the deep moans round with many voices

Things done today:

1. 9am-7pm at the rental office. Very boring day, given that many Cornell students are already leaving for February break. Both Mom Boss and Aunt Boss are currently on vacation, so Miss California has picked up some extra hours by being a second person in the office today and tomorrow. (I would have returned the favor on Wednesday, but I was at Not the IRS all morning and afternoon.)

2. I forgot to mention this yesterday, but I finished listening to The World of Byzantium on Wednesday morning, and started on a new Great Courses lecture series: How to Listen to and Understand Great Music (3rd edition). I listened to episode 2 today. The lecturer is not to be trusted when it comes to historical interpretation of non-musical trends (though he's fine on names and dates, thank goodness), but fortunately he mostly sticks to music and personal history anecdata, so I can grit my teeth and say "Oh for fuck's sake" a lot when he attempts to explain the fall of the (western) Roman Empire. (This is the same guy who did the Bach lecture series I listened to and enjoyed last year, FYI. He had the same "please stop trying to do social, political, or economic history and just stick to music, which you are admittedly very good at" issue there, too.)

3. Listened to The Magnus Archives episode 154: Bloody Mary. As I've mentioned before, I am slowing way down in the homestretch of season 4 because I don't want to run out of content and be stuck in a long hiatus. :/

4. Read chapter 5 of A Fistful of Shells, which felt a bit less in-depth than the previous chapters despite being ten pages longer, perhaps because it's trying to cover a much larger geographic area.

5. Wrote two 3-sentence ficathon fills.

6. Started folding and putting away linens from Sunday's laundry haul.

Now I am going to finish dinner, after which I think I will attempt a bit more writing since I have not yet reached my wordcount goal for the day... and, of course, fold some more linens since they're currently strewn all over my bed as part of my attempt to force myself to fold them because otherwise I can't go to sleep. (This trick does not always work. Sometimes I just chuck the unfolded items back in the laundry bag for another day. But it's always worth a shot!)

...

Oh! Tangentially and unrelated to anything, I just wanted to say that while I was walking into town to catch my bus this morning, I passed a woman walking a dog. I complimented the dog (I think a mutt with a hefty dose of standard poodle? very large and curly and with intelligent eyes), and she complimented my scarf. And I felt very nice about that all the way to work. :)

Things done today:

1. Rental office 10am-6pm. Did two studio tours, fielded some phone calls, answered a few emails, and made supportive comments while Miss California put up our Valentine's Day hearts display for February.

2. Read about half of Six of Crows. I am trying very hard not to stay up foolishly late to read the rest of it.

3. Continued listening to the frustrating Great Courses lecture series. The lecturer has now fucked up the Second Defenestration of Prague, continued not to name popes, neglected to mention almost any dates for the Thirty Years War, etc. *sigh*

4. Continued listening to The Magnus Archives. I am currently through episode 129: Submerged.

5. Wrote four fills for the Three Sentence Ficathon, which is now open. Come play! The more people participate, the more fun it is for everyone! :DDD

6. Paid one credit card bill, which happens to be on a payment cycle about 10-12 days offset from my other credit cards. This is mildly annoying, but not enough to bother trying to change.

7. Took kitchen compost to the communal bin and texted Landlord Dude to let him know the compost company hasn't picked up the full bin and given us a new empty one even though I've had the full bin sitting on the curb for two weeks now.

Things done since 2:30pm:

1. Worked 4-8pm at Not the IRS. I had my first tax client today! We couldn't finish because they were missing two pieces of information, but it's the kind of thing where somebody else just has to plug two numbers in and then run the signatures, so they're coming back on their Thursday lunch break with those numbers and one of my coworkers will get everything signed and paid.

2. Continued listening to The Magnus Archives. I have finished episode 101: "Another Twist," and continue to enjoy the podcast a lot. :D

3. Continued listening to my current Great Courses series, which continues to annoy me but not quite enough to call it a day and move on to something else. *hands* I have decided to treat it as an unreliable introductory survey course, which is basically what it is.

