"Jayne, your mouth is talking again. You might want to see to that."
I'm not sure it's worth updating if I feel as though I have nothing to say, but then that's the kind of thinking that made me stop posting to LiveJournal completely, so maybe I will blather on witlessly for a while.
Tomorrow I shall make a quick Christmas recap post. For some reason, on the computer at work, the LiveJournal interface is absolute crap no matter which browser I use. I get weird overlapping white windows that prevent me from seeing drop-down menus (like for selecting a mood or a userpic) and the tag selection box, and whenever I try to add in pictures it doesn't show me the code at all. So I'm at once perplexed and annoyed and have no idea how to fix it. At least on my own computer these things don't happen. So tomorrow there will be a more picture-ful entry with details about Christmas.
Overall we had a great day yesterday. I was up first at 7:00 in order to take a shower, and pdaughter got up at the same time. Bean was up 15 minutes later, so she was able to capture his reaction to the Christmas tree and all the presents on film. The morning was spent very pleasantly opening presents, and pdaughter's father showed up around 9:30 or 10:00 to make the gathering complete. Unfortunately I had to leave for work by 1pm, but the morning made it well worth it. I'm just sad I wasn't able to stay longer to watch Bean play with his new toys.
Work, thankfully enough, has been pretty quiet. I've been finishing up the Soopar Seekrit Prodgikt, which, as some of you know, was the 4th Doctor's scarf, which I was making for pdaughter for Christmas. I'm busily weaving in ends, and once that's done I need to attach the tassels. This has to be by far the longest project I've ever worked on, including the Baby Blanket of Doom of 2009. Thus far, because I am a slow knitter, I think I've put about 70 hours of work into this thing.
The plan for tonight is to finish work on the scarf, plan out my day for tomorrow, and then work on setting up my plan for the New Year, as I mentioned in some earlier posts.
I've been working hard on not wasting any more time, but it's difficult for me. I know that pdaughter basically thinks I'm a two-headed alien when it comes to putting off certain things. What I have to work on for myself is not giving in to the feeling of being overwhelmed by all the things that are still left to do when I get home from work. I've always found it hard to work multiple 12-hour night shifts (or day shifts, for that matter) and then come home and dive right into doing dishes and washing floors and running errands and doing other stuff. Mostly I want to come home and sleep, or sit down for a minute and unwind. I've found, though, that if I let myself sit for even that minute, I can't or won't get up again. Add to that the extra 4-6 hours a week of commuting from Ottawa, and I'm having even more trouble with that.
The other thing, of course, is that I try very hard to get all "my" stuff done in the 4 or so hours a day that I'm home alone. Things like writing (and my translation work up until recently, though I am no longer doing any work there) and all the other stuff that it's not fair to be doing when the family is at home. I'm usually home 2-3 weekdays at a time, sometimes 4. I try to help pdaughter get Bean out the door to daycare, which usually ends up being between 8:00 and 8:30. She normally gets back from class between 13:00 and 14:00, and then goes to fetch him at 16:00-16:30. They're back for dinner between 17:30 and 18:00, and 19:00 onward is bedtime for Bean and sundry evening activities. So I generally get about four consecutive hours in the morning to get my shit done, and I can never seem to get it all done, no matter how hard I try.
Full disclosure: I haven't written a single word in about 6 months, and before then I hadn't written all that much since January anyway. I don't feel it's fair to fuck off somewhere in order to write and leave the family at home by themselves. It's one thing to leave in order to work, but writing is something I should be doing in my spare time, and family time is not spare time.
I'm not sure how to fix this problem. The most obvious solution would be to get up early and write then. This doesn't work, however. 1) I am too damned tired to get up that fucking early. 2) The minute I get up/set an alarm, I wake up pdaughter too, and she's one of those light sleepers who can't go back to sleep after being awoken. She gets little enough sleep as it is, her sleep is not good to begin with, and so it seems really mean of me to impose my own personal stuff on her on top of her own sleep issues. Besides, if she's up, then I won't be writing anyway, so it's pretty pointless. The same goes for staying up later. No matter what I do, I will wake her up when I get to bed. Unless I choose to sleep elsewhere. We do have a pull-out sofa in the basement, but I'm a little reluctant to not be in the same bed as her the few nights I do get to be home. Yeah, I know, priorities. :P
Maybe when I've settled more into my routines at work I'll be able to write when I'm here. It will mean either writing by hand during my night shifts (I could use Google Docs, I guess, but isn't there some sort of weird fine print which means Google will own my writing until the end of days if I do?), or mustering energy to write for half an hour when I get home from day shifts in-between getting something to eat and trying to get to bed by 20:00 (I get up at 04:00 to get to work on time for day shifts, which means if I want to get 8 hours of sleep I need to be in bed quite early, and I'm usually only home by about 18:30 due to traffic). Right now I haven't found a way to make it work.
