jeliza

1. Merc Rustad's short story The Android's Prehistoric Menagerie is quite wonderful, and gave me the feels but in a way that made the world easier to deal with after. (Thinking about Orlando is still really messing me up.) I do tend to love Rustad's work.

Mothership Zeta magazine (which has this story up for free, but I am not sure all the content goes up free) is very much worth the subscription. I particularly like that the emphasis is on stories that are NOT DEPRESSING. "fun" is in the description, and while the bounds of fun they use are somewhat loose, in this world of grimdark-n-gritty being still en vogue, it is so nice to know that the stories I read there aren't going to make me want to curl up in despair, becuase I just can't handle that right now and don't actually like it even when I am better equipped to handle it.

2. I finally started editing a few of the photos from my trip to Long Beach. Which was in February of 2014. And only because I needed to find some hi-res beach/sunset photos to use as backgrounds in a client's album.  And I haven't even scanned the film negatives yet, even though they are all nicely sleeved and ready, and I'm keeping an old computer at Windows 7 becuase my film scanner wouldn't talk to windows 10 last time I tried. (I shouldn't have bought that damn thing, I shoulda just paid some service to scan what I have, but I hadn't fully acknowledged how much my photography energy was slipping. Then again, even if I'm not shooting, I have YEARS and YEARS of negatives just sitting around, that could at least be going and doing some good for me at my stock agency even if I'm not making and showing proper prints anymore. And, you know, if you need access to a medium format film scanner, I've got one.)

3. I still can either use the monitor with color calibration or have wifi, but not both. Awesome.  Still 6 substantial towers of hanoi moves needed before I can move the whole computer setup to a place that will (hopefully) fix this.

4. The Great Pottery Throw-Down is as lovely as the Great British Bake-Off, but there is unfortunately only one season. The Sewing Bee isn't catching me quite as effectively, perhaps because I like both eating and making pottery, but am not really interested in sewing.

5. Peaceful Cuisine is my new favorite Youtube series. Even more soothing than How It's Made videos, and the recipes are followable. There is no talking, just the sounds of cooking and well-chosen background music.  The recipes are vegan, and a mix of Japanese, Western European and American cuisines. (He's based in Japan.) He's definintely a proponent of veganism as a way of improving the world, but his evangelism consists entirely of making these lovely videos and not being shame-y/combative.

It is day eleventy-billion of running out of energy long before I run out
of necessary tasks. The kids seem similarly low energy, albeit without the
to-do-list issues. We (by which I mean Sean, while I ran errands) did get
them out into the sunshine for a while ("want to go to a park?" is a magic
question that transforms "I'm too tiiiiiired to go outside" into running to
find sneakers. Kind of like when you say "walk" around certain dogs.) but
sadly that adventure ended with Dan banging his head into a piece
of playground equipment. He doesn't have a concussion, just a hell of a
headache, but it defintely put an end to the day's fun.

I am going to attempt the "get up super early and work in the quiet of
everyone else sleeping" gambit, though I've mostly been failing my save vs.
snooze button on that front. The kids have Spring Break this week, so at
worst I can get my quiet by letting them sleep in a bit.

(and now, we see if post via e-mail, which I have not previously used,
actually works. whee!)

Yesterday the school district entirely shut down becauase a guy with a long gun walked onto Meridian Park Elementary (which houses my kids school), and pointed a gun at an employee and implied that he would be "visiting" all the schools.  When they lifted the lockdowns halfway through the day (which let the middle/high school kids go home) we assumed it was because they had caught the guy.

Yeah, no. They don't have a suspect even. I am so incredibly tense right now.  They have "increased patrols" at the schools, and it's just so hard to know whether or not to be scared. I also don't know if we should have had a talk with the kids about why school was cancelled. I expect O might lose her shit, but I also think the school staff is a lot more qualified to have that discussion.

I am glad we drive the kids into school, because there were news crews camped on the sidewalk trying for interviews with the families that walk in.

The gun nuts commenting on the news articles (yeah, I shouldn't have read the comments) implying that this was a stunt dreamed up by gun control advocates can go to hell.

I was going to do one of those "end of 2014" lists that have been going around, but for fully half the questions I had no answer but "I don't remember", which I think sums up the year pretty well.
I lost a lot of months this year to a medication issue, and that affected everything else, including my parenting, my business, and my ability to take care of myself. I feel like I just finished digging myself out of the hole in October, and then there was a lot of boom that landed from elsewhere.

I am ready for it to be over.  And I am hopeful about the coming year, actually. But I am not sure what my goals are yet for anything except the business (which gets the goal that was supposed to be 2014's, which I was on track for because I got sick.)

The kids and I just officially rang out the New Year with an only slightly late bedtime and cute animal videos:

Crash-learning is never fun, but InDesign really is the bomb, and I should have done this ages ago. It's so much FASTER, and having out-of-program image edits update almost automatically without having to put the new version in manually is awesome.  Making it work for matted albums and certain kinds of complex spreads isn't going to work, or at least not until I level up a whole lot, but even just in processing time it's gonna save me so much time.

Listening to conscious hip-hop while working on luxury books is kind of weird, but it's what my brain wants today.

I have got to figure out how to safely put a space heater in here, my fingers keep stiffening up.

I guess the holiday rush thing is gonna probably happen again this year after all. Which is mostly awesome because $$, but having three bookings in the space of three days is a very "shit just got real" moment. And I get to learn how to navigate shipping to the UK wheee!

Maybe I shouldn't send in the form for the school craft fair, since that assumes a chunk of time making new stuff. Though I do have a fair bit left over from Norwescon, so I guess that will be okay either way... eep.

(why does spell-check think fiar is a real word?)

Time to go make the donuts.