on books in February, and nothing on books in March. I also know that I've spent more on eating out each month since I started keeping track, which clearly I need to work on. The result? Well, I finished March with money in my account for the first time in months. I did my taxes and had managed to save plenty, and even had enough left over to pay off my credit card debt (which was a squeeeeee moment, definitely). And it's looking like I'll have money left over this month, too, assuming nothing goes wrong - even though I've had a couple of big expenses this month. Some of this is a direct result of getting a raise, but even so - I'm feeling pretty good about my fiscal situation for the first time since, oh, maybe last spring? I hope it stays that way - it will definitely vary depending on what unexpected things eat money in the next few months - hopefully, none, but ya never know.
I feel like I'm missing a ton, but that's everything that comes to mind right now. I wouldn't be surprised if I end up adding more to the end of this, but I'm gonna stop there for now. :)
Let me start this by saying that I have no idea what happened to winter. I feel like I just turned around, and suddenly it was spring (and, if the weather yesterday and today is any indication, it's now suddenly summer, but that's not a result of busy-ness.)
February was a busy month. I spent a lot of time working, gearing up for the Teaching American History grants which were due on March 22nd, but I also spent some time traveling. I went to Bloomington for Valentine's Day (and completely hermitted at Oz' - basically, only those who happened to encounter me actually saw me, and I didn't tell anyone I was in town - I was pretty blasted from working in Jan and Feb. It was a nice visit. We didn't do much - we had a lovely Valentine's Day dinner at Sweetgrass, ate a lot of yummy food overall, went for a hike in the snow, and generally had a nice time. I couldn't believe how much it snowed while I was there, it was pretty awesome. We also watched a ton of the Olympics - I watched more of the Olympics this year than I've ever watched before, and I really enjoyed it. I never realized how fricken awesome biathlon really was. I even watched curling.
Another highlight of February was the snow we had in NYC, which gave me the opportunity to go for a stupidly long walk and take a zillion pictures, some of which seem to have turned out pretty well.
Hmm...I'm noticing even as I start this post that my brain is failing to organize the things that happened in any kind of useful order, so instead I'm just going to babble about the things that stand out to me about the last couple months.
In and amongst the weeds, I managed to get to two live shows, one by Motion City Soundtrack and the other by Alkaline Trio.
The MCS show was okay, though the night had some hitches - I forgot my camera battery (but remembered my camera) for one. The openers were This Providence, Set Your Goals and the Swellers. The Swellers didn't make much impression on my one way or the other; This Providence reminded me of The Academy Is... but not in a way that I liked, and Set Your Goals reminded me of Rise Against, in a very good way. I'd say of all four performers, they were probably my fav at that show, and they got added to the list of bands to listen to more of. MCS wasn't at their best, they seemed a little lackluster - but that might just be that after the shows in December, anything would pale by comparison - those really were the best live music I've ever seen. Still, they played a lot of stuff off their new album (which is AMAZING) - and they played all of my favorites. I squeed when they played A Lifeless Ordinary, which has become one of my favorite songs ever:
And they also played Worker Bee, Delirium, Her Words Destroyed My Planet, and Disappear. They didn't play $#^$& (not quite the correct set of symbols, but that is essentially the name of the song) that I recall, but it's been a while, and they didn't play Stand Too Close, which made me a little sad but should have been expected as it's not as high energy. They also played some fan favorites (Future Freaks Me Out, I think they played LGFUAD, a few others)...I made the mistake of not actually writing down the set list afterwards, because I'd already heard them play most of what they did. All in all, I was happy I went, though it made me worry that maybe I wouldn't find concerts as awesome now that I'd done the ones in Chicago, which were extra awesome.
This fear was dispelled by the Alkaline Trio show. I was surprisingly unenthusiastic about this concert: it was at a time when I was very busy, I was tired, I was worried it wouldn't rock, and at that point I'd only just started listening to their new album and was shockingly displeased with it - not that it was awful, just that it was completely lack-luster. (It's grown on me since then, though it's still not my favorite of their albums, that'd have to be either Crimson or Good Mourning.) The openers were Cursive and The Dear and Departed. The D&D were decent, but I really didn't like Cursive - they just had a style that wasn't to my taste - it happens. :)
This setlist I did write down. According to the list I wrote that night, they played:
Crawl, '97, Blue in the Face (which was played acoustic, and was awesome); This Addiction, Fatally Yours, Nose Over Tail, Goodbye Forever, Blue Carolina, In Vein, Dine Dine My Darling, Emma, Sadie, Dead on the Floor, I'm Fine, Mercy Me, Continental, Lead Poisoning, and Armageddon. (in no particular order) It was a really great show, and the crowd was decent. I got some pics, though not many that were any good, and I thought they played a nice balance of new stuff and old stuff - though I wish they'd played another song or two from Agony and Irony (only In Vein - wished they'd played Calling All Skeletons...). They didn't play a lot of my favorites, but it worked out. Anyway, I've come out with Lead Poisoning as by FAR my favorite song on the new album, so it was awesome that they played it.
