The brain-critical work is on hold for a couple of days while we just breathe and learn how to spend time together again. I asked for a couple of weeks; it seemed prudent to put them to good use instead of the near-constant process of flagellation and immolation that most of 2011 has been to date. Resolution? Not really, but the mental break from the emotional rollercoastering is nice. We'll be back into the hip-deep crap soon enough, though, to make this part of the process more than a little bittersweet.
But there are some good things happening on other fronts: contract dollars, while short-lived, are paying down the last of my debtload, buying some needful items for family (Dad's finally been permanently moved into a managed-care facility and needs a laptop table that fits his residential bed), a little frivolity for myself, and some self-care in the form of a large-scale swim pass to my favourite local pool. Since yoga ends tonight, I'll be looking for my bathing suit and heading back to the lanes or lunch-time aquafit come Monday (having something a little further from fencing practice than the night-right-before might also make it easier to get back to practice weekly as well.)
The production machine for
"Shadowlands" is lumbering into motion, and my next production application is lining up nicely: my recent personal negotiations with a UK-based company have landed me the rights to bring two of their works to North American debuts (assuming KWLT accepts my proposal), including one very intensely-sexually-themed show I saw at the 2007 Edinburgh Fringe. Negotiating the rights to that one in particular has me feeling pretty chuffed; I'm not sure who I could shop it to if KWLT doesn't bite, as it's definitely too far out on a limb for the still-new TenBareToes banner, and I don't have ties to any other local company. I found with all my previous productions that "the next show" was already live in my head before the current show finished, but I don't think I'd ever done so much work on a subsequent show before a current one had even started. I guess if I'm going to be doing shows yearly instead of every-other-yearly, I should get used to the foreshortened and overlapping timelines.
And today is a lovely day: mild and sunny, and hard to be grumpy on at least the superficial levels. Today I bought my annual addition to the Yule Tree, though I'm not entirely sure when I'll have time to put the damned thing up this year. I'll carve out some time on a weeknight early in the second week of December, I guess, and try and force some seasonal spirit into my days as we head back into the active-work process of Getting Shit Sorted Out at home.
The mantra of my days remains, one day at a time, on breath at a time, one foot in front of the other... even on the good days.