This might just mean that I'm not truly meant to be a writer. I saw someone in a writing community a few months ago going on about how she couldn't imagine going a single day without writing, because writing was her whole entire life, and oh, how she hated being such a slave to this part of herself and if she could she'd carve it out of herself with a rusty spoon!!!11!1eleventy. (I am actually quoting the rusty spoon thing, lest you think I'm exaggerating for effect. I'm really not.) This isn't the first time I've encountered this attitude about writing fiction. I've seen it in lots of people and encountered it a LOT in novels wherein the heroine (almost always a woman) is an aspiring novelist. L.M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott spring to mind.
If that's what it takes to be a writer, then clearly I don't have it. Don't get me wrong, I love writing. I love nothing more than sinking my teeth into a great story idea, finding my flow, and letting the words pour onto the page. But I can and have gone for months and years without writing a single word, and my life didn't end. I'm not especially happy when I'm not writing, but my heart doesn't stop beating and my soul doesn't shrivel up and die. I remain a functional human being even when not composing fiction.
The rest of my plans for the year are, I think, pretty doable. A few more crafts, a bit more time spent with friends, better eating, more exercise (or more time spent outdoors, which translates into more exercise), though alas probably not more sleep. No matter which way I cut it, I can't find a way to work more sleep into my schedule without going to bed much earlier than I currently do on my days off, and that's just not going to happen.
I have to work on the details of my plans. I have the general notions of what I want to do. So, if I'm going to follow Tim Pychyl's guidelines, I first have to set out my goal intentions, then work on my implementation intentions for each of these goals, remembering to keep them temporal, specific and realistic. So that's what I'll be working on for the next little while.
Tomorrow I shall make a quick Christmas recap post. For some reason, on the computer at work, the LiveJournal interface is absolute crap no matter which browser I use. I get weird overlapping white windows that prevent me from seeing drop-down menus (like for selecting a mood or a userpic) and the tag selection box, and whenever I try to add in pictures it doesn't show me the code at all. So I'm at once perplexed and annoyed and have no idea how to fix it. At least on my own computer these things don't happen. So tomorrow there will be a more picture-ful entry with details about Christmas.
Overall we had a great day yesterday. I was up first at 7:00 in order to take a shower, and pdaughter got up at the same time. Bean was up 15 minutes later, so she was able to capture his reaction to the Christmas tree and all the presents on film. The morning was spent very pleasantly opening presents, and pdaughter's father showed up around 9:30 or 10:00 to make the gathering complete. Unfortunately I had to leave for work by 1pm, but the morning made it well worth it. I'm just sad I wasn't able to stay longer to watch Bean play with his new toys.
Work, thankfully enough, has been pretty quiet. I've been finishing up the Soopar Seekrit Prodgikt, which, as some of you know, was the 4th Doctor's scarf, which I was making for pdaughter for Christmas. I'm busily weaving in ends, and once that's done I need to attach the tassels. This has to be by far the longest project I've ever worked on, including the Baby Blanket of Doom of 2009. Thus far, because I am a slow knitter, I think I've put about 70 hours of work into this thing.
The plan for tonight is to finish work on the scarf, plan out my day for tomorrow, and then work on setting up my plan for the New Year, as I mentioned in some earlier posts.
I've been working hard on not wasting any more time, but it's difficult for me. I know that pdaughter basically thinks I'm a two-headed alien when it comes to putting off certain things. What I have to work on for myself is not giving in to the feeling of being overwhelmed by all the things that are still left to do when I get home from work. I've always found it hard to work multiple 12-hour night shifts (or day shifts, for that matter) and then come home and dive right into doing dishes and washing floors and running errands and doing other stuff. Mostly I want to come home and sleep, or sit down for a minute and unwind. I've found, though, that if I let myself sit for even that minute, I can't or won't get up again. Add to that the extra 4-6 hours a week of commuting from Ottawa, and I'm having even more trouble with that.