I'd talk about work, as that's one of the main things I did in Feb and March, but it's not terribly interesting. There was some annoying politics, but I'm in a good mood and it's over now, so screw that, and it was a lot of work - I wrote three proposals, helped write a fourth, and edited and supported and wrote sections of a fifth. The last couple weeks in particular were pretty rough, but a funny side effect has been that for the first time in a long time, I've entered the weeks after something like that feeling great. Pretty much since they day they were submitted, I've felt like a million bucks (with a couple not so good days, inevitably.) The key is, they all got done, so I'm just not worried about it right now.
On the more fun end of things, I got to spend a week in Paris in and amidst the madness. While this might sound utterly impractical - and probably was - it did make a small amount of sense: with
schenker28 living there, it was an inexpensive trip (with internet access the whole time!) Furthermore, I had originally planned to go in April, but it turned out I could save a couple hundred dollars by going in the winter, so I decided to go for it. The trip was sort of a mixed bag. I worked a bit while I was there, though not as much as I needed to. I got to do the main things I wanted to, and it was awesome to get to spend a week with E., but it turned out to really not feel like enough time. Beyond that, I had airport drama on both ends of the trip - 18 hours before departure, one of my flights was canceled, and I had to book a different and later one. Then, my initial flight left so late that even had the flight NOT been canceled, I'd have missed it. On the way back, my connection ended up so close that I had to speed walk and jog across the Madrid airport. Still, it was awesome to get to go there if only for a few days, and I've finally managed to finish a once-over of the entire Louvre, though it took another two full days there. :) Dear god is that museum HUGE and made of awesome...I basically used the trip as a way to catch up and finish the things I wished I could have spent more time doing last time I was there - and that's exactly what I did - two days at the Louvre, a day at the Musee de l'Armee, and a day at the Musee d'Orsay. I spent the remaining day wandering the city with E., which was also a lot of fun. :)Of course, when I came back, I was crazy busy.
ozziel was in town for his spring break, which happened to coincide with the week before the grants were due. It was a pretty rough week, and I spent two days of it in particularly as close to being a basket case as I generally get, so I figure if we made it through that week without breaking up, we must be doing something right. We didn't get to do much, unfortunately - I'd hoped we could go out a bit, catch the St. Patrick's Day parade, and that sort of thing - but it didn't really work out - though we did get to go to the Intrepid. It was nice, both to see how much he dug it, and also to be there without my camera - I had already thoroughly photographed it, so I could sit back and just enjoy the museum this time. :) The only down side was that the day he left was the day the grants were due or, put another way, the day before I achieved freedom. Ah well. We won't see each other again until April 30th, but there's nothing for it - my month ended up just busy enough that I couldn't go sooner than that, which is a pity.I got to do a few touristy things around the city in the last couple months. I made it to an exhibit at the Met about Samurai and Japanese weaponry and armor the day before it closed. It was a pretty awesome exhibit (I even bought the book!) though the thing that stands out to me looking back was a Japanese family that was there. They had a very young kid, who kept looking at the katana blades and going, "abunai!" (which means "dangerous") - which had to be the cutest thing I've seen in recent memory, I kept laughing whenever they were near me. I also went to the Orchid Show with my mom last year. This is an event at the Botanical Gardens that I look forward to every year, but I was a little disappointed this year - a lot of it seemed similar to last year, and I wish they would display some other, different orchids - there are so many varieties. I was hoping that while we were there, the spring flowers would be blooming, but only a few early starters were going. I'm planning to go over there again early next week, though, as given the weather we've had this week I'm sure that it's in full blossom now. :)
Etsy hasn't been going as well as I'd hope, but I think that's mostly my fault. I've made back about half of what I invested to get started, which ain't shabby, and I just haven't been doing any marketing, with the result that I've only sold a couple things in the last month or so. Still, I've got two new patterns (the brontosaurus and the peacock) to edit and try to sell, and I'm still pretty optimistic that things will end up working out. Certainly, it takes so little effort on a day-to-day basis that I see no reason to not keep making the attempt. :)
