Serene of the Oakland Serenes

In the past week, I:

Wrote 5K+ words (not as much as I wished, but I did a lot of editing)

Finished 3 stories

Submitted 3 stories and 4 poems

Wrote almost every day (not today so far)

Worked on organizing my writing, including putting old on-paper-only writing into my electronic documents

One of the things that vexes me continually is my love of starting new projects, because I end up with more projects than I can reasonably finish, and then I end up feeling like a failure even though I'm doing productive, exciting, good things a lot of the time. I just can't keep up with all the things I want to do, and I haven't developed the impulse control to either stop starting new things, or to finish what I've started.

I want to improve in this area.

I'm open to suggestions.

Right now, I think what I need to do is do some thinking and planning about which things will get my attention for now. School, certainly. But the magazine has languished, and I probably need to let it go, at least for now. Ditto the food blog. I have seventeen weeks left of school. Maybe I can just resolve to do nothing but school and work for that seventeen weeks and then revisit it.

I get so excited about things. I want to do ALL the things! But I have such limited energy, so it's really unrealistic.

Dammit.

Notes of little interest, but hey, badgerbag & vito_excalibur say they like the minutiae, so here they are:

1) Slept until something like 4pm yesterday; the only time I can sleep that long is when I'm sick, so I'm glad I pretty much slept through it. Today was spent sitting in one place almost the whole day (with brief forays into the kitchen to put away dishes; james_huber won't let me wash them because it eats up my hands), writing FIVE blog posts and fixing some of the static pages on the blog. Maybe now I'll work on some of the design stuff; I suck at design stuff, but I can't afford a designer, so I'll see what I can do.

2) I can hear the kid in her room, singing in Japanese to her WoW friends. Singing really prettily. I haven't heard her sing since she was a small child, and this is kind of choking me up.

3) Famous people (at least people famous in the circles I run in) talk to me on Twitter, and it's kinda fun to be part of their day. I wasn't expecting that to be anything I gave a rat's ass about.

4) Keep feeling like I don't know how to maneuver socially at work. Have decided to just let it be. They like my work and my work ethic; they'll have to just put up with my weirdness.

5) I don't buy new books very often, but I bought Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table for French Fridays with Dorie, and it's really beautiful, and so far, very good. I'm only a chapter in yet, though. (The gougeres turned out really well.)

Mom likes the new blog, and my aunt likes it even more. The first real post is up today. If you want, you can see it at http://www.momfoodproject.com (or the feed's at momfood_feed).

Yay!

Next steps: take a photography course, preferably online; buy or make a lightbox; choose or write something to archive the recipes for when I want to put them into book form

I didn't tell you all about my new project yet, did I? I got to watching Mythbusters with the boyfiend and one thing led to another, so anyway, here it is!

( Momma Duck, if you're reading this, don't click here unless you want to spoil your birthday surprise. If you do, I won't be mad or anything, just fair warning. )

What a nice day we had. The kid and I had planned to go to the Youth Jobs Program thingy (she could go alone, but she has understandable anxiety about going new places on the bus), and when we got downtown, it was lunchtime, so we ate lunch, went and got her an intake appointment, then sat in Peet's for an hour or so having a nice companionable conversation about everything and nothing, while she drew sketches.

Next, we stopped at the Korean grocery store, where she was *fascinated* with the live Dungeness crabs, which were very inexpensive as such things go, so I agreed to buy some for dinner. Since wild_irises was coming over to drop off Costco butter anyway, I decided dinner time would be the perfect time, and she and abostick59 came over and shared our crabs and butter and oven-fried spring rolls and cherries and pistachios and sorbet with us. Lovely dinner, lovely to see our friends again. Very funny and macabre to watch the kid do the actual work of killing crabs for our dinner.

