Getting things done
Sunday, 06 January, 2008
Today is the last day of my holidays. (Well, for a week anyway; then I'm off to Victoria on a road trip.)
Monday 31/12/07
New Year's Eve. I slept in, then tried to get started on my newsletter. Blogging was a distraction for most of the day, however. And then there was the finicky matter of nailing the newsletter design. Going to church with a bunch of visual artists gives rise to a certain amount of dissatisfaction with my meagre design skills.
Josh turned up in the afternoon and had leftover Thai with us. Then we drove to Glebe, parked and walked to the park, armed with a picnic blanket, packets of chips, drinks and plastic cups. Some church people and some FEVA folk were already there and we joined them. Fish was sketching in his brand new Moleskine (and not letting anyone look at it). The sun hadn't yet set and everyone appeared rather festive but not rowdy.
I knitted for a while (the Henry scarf), and Fish and Judith taught us to play the Backpacker card game. I won one round, and spent the rest trying to come up with songs that matched the countries (infecting Judith with “I Like to Be in America” from West Side Story). Marinka came around with glo-stick bracelets, and we all took one. Judith noticed that someone was selling toy lightsabers and went to buy Fish one. As the sun set, it gave us enough illumination to keep playing for a while.
At 9 pm everyone stood up to watch the fireworks and we had a pretty good view of the ones near the bridge (along with the bridge itself in the shadow of the Anzac Bridge which makes me think of that scene in Saving Francesca where Francesca walks all the way from Hyde Park across the Anzac Bride and down Johnson St in Annandale, and how long that would take) and the ones further towards Drummoyne. It was nice to see them live for once; normally we just watch them on TV while some guy does cheesy commentary over the top and some radio station plays cheesy music, and it was cool that so many people were getting into them.
After the 9 pm show, a lot of the families left and went home. Wanting to stretch our legs, we went on a walk around the headlands (past the houses I will never afford to live in, as far as the The Boathouse on Blackwattle Bay) and talked about our Christmases and the best presents we had received. I remember a fair amount of discussion about books but I don't remember what about in particular.
When we came back, the group of girls who had camped out near the corner of our picnic mat had more or less dispersed (it was totally weird; one of them had carelessly let her stuff drift across our rug. Who does that? Especially complete strangers??? Well, she was British ...) Judith and I made the trek to visit the ladies' but were rather put off by the fact that the lights didn't work (so people were seeing their way with lightsabers. Perhaps it was best that we didn't see what the toilets actually looked like. And at least they had toilet paper). When we got back, the last of the odd corner girls had left. And soon it was time for the midnight fireworks (which were accompanied with much catcalling and whooping).
Then we packed our stuff, walked back to the car and drove home. Ben dropped Josh home and I kept at it with the newsletter design, then went to bed around 2 ... again.
Tuesday 1/01/08
New Year's Day. I slept in again, started work on writing the newsletter proper, then Panther, who just happened to be in the country, came around and we went for a walk. It was a beautiful day—very sunny—and there was hardly anyone around. I wanted to see if we could reach the pedestrian bridge just before the Anzac Bridge. We did, but it took an hour.
Panther had the advantage on me because she's kept up-to-date with my blogging habits whereas I had no idea what was happening in her life. So she brought me up to speed, and we talked books and stuff there and back again. We got back around 5 and then she had to go, so we said goodbye for yet another year.
Ben made dinner, and invited Fish and Judith around for dinner. But Fish had a date with a nasty website so only Judith came. She brought some DVDs with her but I didn't feel like watching; I wanted to get the smelly newsletter done. So she and Ben watched something, and I kept writing. I finished it at 1 am.
Wednesday 2/01/08
The day after New Year's Day. I slept in again and thought, “I must kick this habit before Monday.” I wanted to send the newsletter, so interviewed Ben about college via IM, then he gave the whole thing a read-through (and his approval) and then double-checked the address list. Then I sent it. It's the first newsletter we've written in 18 months so I hope people read it.
