If by 'productive' you mean reading books and watching anime, then YES
Wow, lucky break this morning for me--I woke up, and the rain was pouring relentlessly outside. But by the time I needed to leave the house, the rain finally let up, and I walked to the bus stop through sunlit humidity and the smell of wet earth :) That was a wake-me-up I sorely needed!
Busy weekend, but productive. Brian and I finally tackled apartment cleaning, which we desperately needed to do. And then we treated ourselves to ice cream (as is our custom during warm-weather cleaning). So now our place is much cleaner, and already I'm getting a sense of stuff that can be gone through or gotten rid of when we move (so many papers! argh!). Still need to get going on the apartment hunt, but I've already scouted out a few potential places. We'll see.
So this weekend, Brian and I wrapped up watching Magic Knight Rayearth season 2. Both of us had started watching it way back in college, and neither of us had finished it. But it was definitely worth it to finally see it through. The character development was engaging; the story moved at a nice, brisk pace that kept me on my toes; the animation was really slick and the Holy Sh*t Quotient was pretty high by the end! It's like everyone in this show is awesome in some way, and gets a moment to shine. The last five episodes we had, unfortunately, were dubbed--but the dub was actually fairly watchable.
Sunday was...weird. Specifically, Pitt commencement + the Pittsburgh marathon made getting to church a pain. The marathon made a loop around the city, and all the roads in that loop were closed to traffic. I was outside the loop; the cathedral was inside the loop. I had to take some creative back routes to get past Forbes, and then did some creative parking on Boundary Street and then walked the remaining couple of blocks. It was eerie to see the corner of Fifth and Craig so devoid of traffic. Not even an errant peahen.
But I did make it to choir! However, only a third of us showed up, so Don had to do some reshuffling of music and find stuff we could actually sing. Surprisingly, the tenors and basses were almost completely in attendance, but we only had two sopranos and about four altos, so the sound balance was a little weird. It's a different experience to sing in so small a choir, because one is keenly aware that every voice matters, and there's less wiggle room to fudge or to rely on your neighbor to lead. But we made it through, and did well enough with what we had.
Next week is going to be the Race for the Cure. More traffic snarls. Ah well...it's for a good cause!
Friday I finished the first draft of a new short story that I'm pretty pleased with. I'm going to share it with some beta readers so we'll see how that goes. I also snuck in a little bit of writing on Sunday evening, moving forward with the Tanna story. Chapters 14 and 15 kicked my butt (lots of scene reshuffling, inserting, etc.) but they're done now and I can move forward. Already Chapter 16 is moving forward at a brisk pace, and I believe that I'm done with the most major edits. Now it's just minor tweaks here and there.
Also drew a nice new picture, and got a lot of reading done. It's become less common for me to actually sit down and do nothing but read; usually I read while I eat, or while I'm waiting for or riding the bus. But I gave myself the time this weekend. I've been making my way through The Last Lecture, The Last Unicorn and Artemis Fowl, and all of them are enjoyable in different ways.
Well, that's it--standard update. I'll post again here when more stuff happens :)
Busy weekend, but productive. Brian and I finally tackled apartment cleaning, which we desperately needed to do. And then we treated ourselves to ice cream (as is our custom during warm-weather cleaning). So now our place is much cleaner, and already I'm getting a sense of stuff that can be gone through or gotten rid of when we move (so many papers! argh!). Still need to get going on the apartment hunt, but I've already scouted out a few potential places. We'll see.
So this weekend, Brian and I wrapped up watching Magic Knight Rayearth season 2. Both of us had started watching it way back in college, and neither of us had finished it. But it was definitely worth it to finally see it through. The character development was engaging; the story moved at a nice, brisk pace that kept me on my toes; the animation was really slick and the Holy Sh*t Quotient was pretty high by the end! It's like everyone in this show is awesome in some way, and gets a moment to shine. The last five episodes we had, unfortunately, were dubbed--but the dub was actually fairly watchable.
Sunday was...weird. Specifically, Pitt commencement + the Pittsburgh marathon made getting to church a pain. The marathon made a loop around the city, and all the roads in that loop were closed to traffic. I was outside the loop; the cathedral was inside the loop. I had to take some creative back routes to get past Forbes, and then did some creative parking on Boundary Street and then walked the remaining couple of blocks. It was eerie to see the corner of Fifth and Craig so devoid of traffic. Not even an errant peahen.
But I did make it to choir! However, only a third of us showed up, so Don had to do some reshuffling of music and find stuff we could actually sing. Surprisingly, the tenors and basses were almost completely in attendance, but we only had two sopranos and about four altos, so the sound balance was a little weird. It's a different experience to sing in so small a choir, because one is keenly aware that every voice matters, and there's less wiggle room to fudge or to rely on your neighbor to lead. But we made it through, and did well enough with what we had.
Next week is going to be the Race for the Cure. More traffic snarls. Ah well...it's for a good cause!
Friday I finished the first draft of a new short story that I'm pretty pleased with. I'm going to share it with some beta readers so we'll see how that goes. I also snuck in a little bit of writing on Sunday evening, moving forward with the Tanna story. Chapters 14 and 15 kicked my butt (lots of scene reshuffling, inserting, etc.) but they're done now and I can move forward. Already Chapter 16 is moving forward at a brisk pace, and I believe that I'm done with the most major edits. Now it's just minor tweaks here and there.
Also drew a nice new picture, and got a lot of reading done. It's become less common for me to actually sit down and do nothing but read; usually I read while I eat, or while I'm waiting for or riding the bus. But I gave myself the time this weekend. I've been making my way through The Last Lecture, The Last Unicorn and Artemis Fowl, and all of them are enjoyable in different ways.
Well, that's it--standard update. I'll post again here when more stuff happens :)