The other thing, of course, is that I try very hard to get all "my" stuff done in the 4 or so hours a day that I'm home alone. Things like writing (and my translation work up until recently, though I am no longer doing any work there) and all the other stuff that it's not fair to be doing when the family is at home. I'm usually home 2-3 weekdays at a time, sometimes 4. I try to help pdaughter get Bean out the door to daycare, which usually ends up being between 8:00 and 8:30. She normally gets back from class between 13:00 and 14:00, and then goes to fetch him at 16:00-16:30. They're back for dinner between 17:30 and 18:00, and 19:00 onward is bedtime for Bean and sundry evening activities. So I generally get about four consecutive hours in the morning to get my shit done, and I can never seem to get it all done, no matter how hard I try.
Full disclosure: I haven't written a single word in about 6 months, and before then I hadn't written all that much since January anyway. I don't feel it's fair to fuck off somewhere in order to write and leave the family at home by themselves. It's one thing to leave in order to work, but writing is something I should be doing in my spare time, and family time is not spare time.
I'm not sure how to fix this problem. The most obvious solution would be to get up early and write then. This doesn't work, however. 1) I am too damned tired to get up that fucking early. 2) The minute I get up/set an alarm, I wake up pdaughter too, and she's one of those light sleepers who can't go back to sleep after being awoken. She gets little enough sleep as it is, her sleep is not good to begin with, and so it seems really mean of me to impose my own personal stuff on her on top of her own sleep issues. Besides, if she's up, then I won't be writing anyway, so it's pretty pointless. The same goes for staying up later. No matter what I do, I will wake her up when I get to bed. Unless I choose to sleep elsewhere. We do have a pull-out sofa in the basement, but I'm a little reluctant to not be in the same bed as her the few nights I do get to be home. Yeah, I know, priorities. :P
Maybe when I've settled more into my routines at work I'll be able to write when I'm here. It will mean either writing by hand during my night shifts (I could use Google Docs, I guess, but isn't there some sort of weird fine print which means Google will own my writing until the end of days if I do?), or mustering energy to write for half an hour when I get home from day shifts in-between getting something to eat and trying to get to bed by 20:00 (I get up at 04:00 to get to work on time for day shifts, which means if I want to get 8 hours of sleep I need to be in bed quite early, and I'm usually only home by about 18:30 due to traffic). Right now I haven't found a way to make it work.
This might just mean that I'm not truly meant to be a writer. I saw someone in a writing community a few months ago going on about how she couldn't imagine going a single day without writing, because writing was her whole entire life, and oh, how she hated being such a slave to this part of herself and if she could she'd carve it out of herself with a rusty spoon!!!11!1eleventy. (I am actually quoting the rusty spoon thing, lest you think I'm exaggerating for effect. I'm really not.) This isn't the first time I've encountered this attitude about writing fiction. I've seen it in lots of people and encountered it a LOT in novels wherein the heroine (almost always a woman) is an aspiring novelist. L.M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott spring to mind.
If that's what it takes to be a writer, then clearly I don't have it. Don't get me wrong, I love writing. I love nothing more than sinking my teeth into a great story idea, finding my flow, and letting the words pour onto the page. But I can and have gone for months and years without writing a single word, and my life didn't end. I'm not especially happy when I'm not writing, but my heart doesn't stop beating and my soul doesn't shrivel up and die. I remain a functional human being even when not composing fiction.
The rest of my plans for the year are, I think, pretty doable. A few more crafts, a bit more time spent with friends, better eating, more exercise (or more time spent outdoors, which translates into more exercise), though alas probably not more sleep. No matter which way I cut it, I can't find a way to work more sleep into my schedule without going to bed much earlier than I currently do on my days off, and that's just not going to happen.
I have to work on the details of my plans. I have the general notions of what I want to do. So, if I'm going to follow Tim Pychyl's guidelines, I first have to set out my goal intentions, then work on my implementation intentions for each of these goals, remembering to keep them temporal, specific and realistic. So that's what I'll be working on for the next little while.