In terms of stuff on the side, I've been pretty productive the last couple weeks. I've been practicing my drums (though not as much as I should) - and at my last lesson we started working on a REAL song, which is super exciting and harder than I would have imagined...or maybe it's not...I started working on my novel again on April 1st, right on my personal schedule, and it's going okay - though having re-read the second half of the book, I'm a little horrified by just how much work I think it needs. Even the chapter I'm editing right now, which was one of the better ones, has hardly an untouched sentence, and I completely cut half of it and will need to rewrite it completely new. Despite that, I'm pretty cheerful about it, too, as it's nice to be moving again even if it's scary just how much there is to do. The other personal thing I've really been meaning to work on is my photo collection. I'd really gotten lazy about labeling things, but the last few weeks I've started to get through some sets. It's slow going, just cause there's so much, but I figure if I keep chipping away at it, I might never catch up but at least I'll be on top of things. :)
My exercise stuff has been going quite well. Though I ate kinda crappy in March and therefore gained about a pound, I'm now back where I was when that started. I recently switched to a 3 day on/1 day off schedule, and it's not going quite as well as I would hope. I've only been doing it a couple weeks, but this last time I had to take two days off because of a pain in my leg that had me worrying that it might become long term - I really want to avoid the kind of problem that ends up requiring that I take a week off to recover - but when I woke up yesterday morning, it felt okay, and I've finished a day two today - so we'll see how tomorrow goes, and if one day proves to be enough to recover. I'm starting to think that for the first few weeks, while my body adapts to the stepped-up schedule, I might have to do 3 days on/1 day off/3 days on/2 days off - this wouldn't represent more than I was doing before, but it might get me conditioned enough to just do 3 on/1 off. :) I continue to beat old records, and I continue to be amazed at how I can't seem to find the limit despite this being my 6th month of exercise. :)
I'm very excited to have baseball starting up again. It's funny how empty my evenings feel during the off-season.
ultimabaka and I decided to buy a 15 game pack of tickets, which included Opening Day. They weren't terribly expensive (on a game-to-game basis) and this'll be the most games I've gone to in any season (I'll be at 13 at least - I've got conflicts with two of the dates...). Opening day was AWESOME. We both brought our dads, and it was a great game - the Mets owned the day easily. We also got bonus tickets to the Mets 2010 Workout, which turns out to be a low-key event held the day before opening day. I got my first start of a sunburn for the year, and hung out, and generally had a nice time. I have no idea how this season will go (my prediction is that we'll have about a 500 season - win about as many as we lose - but who knows? there are so many variables...) but I'm still glad that it's on.I thought of something else I wanted to discuss in this post: money. In the January post, I discussed how I was keeping a detailed budget for the first time in my life. I've maintained that since then, and it's been really helpful. Every few days, I update my excel sheet to reflect what I've spent, and by keeping on top of this, I always know how much money I have. Furthermore, at the beginning of each month, I deduct ALL of my bills from my "total," even those that don't clear til the end of the month, thus ensuring that I know how much I "actually" have, not how much the bank says I have - so that I don't forget what is going to be deducted. To top it off, I recently created an "upcoming expenses" tab, where I track things I KNOW I'm going to have to buy - ie, a badge to Origins on June, all my expenses for Gencon in August, that kinda thing. This means that I now KNOW how expensive May is going to be, because of the various expenses I'll have, and I should be careful in April to try to have some funds left. And, at the end of each month, I sort all the expenses in to categories and then enter them as tallies on one sheet. Thus, I know I spent $44.09 on books in January, $54.54 on books in February, and nothing on books in March. I also know that I've spent more on eating out each month since I started keeping track, which clearly I need to work on. The result? Well, I finished March with money in my account for the first time in months. I did my taxes and had managed to save plenty, and even had enough left over to pay off my credit card debt (which was a squeeeeee moment, definitely). And it's looking like I'll have money left over this month, too, assuming nothing goes wrong - even though I've had a couple of big expenses this month. Some of this is a direct result of getting a raise, but even so - I'm feeling pretty good about my fiscal situation for the first time since, oh, maybe last spring? I hope it stays that way - it will definitely vary depending on what unexpected things eat money in the next few months - hopefully, none, but ya never know.
I feel like I'm missing a ton, but that's everything that comes to mind right now. I wouldn't be surprised if I end up adding more to the end of this, but I'm gonna stop there for now. :)
