keep your head down and keep going
It has been a week but by God, I got a lot done at the end of it.
Namely, posting two fics! My first for the prompt challenge that Sev and I are doing, and also my first this month for
monthlysupergo.
"The Spirit of Knowledge," Lost Odyssey, Sarah and Mack, G. Spoilers through disc 2. Sarah has always sought knowledge in all its forms.
Dreamwidth | AO3
"Pajama Party," Final Fantasy X-2, Yuna, Rikku, Paine. G. Spoilers through endgame, assumes Good Ending not Perfect. Rikku demands a pajama party, and Paine and Yuna oblige.
Dreamwidth | AO3
I spent most of this week down with a migraine - it started sometime Monday afternoonish and more or less kept going until today. Yesterday I finally gave up and called out of work because it had reached the point where the worst bits of it were triggered by moving, so instead I sat very still on the couch and caught up some of the recorded TV I've been working through.
Still, I managed to get a fair bit done this week on most of my goals! I did yoga twice (despite the damn migraine) and today I got on the elliptical, and I did some writing (as linked above), and I did a little sewing, and I kept working grimly through various bits of cleaning I needed to do, although that came to a crashing halt today when it turned out that something is blocked in the gray water pipe again because the washing machine is causing water to happen in the downstairs bathroom, so a plumber must be summoned. (Someday, I swear to God, someday we will not be fixing water-related things in this house.)
This morning--or maybe this afternoon--we took down the Christmas tree and all the decorations. My living room is oddly empty now. I spent about 45 minutes practicing piano, which was a mix of good and bad. I had picked up an iOS app, Simply Piano, because it's been long enough that I no longer instinctively identify the notes (though it turns out my muscle memory is still pretty good) and I was never very good at the bass clef anyway, since I started on flute. The app has a good teaching method, but I am just not going to be able to use it, because it is a pain in the ass and a half about rhythm - far more than any music teacher I've ever had, and I just ended up frustrated because it wouldn't acknowledge that I had played things correctly. (I could nail them 100% perfectly in practice mode, but not in "real" mode, and I got really sick of repeating it.) So I turned the app off and just pulled out my old sheet music, most of which is currently too advanced for me to sight-read. I mean, not that I was ever an aficionado, but I could play some medium difficulty pieces effectively. I am slower, and I make more mistakes, but the ones I was most familiar with it turns out my hands remember, so that was nice.
Tonight paladin and I went out for a fancy dinner at a wine bar/bistro kind of place and it was amazing. I got a flight of citrusy, sweet whites, and he got a flight of Malbec, and both were tasty. We split a cheese plate (some kind of goat/sheep's milk blend that was creamy and soft and amazing, a very assertive Gorgonzola, a hard cheese that I think was Spanish that had a kind of sour interesting aftertaste, grapes, candied walnuts, apples, and cinnamon-raisin toast.) That was fantastic. For dinner, he had a duck duo and I had shrimp and lobster ravioli, in a lobster cream sauce, topped with a diver scallop, a giant prawn, and a lobster claw. It was delicious (but I think the real winner was the broccolini hidden under all of that and soaked in the lobster sauce. yum.) Since neither of us was good to drive at that point, we lingered over tea and dessert--flourless chocolate cake with chocolate mousse, creme anglais, and raspberry coulis, and then came home and watched the end of the Lions/Seahawks game. And then I did my downtime actions for DCP, and finished up my fics, and all in all it has been a pretty productive week, especially given how much time I lost to being slow as hell from headache.
Another thing I did this week was make myself tracking pages in my bullet journal for writing. Linked because they are huge (and the one for tracking projects is partly redacted because it contains Actual Titles of Actual Books I intend to publish):
Project Tracker
Fic Tracker
Some of those lines should be (and are now) filled in - the first two under the very first project are things I completed in 2015, but wanted to document with the rest of the set. I am not especially visually artistic, but straight lines and grids with colored lettering, I can handle, and it's pretty enough to make me feel good. (I also like the idea of a bar chart filling up with GYWO/NaNo/etc. - that seems like a marker of progress my brain instinctively understands better than looking at a word count number.)
And now I have typed enough and my hands hurt, so I am off to do something else instead.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1168725.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.