Thus far the lecturer has made howling genealogical errors for both the Medicis and the royal family of Castille-Aragon, has fucked up the timeline of the Portuguese voyages of exploration around Africa to India, and has also repeated negative rumors about the Borgias as if they were proven fact. (Which, like, I am not a Borgia fan? But there is a difference between saying, "There were widely believed stories that the Borgias did such-and-such shocking, immoral things," and saying, flat-out, "The Borgias totally did these shocking, immoral things," in the same tone as reporting clear facts like who was king of France in a certain year.) I also have serious arguments with his take on Columbus's voyages and Cortez's conquest of Mexico, though that's more an interpretation thing than an errors-of-fact thing. On the other hand, this is one of the first times I've heard someone devote time and attention to the growth of the popular piety movement in the late Middle Ages/Renaissance, so that's worth something.

4. Wrote ~525 words of the bridge-centric Narnia fic. I think I have figured out what the tax record stuff is doing there -- the theme is about building Narnia back into a functional and unified country in the years after PC (possibly also after VDT? I am as yet unsure of the exact timeframe of this fic), so cracking down on old habits of tax evasion (and also using taxes for public works rather than just making Miraz rich and hiring ever-more soldiers) is related to my protagonist's obsession with creating functional bridges to improve transportation networks and logistics. Also, I have worked out a good reason for her to meet a local naiad, and a reason for that naiad to have an interest in human engineering. So. Progress!

(Also, as of yesterday I am no longer in the red on my getyourwordsout pledge of 75,000 words in 2020. \o/ I mean, ~205 words a day is not a particularly grueling writing pace, but I spent the first week of January writing literally no fiction, and most of the next week writing a grand total of 210 words over six whole days, so it's nice to prove to myself that I can still knock words out when I put in a little time and effort. Are these words aimed toward my planned Writing Projects To Complete in 2020? So far, mostly not. But some of them are, and any words are better than no words, you know?)

5. Bought some more groceries, including the zucchinis I was unable to buy yesterday because the store had run out of them. They were very nearly out again today, but I snapped up the last remnants -- they're quite small and some have weird marks on their skins (which is probably why no one else had bought them earlier), but they will roast just fine so I don't care.

6. Steamed broccoli for lunch tomorrow and Friday. Possibly dinner tomorrow as well? Or no, that will probably be taco salad.

7. Possibly I should mention that I washed all the dishes I used in my various cooking projects? I don't usually mention washing dishes, because that's not a task I have ever had trouble with. It doesn't eat spoons for me -- in fact, I find it meditative and a minor source of the "look, I have Done A Thing" satisfaction I get from creative endeavors. And I think because I know dishes aren't a problem for me, I don't get bothered if they stack up in my sink for a couple days -- I know I will get to them sooner or later, so there's no sense of building anxiety as the size of the task grows. It just means I get one long meditation session instead of two or three smaller ones spread over multiple days.

I have heard other people's dish-related issues, and I am really glad they're not something I personally share. Anyway, you can generally assume that I have eaten three meals, showered in the morning, gotten dressed, brushed my teeth twice a day, and flossed in the evening, even if I don't explicitly mention doing those tasks. I do put them on my to-do lists, but that's mostly to give myself some "freebies" so even on bad days I can feel like I'm still doing something, you know?

...

This has been a really good/productive week, actually. Suspiciously good. Now I'm suddenly waiting for the other shoe to drop. *headdesk*

...

Anyway, now I am off to bed, because I have to be up at 7:15am tomorrow instead of getting to sleep in until the luxuriously late hour of 9:00am. *wry*

Things I intended to do today: a lot.

Things I actually did today: maybe half of that? Which was still a fair bit, and included getting sort of half-done with some of the unfinished items so I can do them properly tomorrow, so I'm not terribly annoyed.

I think what bugs me most is that I have been very tired lately. As in, when I have a day off I invariably seem to require a two hour (or three hour) nap in the afternoon or early evening, regardless of whether I've been getting adequate sleep in the preceding days. I don't know if this is a depression symptom or something else. I suppose for the moment my best bet is to continue maintaining a regular sleep schedule and see if this settles out or fades as the days get longer. Hmm. Also I could probably stand to use my little Verilux light during the afternoons as well as during breakfast and see if that makes a difference.

