Life, Death, and Taxes
Been a rough week.
Primarily because I found out that someone I know and like (though I don't know them well, and haven't seen them in a while) is in the late stages of a terminal illness. I can't say more here, and anyway I don't want to turn their illness into being all about me. But it was very distressing to hear about.
Other stuff that was all about me (from my point of view, that is) was mostly related to my being out of sync with everyone else in terms of timing. There were two meetings and a lunch at work (I already talked about the lunch, a week ago) that I showed up for only to find nobody else was there; and there was another meeting that I was just late enough to to miss getting my picture taken with the group (I think); and there was another meeting where I had to spend the first ten minutes or so downloading and installing the appropriate software so that I could view the presentation. I'm not sure how much my timing problems have had to do with the fact that the company's Outlook server apparently hasn't adjusted yet to Daylight Savings, so most meeting times are given as GMT-0800 even though we're actually in GMT-0700 now, so I'm never even sure what time a meeting was intended to be scheduled for.
Have been similarly out of sync with Pam & Arthur's schedules; they've been unexpectedly unavailable for my usual Thursday night visit the past couple weeks.
And in another case of bad timing, I held off on telling my accountant some new information I'd found about my taxes; he'd told me that he wouldn't have my taxes done by the 15th (due to my previous lateness), so I didn't want to interrupt him during an extremely busy time of year; I figured I'd wait 'til after the 15th to tell him. And of course on the 14th I got a call from his office telling me that my taxes were done after all. So I ended up making more work for him rather than less, and it's apparently now going to be several more weeks before he has a chance to make the correction, and I imagine the extra cost to me for his extra time spent on this will be substantial (whereas it would've been only a few extra seconds for him if I'd given him the info when I first found it out).
On a much less concrete note, unrelated to timing, it seems like everywhere I look this week I've been running into stories of dead or dying mothers, a topic that I sometimes find a little difficult to cope with. There were a couple of submissions relating to that topic, and I happened across some people's journal entries on related issues, and the mindless entertainment that Kam and I picked partly to cheer me up ended up being The Hulk and the first seven episodes of Alias—both of which turned out to prominently feature dead mothers. I guess it's not that uncommon of a plot element in fiction, but it seemed to be cropping up more than usual this week (and the journal entries weren't fiction, of course).
And much of the week the skies around here have been gray, which hasn't helped my mood.
But the sun is out today, and Kam and I are going to head up to Berkeley to go see this indie sf movie Robot Stories with various folks (thanks to Dan P.), and tomorrow I get to see a friend who I don't see nearly often enough (did I mention that something like six out-of-town friends are visiting the area in an overlapping series of visits over the next three weeks?). And I should've mentioned that we liked Alias an awful lot (despite a temporary drastic dip in quality for episodes 3 and 4); I'll write a more detailed review at some point, but for now suffice it to say that I thought the pilot was one of the best hours of TV I've ever seen.
So I won't say that things overall are looking up, exactly, but I'm hoping the next couple days will be a little less stressful than the past several.
