Three days weekends are a great gift, you know?

Mine is a little offset -- Sunday-Monday-Tuesday instead of Saturday-Sunday-Monday -- but the principle is the same. I wrote Sunday off as a sleep and do-nothing day (very important for physical and mental health!) and have been using today for assorted household chores. I haven't completely managed to clear off my tables and counters, but I made significant progress. I've also put away all my laundry, caught up on one of the podcasts I follow, caught up on Dracula Daily emails, and responded to some AO3 comments that have been sitting in my inbox for up to a year. \o/

Tomorrow morning I have an appointment to get a potentially faulty automatic braking system part replaced in my beloved car (Toyota issued a recall/replacement in June, but I only got around to scheduling the fix last week), after which I think I will continue with the household and internet tidying. I think the focal points will be assorted flower pots and then vacuuming the whole apartment (ugh).

-----

In unrelated news, I have started slowly working through the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman. Audiovisual media remains a challenge for me, so I'm only halfway through episode 3 despite starting four days ago, but I'm enjoying it a lot so far! :)

(I may also have reread Preludes & Nocturnes, The Doll's House, and Dream Country in one evening because of reasons, but that is neither here nor there, really. *wry*)

My current audiobook is an unabridged version Herodotus's Histories, as narrated by David Timson. The particular version I'm listening to is produced by Naxos Audiobooks, and I have no idea what translation they're using because the product data very carefully says nothing whatsoever about that fairly important issue.

I think it's an older translation, based on some of the word choices and the fact that Naxos Audiobooks claims the text is in the public domain. Older doesn't necessarily mean less accurate, but still, I'd like to be able to trace the provenance of the text!

That annoyance aside, Mr. Timson does the most "cheerfully garrulous British traveler eager to tell you about everything!" shtick I have ever heard, and it's frankly delightful. Very chatty, very plummy.

And the text works AMAZINGLY well in audio form. I think I would be driven up the wall by the non-chronological approach and the constant asides if I were reading this on paper, but when it's a cheerful old guy talking my ears off, the rhythm of the prose is deeply pleasing and makes nice shapes in my brain. :)

I also really appreciate Herodotus's habit of saying flat out that he's heard different versions of some stories and then repeating both along with their provenance -- it's a nice bit of humility and also reveals more about his world than just picking one and not mentioning the others would do. He's pretty careful about sources in general, for a guy who is inventing his genre out of whole cloth.

I am just about to the end of Book 1, which seems poised to end with the death of Cyrus. This is only 4 hours into a nearly 28-hour recording, so I have plenty more enjoyable digressions with my delightfully chatty guide ahead of me. :D

I let my daily to-do lists fall by the wayside a few weeks back -- writing them just became too overwhelming to deal with, even though that has led to a handful of things slipping through the cracks.

But today I made myself a to-do list, on the principle that this is a very good day on which to be Very Busy, for many and various reasons.

Thus far I have:

1. Changed my linens (which I should have done Sunday afternoon, but eh, life happens)

2. Taken kitchen compost to the communal back yard bin

3. Bagged all my trash and put the bag into my designated trash can at the side of the house

4. Washed the masks I've worn over the past week

5. Boiled some eggs

6. Put away my electric fans

7. Vacuumed my apartment

8. Bought groceries

9. Cooked the pre-seasoned salmon and broccoli I'd had sitting around for the past few days. I then ate them for dinner. They were delicious. I must do that again sometime. (For reference, my salmon-cooking method is the same as my minimal-effort cooking method for most meats: namely, chuck it into a covered Corningware dish with a bit of liquid to stop it from sticking/burning and cook it at ~350 Fahrenheit for 20-30 minutes. The tastiness of the results is based entirely on one's seasoning choices, and a bit on the size of the meat pieces.)

...

The remaining items on my list are:

1. Put away laundry (which I have started but not finished)

2. Repair pants (I have set out the necessary supplies)

3. IGNORE ELECTION!!! (which I feel I am managing tolerably well)

...

