Big Long Crazy Real Life Post
Longness and Craziness to vary depending on how long it takes me to type this or how much I feel like writing.
So, unfortunately, my vacation ended rather abruptly when I checked my e-mail the day I got back and found that I did not get hired for the job I interviewed for, which disappointed me because I thought the interview went rather well, but at least they were courteous enough to send me an e-mail about it instead of leaving me hanging for weeks on end. Back to the resume-spamming, I suppose.
And I was going to take a kind of extra day to myself and do some writing, seeing as I got a little bit of that done on vacation - not too much, since I was too busy not caring about anything and wandering around with no direction, but I at least got through the phase of crossing out and being dissatisfied with everything until I settled upon a paragraph that I liked. Progress?
BUT ANYWAY. Vacation! It was very lovely. We spent a week at the beach, with occasional breaks to go to an expo for physicists and the people who work in power plants and things. Mostly I just spent the time walking on the beach, since I technically only just got the okay to immerse my incision and rolling around in the tides and waves is probably not the wisest post-operative thing. But things I did get to:
1. Go on an offshore fishing trip, where we didn't catch anything we could keep but did see manatees less than twenty feet from out boat! There were three of them eating the sea grasses near where we were fishing, and they would surface occasionally to breathe right near the boat. The man leading our tour said that if you shake your hands into the water, they'll come up to you and roll over so you can rub their tummies. :D
2. See both a dead horseshoe crab (which was over two feet long) and a dead sea turtle on the beach. The second one raised some mixed emotions: it was sad seeing a dead sea turtle, especially since there are so few of them, but on the other hand it didn't look like it'd been bitten or eaten or choked or anything; it looked like it had just gotten old and died. And it was the closest I've ever been to a sea turtle - I could have reached out and touched it if I'd been in the habit of poking dead things. It was almost like they hadn't been real before, and now I knew that they existed outside of zoos. I mean, I always knew that, but sometimes you don't really feel like they're really out there until you've seen them, you know?
3. On that note, watch parts of Shark Week on an HD screen. The program that I watched had Craig Ferguson diving with sharks and feeding them, and the scenes where we got to see the sharks were - and I try not to overuse this adjective but it was merited here - breathtaking. They didn't look real, that's how slick and graceful and precise they were. I really want to go diving with sharks someday. Maybe after I've had a long life and have been of service to others, I suppose. ;)
That said, I do have to take issue with the direction that Shark Week has been taking these past few years. Whereas in its earliest incarnations Shark Week was more about research and learning about sharks - educating its viewers and decreasing the fear that surrounded sharks - the more recent Weeks are so much about the attacks and bites, about how scary and dangerous sharks are, and the programs about bites have gotten so much gorier besides. It's too sensationalistic for my tastes and I feel it's counterproductive to the purported mission of Shark Week. /whining
4. Get a full-body sugar scrub. It is probably the most pointlessly spoiled thing I have ever done and it was amazing.
5. Chat with nuclear physicists about new plant designs and technologies for more efficient plant design and management. Even when I was asking questions people I talked with seemed to think that I worked for one of the exhibitors, so I guess I must have comported myself reasonably like an adult. Also, got to demo a 3-D immersive training system for plant staff that models the plant itself and functions basically like a giant sandbox game. It was really, really cool. :D
Unfortunately nobody seemed to be hiring despite my entreaties. Did get a couple of references though, that's something.
6. Find two sharks' teeth! By comparison, my brother found upwards of seventy and Mom found four sand dollars. NOT THAT I'M JEALOUS OR ANYTHING.
So, yes. I am feeling quite refreshed even if I have to go back to work. And I think I will get some more writing done today, now that I finally know which direction to take one of my enormously overdue fics in.
And I just saw an ad for an Eli Roth movie that is basically a 'documentary-style' Shaky-cam retelling of The Exorcist. I know I said I disliked Eli Roth less back when he was in Inglorious Basterds, but I really, really wish people would stop letting him make movies.