But hey, I washed all my laundry (even if I didn't fold and put anything away yet); I bought some cheap red wine, started thawing beef, and pulled out my slow-cooker to make pot roast tomorrow; I roasted zucchini and eggplant so I have vegetable accompaniment for the next few days; I took my kitchen compost to the communal bin; I checked out an interesting book from the library; I wrote my to-do lists for the coming week; I've been listening to a Great Courses audio series about US constitutional law; and I got through another handful of Magnus Archives episodes as I approach the end of season 2. Like I said, still a fair bit, especially when you figure in the 2.5 hour nap. *wry*

The following is a list of the 34 audiobooks (for varying definitions of "book") that I have listened to in January through October, 2019. They are more or less in chronological order by listening date. (I say "more or less" because Amazon's content-management function lists items by purchase date, and while my Audible app mostly lists by "last date you did something with this item," where "did something" can be either "listened to it" OR "purchased it" OR "downloaded it to your phone," sometimes parts of it glitch back to purchase order.)

Anyway, the list:

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1. The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World, by Robert Garland (Great Courses, 24 hours 28 minutes)
-----Or more accurately, in the ancient Mediterranean world (Egypt, Greece, Rome, with a few digressions into Mesopotamia and Persia) and in medieval England. Garland's unexamined ethnocentrism grates after a while, but there's a bunch of useful information in here. (Just ignore most of what he says once he gets to the medieval period, particularly about the Vikings.)

2. Jingle Bell Pop, by John Seabrook (Audible free member offer, 1 hour 14 minutes)
-----A history of how/when/why various songs entered the "canon" of American Christmas music. Slight but entertaining.

3. Origins of Great Ancient Civilizations, by Kenneth W. Harl (Great Courses, 6 hours)
-----Which should probably be subtitled "maybe let's not skim over Mesopotamia and Anatolia/Persia so fast before diving into Greek history, hey?" This is fairly introductory level stuff, but well organized and interesting. Also, a note about Prof. Harl, since I have been listening to a bunch of his courses: he has a strong Brooklyn (or Brooklyn-adjacent) accent and a kind of strident speaking pattern, which I understand some listeners find off-putting, but which I find oddly endearing because it makes him sound like he's really into whatever he's talking about.

4. The Black Death: The World's Most Devastating Plague, by Dorsey Armstrong (Great Courses, 12 hours 10 minutes)
-----What it says on the tin. My one gripe is that Prof. Armstrong treats the course a bit too much like an actual college course where students can go several days between lectures and therefore includes a sort of five-minute "as we discussed in the previous lecture..." catch-up section at the start of each new lecture. This gets old fast if you're listening to a bunch in a row on a long drive. *wry* Other than that, very interesting and informative.

5. Maya to Aztec: Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed, by Edwin Barnhart (Great Courses, 23 hours 15 minutes)
-----Fascinating and informative. You could easily make a whole course (or multiple courses) on any one of the cultures Prof. Barnhart discusses here.

( cut for length! )

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You know, looking at it all together, that is a lot of hours. What's especially interesting is that they're all hours I also fill with other tasks, because I literally cannot focus on audio-only input without something else to eat fidgety overflow. So I listen while driving, or while walking into work, or while cooking, or while doing laundry, or while raking leaves, or any number of random tasks. All of which are things I would be doing anyway, but adding the audio input makes those tasks less annoying because I no longer feel like "ugh, folding laundry is such a waste of time" since I am now Learning A Thing while doing a mindless chore.

Apparently the theme of 2019 for me is that this is the year I finally learned how to listen to audiobooks (and/or podcasts) and it improved my life in ways I was absolutely not expecting.

...Also, you have probably noticed that there is no fiction on this list. There's a reason for that, and it's that I am super-picky about narrative voice for fiction and also I get SO IMPATIENT at the pacing when I can't just read ahead at my own speed. I'm picky about nonfiction narrative voice, too, but less so. And lecture series are perfect because they're not a person reading written prose -- they're just a person talking like a normal human being. Like, okay, they're talking from notes about a specific subject, but it's basically a college lecture recorded on tape, and I'm cool with a wide variety of professorial styles, so. *wry*