I have also been listening to audiobooks. This morning I finished Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane, which was fine though I'm not wildly enamored of his writing style and I think the summary was a bit misleading in that it didn't mention that this is a very deliberately European-centric book rather than one with a global focus.

This afternoon I started Rome Enters the Greek East: From Anarchy to Hierarchy in the Hellenistic Mediterranean, 230-170 BC by Arthur M. Eckstein, which is a book I saw mentioned on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry and then discovered is part of Audible's new "included in Audible!" promotion thingy where certain audiobooks are available for merely the monthly price of membership rather than needing to be purchased separately. Which means they can also be taken away again at any moment, but hey, in the meantime at least I get to listen to some interesting books I might not otherwise have purchased.

...

Apropos of some very particular things I shall not mention, I have had stress pain in my jaw all day long and it is unpleasantly distracting, no matter how much I try to release tension and not grind my teeth. *sigh*

Okay, now off to finish the laundry-folding.

Things done today:

1. The main downtown office was closed today for Labor Day weekend (...which I did not totally forget was a thing until halfway through yesterday, resulting in me trying to schedule a tour for Monday; that never happened, shut up) and I'm technically not supposed to be at that office on weekends, but I had two more South Hill units to stage, so I clocked in up there and did some quick un-staging, staging, and photographs. I am now entirely caught up until the next set of rooms are done with turnover -- and since at least two of them have some structural repairs going on, I don't expect that to be until Wednesday or Thursday.

2. Continued editing photos and floor plans. I didn't actually get many uploaded to our website, because the upload manager for the third-party software program we use to generate our website (among other things) was frozen all day except for one hour between 3pm and 4pm, during which it ran like it was shoving through a three-foot-deep trench of molasses. *headdesk*

3. Handed out keys to several incoming tenants.

4. Replied to an inquiry that led to a tour request, and I was good and said I could do a virtual Skype tour at 5:45pm even though that meant closing the satellite office early, walking back to my car, and driving back up to South Hill which was a pain in the neck. It is better to do things same-day if possible, you see, rather than putting someone off until Tuesday. Anyway, I think the tour went well. I suspect the prospects may actually rent units in a different building, but showing them the building they inquired about helped clarify what they want, so that's useful.

5. Wrote an email to the Right Relations committee of a UU congregation in NJ to ask if they have any advice on how to create a Right Relations covenant and form a Right Relations committee. We are trying to create a Right Relations team (nitpicky terminology difference because of governance structures, not important, ignore it) here in Ithaca, because reasons. Hopefully someone will respond before the Tuesday Board of Trustees meeting. (WHY did I get involved in church governance??? I mean, yeah, okay I was asked to stand for the Board and SOMEONE has to do it. And then nobody else was stepping forward to serve as clerk and, again, SOMEONE has to do it, but still!!!)

6. I haven't been posting my reading or audiobook listening lists lately, have I? In the case of reading, that's mostly because I have shifted my reading almost entirely to fanfic this summer. I am pretty sure that is a stress response. For audiobooks, I recently finished listening to The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, which I had been meaning to read for years (since 2012-ish, I think? definitely since 2014) and kept not quite getting around to. Today I finished listening to Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine by Thomas Hager, which I think I bought as an Audible Daily Deal selection... a year and a half ago? *checks* The text edition was published in March 2019, so yeah, that sounds about right. (I have a fair number of books in my Audible library waiting for me to download and listen.)