Off to write, maybe, and possibly catch up on flist. Ta.
So, unfortunately, my vacation ended rather abruptly when I checked my e-mail the day I got back and found that I did not get hired for the job I interviewed for, which disappointed me because I thought the interview went rather well, but at least they were courteous enough to send me an e-mail about it instead of leaving me hanging for weeks on end. Back to the resume-spamming, I suppose.
And I was going to take a kind of extra day to myself and do some writing, seeing as I got a little bit of that done on vacation - not too much, since I was too busy not caring about anything and wandering around with no direction, but I at least got through the phase of crossing out and being dissatisfied with everything until I settled upon a paragraph that I liked. Progress?
BUT ANYWAY. Vacation! It was very lovely. We spent a week at the beach, with occasional breaks to go to an expo for physicists and the people who work in power plants and things. Mostly I just spent the time walking on the beach, since I technically only just got the okay to immerse my incision and rolling around in the tides and waves is probably not the wisest post-operative thing. But things I did get to:
1. Go on an offshore fishing trip, where we didn't catch anything we could keep but did see manatees less than twenty feet from out boat! There were three of them eating the sea grasses near where we were fishing, and they would surface occasionally to breathe right near the boat. The man leading our tour said that if you shake your hands into the water, they'll come up to you and roll over so you can rub their tummies. :D
2. See both a dead horseshoe crab (which was over two feet long) and a dead sea turtle on the beach. The second one raised some mixed emotions: it was sad seeing a dead sea turtle, especially since there are so few of them, but on the other hand it didn't look like it'd been bitten or eaten or choked or anything; it looked like it had just gotten old and died. And it was the closest I've ever been to a sea turtle - I could have reached out and touched it if I'd been in the habit of poking dead things. It was almost like they hadn't been real before, and now I knew that they existed outside of zoos. I mean, I always knew that, but sometimes you don't really feel like they're really out there until you've seen them, you know?
3. On that note, watch parts of Shark Week on an HD screen. The program that I watched had Craig Ferguson diving with sharks and feeding them, and the scenes where we got to see the sharks were - and I try not to overuse this adjective but it was merited here - breathtaking. They didn't look real, that's how slick and graceful and precise they were. I really want to go diving with sharks someday. Maybe after I've had a long life and have been of service to others, I suppose. ;)
That said, I do have to take issue with the direction that Shark Week has been taking these past few years. Whereas in its earliest incarnations Shark Week was more about research and learning about sharks - educating its viewers and decreasing the fear that surrounded sharks - the more recent Weeks are so much about the attacks and bites, about how scary and dangerous sharks are, and the programs about bites have gotten so much gorier besides. It's too sensationalistic for my tastes and I feel it's counterproductive to the purported mission of Shark Week. /whining
4. Get a full-body sugar scrub. It is probably the most pointlessly spoiled thing I have ever done and it was amazing.
5. Chat with nuclear physicists about new plant designs and technologies for more efficient plant design and management. Even when I was asking questions people I talked with seemed to think that I worked for one of the exhibitors, so I guess I must have comported myself reasonably like an adult. Also, got to demo a 3-D immersive training system for plant staff that models the plant itself and functions basically like a giant sandbox game. It was really, really cool. :D
Unfortunately nobody seemed to be hiring despite my entreaties. Did get a couple of references though, that's something.
6. Find two sharks' teeth! By comparison, my brother found upwards of seventy and Mom found four sand dollars. NOT THAT I'M JEALOUS OR ANYTHING.
So, yes. I am feeling quite refreshed even if I have to go back to work. And I think I will get some more writing done today, now that I finally know which direction to take one of my enormously overdue fics in.
And I just saw an ad for an Eli Roth movie that is basically a 'documentary-style' Shaky-cam retelling of The Exorcist. I know I said I disliked Eli Roth less back when he was in Inglorious Basterds, but I really, really wish people would stop letting him make movies.
Off to write, maybe, and possibly catch up on flist. Ta.