Tonight, we'll work on the kid's application for the jobs program (her appointment is tomorrow), and I'll start playing with my own projects over the next few days:

1) Getting my new blog up and running (more about this later)
2) Getting my poetry chapbook together with the help of some wonderful friends who have offered to read some of my stuff
3) Knitting the rest of someotherguy's Doctor Who scarf

Well, maybe first I'll take a firehose to my house to clean up the utter crab mess. :-)

1) I am facing my finances without flinching, at long last, and it's less painful every day. My net worth is in the red right now by approximately $10k ($4k in student loans; a few thousand in medical bills from when I was uninsured; a few thousand in loans from family members -- I'll know more accurately when I've gathered up all those long-ignored medical bills and start answering the phone when creditors call -- but thankfully, no high-interest debt like credit cards or car payments); I hope to go into the black by this time next year. More later if I feel up for it, but that's my basic goal, and we'll see how it goes. It won't be easy, seeing as how I made around $16K this year (and mom sent me another $5K or so to help with child-rearing expenses), but I think it could be doable, especially if I pursue freelance work more diligently and/or get a raise, which is a possibility.

2) The kid has been playing the piano on and off for a couple hours. I love it.

3) Summer hit Berkeley yesterday. It's actually been hot here. I wish I could ship some of this to my friends who are still in winter.

4) Is it silly that the thing I'm most excited about re: the tax refund is that someotherguy and I can get our dental work done?

5) Today is the birthday of both sogwife and my baby brother. They're a year apart, and as different as two people can be, but I love them both. Tomorrow night is the traditional birthday corned-beef-and-cabbage dinner. :-)

6) My dad friended me on Facebook, and minutes later someone posted this, which I had to share, but I will confess to having paused for a minute before hitting send. :-)

7) The magazine lost $632 in 2009. That feels like a respectable first year to me. It puts the thing squarely where I said it was, which was "moderately expensive hobby". I know people who spend more than that on yarn and beads in a year, so I don't feel too bad about it. If I revive the magazine, and I hope I will be able to, I will have to be a LOT better about keeping records, though, and not just dumping receipts into a file drawer. Taxes took way too long this year. Normally, I've got them done by the first week of February.

8) And speaking of recordkeeping, I found an excellent piece of money-tracking software for linux called GnuCash, and I love it! I actually had to brush up on double-entry bookkeeping before using the software, but the documentation is so good that I was able to do that in an afternoon, and the software is very robust and does everything I need it to. Suck that, mint.com.

9) Tomorrow is medical-stuff day: EKG, echocardiogram, and thyroid blood tests. I tell you, if I keel over, it won't be because doctors weren't trying to figure out how to keep me alive.

10) I really love our Farm Fresh To You CSA. I had to scale back on the size of the box (back to regular from one size bigger), but that's because I've been busy and not cooking as much. That'll probably change now that Disability Awareness Week and the taxes are over.

I have to print more magazines; they sold out!

(Yes, yes, I could look at this as poor planning on my part, but I prefer to look at it as a triumph of both word-of-mouth marketing and small-batch printing. :-)

1) A one of a kind steampunk piece was stolen from its creator at DragonCon. There's a cash reward for return, no questions asked, and more if the person is caught instead. Take a minute and look at the pictures, please, and signal boost if you're so inclined. http://brute-force.livejournal.com/127377.html

2) I saw a Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) ad on the bus yesterday, and was happy. It was this one, but you can see them all here.



3) The skin I had removed for biopsy was/is clear of anything to worry about. (I half-jokingly told the doctor that I knew it wouldn't be cancer, because my family has already had its share of cancer, so we have no room for more. Still, good to know I'm just good at growing suspicious moles, and not at growing skin cancer.)

4) I bet you already knew that incision sites itch like a mofo when they're healing, huh? Since these stitches represent a very small percentage of the ones I've had in my life, this should not surprise me, but man, is it ever annoying.

5) Tomorrow is my 43rd birthday. I have been asked if I'm changing the name of the magazine. No. My getting older doesn't change the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

6) Yesterday, I FINALLY got the check from the Bar for the work I did for them back in late July. This is the check I am using to pay the printer. You can imagine my joy. There will be an Issue 2 soon! Finally!

Well, no wonder I felt too busy in the last month. I worked 61 hours for the bar-exam guy, 92 for Cal, and who knows how many keeping all my other balls in the air. Not that 38.25 hours (on average) per week is all that many hours, but it's a lot more than I'm used to working while trying to do all the other stuff I try to do.

But that's over now. Maybe I can catch my breath.

Well, after I finish all the stuff for the magazine.

And, you know, stuff.