Namely, posting two fics! My first for the prompt challenge that Sev and I are doing, and also my first this month for
monthlysupergo.
"The Spirit of Knowledge," Lost Odyssey, Sarah and Mack, G. Spoilers through disc 2. Sarah has always sought knowledge in all its forms.
Dreamwidth | AO3
"Pajama Party," Final Fantasy X-2, Yuna, Rikku, Paine. G. Spoilers through endgame, assumes Good Ending not Perfect. Rikku demands a pajama party, and Paine and Yuna oblige.
Dreamwidth | AO3
I spent most of this week down with a migraine - it started sometime Monday afternoonish and more or less kept going until today. Yesterday I finally gave up and called out of work because it had reached the point where the worst bits of it were triggered by moving, so instead I sat very still on the couch and caught up some of the recorded TV I've been working through.
Still, I managed to get a fair bit done this week on most of my goals! I did yoga twice (despite the damn migraine) and today I got on the elliptical, and I did some writing (as linked above), and I did a little sewing, and I kept working grimly through various bits of cleaning I needed to do, although that came to a crashing halt today when it turned out that something is blocked in the gray water pipe again because the washing machine is causing water to happen in the downstairs bathroom, so a plumber must be summoned. (Someday, I swear to God, someday we will not be fixing water-related things in this house.)
This morning--or maybe this afternoon--we took down the Christmas tree and all the decorations. My living room is oddly empty now. I spent about 45 minutes practicing piano, which was a mix of good and bad. I had picked up an iOS app, Simply Piano, because it's been long enough that I no longer instinctively identify the notes (though it turns out my muscle memory is still pretty good) and I was never very good at the bass clef anyway, since I started on flute. The app has a good teaching method, but I am just not going to be able to use it, because it is a pain in the ass and a half about rhythm - far more than any music teacher I've ever had, and I just ended up frustrated because it wouldn't acknowledge that I had played things correctly. (I could nail them 100% perfectly in practice mode, but not in "real" mode, and I got really sick of repeating it.) So I turned the app off and just pulled out my old sheet music, most of which is currently too advanced for me to sight-read. I mean, not that I was ever an aficionado, but I could play some medium difficulty pieces effectively. I am slower, and I make more mistakes, but the ones I was most familiar with it turns out my hands remember, so that was nice.
Tonight paladin and I went out for a fancy dinner at a wine bar/bistro kind of place and it was amazing. I got a flight of citrusy, sweet whites, and he got a flight of Malbec, and both were tasty. We split a cheese plate (some kind of goat/sheep's milk blend that was creamy and soft and amazing, a very assertive Gorgonzola, a hard cheese that I think was Spanish that had a kind of sour interesting aftertaste, grapes, candied walnuts, apples, and cinnamon-raisin toast.) That was fantastic. For dinner, he had a duck duo and I had shrimp and lobster ravioli, in a lobster cream sauce, topped with a diver scallop, a giant prawn, and a lobster claw. It was delicious (but I think the real winner was the broccolini hidden under all of that and soaked in the lobster sauce. yum.) Since neither of us was good to drive at that point, we lingered over tea and dessert--flourless chocolate cake with chocolate mousse, creme anglais, and raspberry coulis, and then came home and watched the end of the Lions/Seahawks game. And then I did my downtime actions for DCP, and finished up my fics, and all in all it has been a pretty productive week, especially given how much time I lost to being slow as hell from headache.
Another thing I did this week was make myself tracking pages in my bullet journal for writing. Linked because they are huge (and the one for tracking projects is partly redacted because it contains Actual Titles of Actual Books I intend to publish):
Project Tracker
Fic Tracker
Some of those lines should be (and are now) filled in - the first two under the very first project are things I completed in 2015, but wanted to document with the rest of the set. I am not especially visually artistic, but straight lines and grids with colored lettering, I can handle, and it's pretty enough to make me feel good. (I also like the idea of a bar chart filling up with GYWO/NaNo/etc. - that seems like a marker of progress my brain instinctively understands better than looking at a word count number.)
And now I have typed enough and my hands hurt, so I am off to do something else instead.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1168725.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.