Accountable Delay
Jan. 9th, 2022 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madwriterBack here to post again after a few weeks. The delay really was just prosaic - the home Internet connection had been out for quite awhile, which meant that in practice I could only post entries at work while I was off the clock. (Technically I could post from my phone, but non-physical keyboards and I don't get along all that well. That's the one thing I miss about my old slider phone.)
At any rate, the issue was just a simple router problem that was fixed within a few minutes once somebody was able to look at it. So here's hoping I won't go three weeks without posting anything again.
I wish I could say otherwise, but I didn't get a whole lot of writing done over my Christmas break either. 3200 words in total, which is still 3200 words and a lot of grief better than nothing at all, though ironically it was less than I typically get done during a work week. That said, part of this was because I also wanted to catch up on my pleasure reading. I wouldn't say that I "caught up", exactly, but I did get a lot more done of that than usual. I've got several books underway, more than I've put up on Goodreads, which I'm bouncing back and forth between on those usual days when reading time is sparse.
I also got a lot of family time in during my holiday, which was very nice - and my 22-year-old niece is now engaged as of two days before Christmas. :) On a simultaneously sad and positive note, my nephew, who started college this past semester, moved out with the help of his mother (my sister), his brother, and me on New Year's Eve. It's a great school overall but just not, it seems, for him. While I was sorry to see him move out, there's a good chance he'll be much happier wherever he chooses to go to next, and it was nice to be able to spend the better part of a day with him.
(Or really, any of the kids these days when they're all mobile and definitely have lives of their own, as the saying goes.)
One of those Christmas Break days was spent putting a new tire on the Antimatter Van (planned, unlike the last time I replaced a tire). I was told it would be a 3-4 hour wait and I'd just told my sister a day or two before that I missed walking around downtown Roanoke, so that's what I did. Alas, the museums were closed, but otherwise I enjoyed it immensely, remembering with every block why I enjoy it immensely.
One thing I also did, which was less enjoyable but felt necessary, was to walk as far as the now-abandoned Roanoke Times building. Like many other American regional newspapers, it's falling victim to cutbacks regardless of profitability. The newspaper had stood on that spot since the late 19th century, and my father worked there for 49 years, from paperboy to copy and layout editor, with being a reporter, feature writer, and other sorts of editor in between. It's one of those things where despite logic, I had to see it for myself to really believe the paper would no longer be on that spot, in that 100-year-old building. It's moved to a smaller building, still in downtown; the original location is set to become city offices.
The "frustrated" in my mood is simply because there's so much I want to be doing and so little time through the recent past and for the foreseeable future to get anywhere close to all of it done. As I've mentioned here before, 2020 spoiled me: I had a 3-month furlough during which money was not a worry, then at Thanksgiving and Christmas through early January I had a 6-week paid vacation due to still having a ton of earlier vacation time at the point when my furlough kicked in. I got all kinds of things done, especially writing and reading and gardening, and I really do miss that. (Particularly as retirement still seems like a distant and unobtainable goal.)
The stereotypical midlife crisis is to buy a sports car, or have an affair, or whatever. I never would've guessed that my midlife crisis would be to want to pack up all my pets and books and run off to an island in the middle of the South Pacific to spend I could spend all my days reading, writing, and snuggling with cats!
At any rate, the issue was just a simple router problem that was fixed within a few minutes once somebody was able to look at it. So here's hoping I won't go three weeks without posting anything again.
I wish I could say otherwise, but I didn't get a whole lot of writing done over my Christmas break either. 3200 words in total, which is still 3200 words and a lot of grief better than nothing at all, though ironically it was less than I typically get done during a work week. That said, part of this was because I also wanted to catch up on my pleasure reading. I wouldn't say that I "caught up", exactly, but I did get a lot more done of that than usual. I've got several books underway, more than I've put up on Goodreads, which I'm bouncing back and forth between on those usual days when reading time is sparse.
I also got a lot of family time in during my holiday, which was very nice - and my 22-year-old niece is now engaged as of two days before Christmas. :) On a simultaneously sad and positive note, my nephew, who started college this past semester, moved out with the help of his mother (my sister), his brother, and me on New Year's Eve. It's a great school overall but just not, it seems, for him. While I was sorry to see him move out, there's a good chance he'll be much happier wherever he chooses to go to next, and it was nice to be able to spend the better part of a day with him.
(Or really, any of the kids these days when they're all mobile and definitely have lives of their own, as the saying goes.)
One of those Christmas Break days was spent putting a new tire on the Antimatter Van (planned, unlike the last time I replaced a tire). I was told it would be a 3-4 hour wait and I'd just told my sister a day or two before that I missed walking around downtown Roanoke, so that's what I did. Alas, the museums were closed, but otherwise I enjoyed it immensely, remembering with every block why I enjoy it immensely.
One thing I also did, which was less enjoyable but felt necessary, was to walk as far as the now-abandoned Roanoke Times building. Like many other American regional newspapers, it's falling victim to cutbacks regardless of profitability. The newspaper had stood on that spot since the late 19th century, and my father worked there for 49 years, from paperboy to copy and layout editor, with being a reporter, feature writer, and other sorts of editor in between. It's one of those things where despite logic, I had to see it for myself to really believe the paper would no longer be on that spot, in that 100-year-old building. It's moved to a smaller building, still in downtown; the original location is set to become city offices.
The "frustrated" in my mood is simply because there's so much I want to be doing and so little time through the recent past and for the foreseeable future to get anywhere close to all of it done. As I've mentioned here before, 2020 spoiled me: I had a 3-month furlough during which money was not a worry, then at Thanksgiving and Christmas through early January I had a 6-week paid vacation due to still having a ton of earlier vacation time at the point when my furlough kicked in. I got all kinds of things done, especially writing and reading and gardening, and I really do miss that. (Particularly as retirement still seems like a distant and unobtainable goal.)
The stereotypical midlife crisis is to buy a sports car, or have an affair, or whatever. I never would've guessed that my midlife crisis would be to want to pack up all my pets and books and run off to an island in the middle of the South Pacific to spend I could spend all my days reading, writing, and snuggling with cats!