I have found that audiobooks are an excellent way to consume books that I've been meaning to read and not getting around to, because they are easy to work in and around my schedule in a way that printed text is not -- that is, I can listen to an audiobook while driving, while walking, while cooking, and while doing any number of chores. (Also while doing various tasks at work, such as NYSEG meter photos, apartment staging and photos, or just general walking around and checking on this or that.) The trick is that the narrator has to be someone I am willing to listen to, which is annoying because there are a LOT of audiobooks that are EXACTLY MY THING but I listen to a sample and the narrator's voice scrapes nails across the chalkboard of my soul. *shudder* So they go back onto the list of print books I vaguely intend to read at some unspecified point in the future. *sigh*

(Also they have to be nonfiction, but that's so fundamental I don't even bother opening fiction audiobooks to check on the narrator's voice. I cannot deal with audiobook fiction at all. I could barely even deal with my own dad reading aloud to me once I learned how to read on my own, and that was, you know, MY DAD sitting right next to me on our sofa or on my bed. I cannot be having with anyone less close to me than that trying to dictate my experience of a fictional narrative. (Also they always get the pacing and the emphasis wrong. ALWAYS.) Nonfiction is okay because it's like a university lecture or somebody explaining interesting facts to me, which is totally different. And radio plays/podcasts can sometimes sneak around that block by being specifically designed for an audio medium, so the performers' intonation choices and pacing and such are the POINT rather than an unwanted extra layer of interpretation between me and a source text.)

Anyway, my new audiobook is Supernavigators: Exploring the Wonders of How Animals Find Their Way by David Barrie. I will report back on it at some point, maybe.

8. Continued working on the rough draft of my NFE fic. What I'm going to post tonight will be a serviceable fic, but it is NOT the total of what I'm trying to write. It's more like part one of... three parts, I think? Structure is not my friend at the moment, by which I mean I have a plot but the formal division of scenes and themes is a bit fuzzy at the moment.

...

Okay, back to writing.

Yeah, so I am not great at regular daily updates. Ah well. Anyway, since I last posted there have been things! And stuff! Most of which were fairly everyday and boring, but, y'know, I will mention them because this is my journal and I do what I want. *wry*

Monday: Rental company office 9am-5pm. Continued data entry for old tour information. Also distributed all the move-out packets into the mailboxes of one of our three big apartment buildings. This took MUCH LONGER than it should have, because I was removing all junk mail at the same time. I filled three large trash bags worth of paper, which I carted down the hall to the ground floor recycling bin. OUCH.

Tuesday: Moved my container garden outside for keeps! I also did my annual spring cleaning laundry, which involves stripping not just my sheets but also my comforter, my mattress pad, and my mattress protector and dumping them in front-loader washing machines -- and my winter coat, and my little fleece blanket for good measure. It runs about twenty dollars to tack those on to my normal three loads, but it needs doing and now I have a very clean, fresh bed. :)

Wednesday: Grocery day. I should perhaps mention here that I have been comfort-rereading the Books of the Raksura (or at least the ones my library has in ebook form (and has available; one has been checked out this whole week, argh)). I have also been reading some regency urban fantasy gay romance books (the A Charm of Magpies trilogy) by K. J. Charles, since the first book is currently free on Amazon and dammit, I needed to know what happened next. And I put away some laundry.

Thursday: Back at the rental company office. More data entry, more move-out packets. But the packets are finally all distributed! ...Which, of course, means that tomorrow we start sending out emails saying "Hey, your move-out packet is in your mailbox/in your apartment, please read it and follow the instructions" and also adding something about "if you're not in Ithaca right now, here is how to return your keys and here is what you need to do to make sure we send your damage deposit return check to where you will be at the end of your lease".

I also finished putting away laundry, and listened to episode 165 of the Magnus Archives ("Revolutions") which is mostly a very long poem. That was... well, it was odd. There is a strong pattern to these various "hellscape" statements, which is that because they are all one thing, and that thing turned up to eleven (or more), they don't have the same effect as the previous season statements. This is because there's no contrast left. I hope this turns out to have thematic significance as the season progresses, in the sense that a world that's entirely FEAR isn't actually that great for the Fears themselves -- sort of like an ocean of junk food instead of properly spaced out nutritionally balance meals. Or something like that, I dunno.

Anyway, ( spoilers )

...

I am probably getting too meta.

Also, I am going to make dinner now. :)

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*