Ben went off to the city to spend his birthday vouchers, and I started the process of changing the rooms around. It felt a bit like those sliding tile puzzles where you move one square and then move another into its place so you can move the first one into the space the second tile has just vacated: I moved things out of the bedroom and put them in the spare room, then moved things out of the office and into the lounge, and then moved stuff from the lounge into the bedroom (which was supposed to become the study) and stuff from the spare room into the bedroom, and some things were moved four or five times before I could move them to where they were supposed to be. I ended up doing quite a lot by myself before Ben came home, and then when he came home, he helped me do the rest—move the two giant wardrobes that Peter had given us, the bed, the extremely heavy dining table which we inherited from Ben's grandma—all the while vacuuming and dusting and cleaning. Around 7 I was running out of steam, so we called it quits and had dinner and watched TV, then spent the rest of the evening setting up all the technology (yes, computers seem to have priority in this house): realigning the phone cords so they went into what is now the study instead of what was the study, running extension cords around the room, moving my computer to Ben's computer desk (as now our situations are reversed: he has a laptop and I have a desktop, and now, for the first time, I am directly plugged into the modem instead of going wireless with three walls between me and router).
Thursday 3/01/08
First day with new study and new bedroom. More lights gets into our bedroom but it's not too bad; it's not annoying light—high contrast light—like digital alarm clocks and the little green bulb on Ben's bedside table speakers that makes me irritated because I have to keep looking at it. The new position of the bedroom means that we can hear more noise from the other side of the house—like our neighbours talking—and that is a little weird.
I moved the last two bookshelves into the new study with Ben's help, then proceeded to move all the books across (laundry baskets are good for that sort of thing). We cleared the last of the stuff from the lounge (though not from the spare room; I'm not sure what to do with that stuff) and then I spent a very nice afternoon and evening watching DVDs, reading blogs and answering my email.
Friday 4/01/08
Because some of the ECU Wollongong crew were coming around to talk website with Ben at 10, we got up earlier—about nine. There was a senior staff worker, an MTS trainee and a student, and they talked shop with Ben for a couple of hours while I started up my computer and started weeding out the duplicate music on my hard drive. All this time I've been using SonicStage to manage my music because that's the software that works with my MP3 player, however, when it imports CDs, it converts them all to Atrac format which is unreadable on all other music programs. As I'd just raided Ben's music library which is all in MP3 format with db volume level set to 89.0, I thought it would just be easier to make everything that standard. But Ben doesn't necessarily have everything I have. So it took a couple of hours to sort through and compare the list, delete the duplicates and make a list of everything else I needed. And then it took more hours to rip through the rest of the stuff I needed. So while Ben went off to have dinner with Luke, I spent the evening ripping CDs and playing West Wing trivia on Facebook, trying to make sure I was in bed by midnight.
Saturday 5/01/08
Laundry day. I did about four loads. I also did the grocery shopping, and chopped up 4.5 kg of chicken breast so Ben will have meat that will be easy to defrost and cook the week I'm away. The CD ripping continued throughout the rest of the day, along with the balancing of accounts for 2007 (woohoo! We broke even! More or less) and much DVD-watching. Ben went out to meet Fish and Judith for dinner, then go to the start of the Sydney Festival. I didn't want to go out, so stayed at home and joined LastFM, IM-ed Bec and wrote a blog post.
Ben came home and we were up talking until four. Oh dear, bad start to the working week ...
Sunday 6/01/08
The last day of my holidays. We got up around 12, and I decided to skip breakfast and make fried rice for lunch. I've been doing that a lot during these holidays: subsisting on two meals a day. Not sure if that's actually good for me physically ...
This afternoon has been spent blogging, catching up with The New York Times and Salon.com and ripping the last of the CDs. Well, apart from the musicals; I'm not sure what to do with those. Church is soon. Smell you later.
Blinks:
A way of funding writing in the future: pitch and idea and get people to support it.
Place where you can hire play equipment for parties, etc.
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
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