Exhaustion
Am very tired. Quick update, then off to bed. (Ever notice how when I say "quick" I mean "only a dozen or so paragraphs"?)
My mother, Marcy, would have been 63 years old today. There was too much general day-rushing-by-ness today for me to stop and spend much time thinking about her. And now I'm too tired to say much of anything coherent, so I'll just point you to last year's entry, which also linked to my old essay about thinking about her while wandering through the woods at Swarthmore one year.
(Another reason I've had death on the mind lately is that a very close friend of Kam's brother-in-law was killed in a car accident recently. I'm certainly quite aware of how suddenly and unexpectedly death can arrive, but it still threw me a little, even though I'm not sure whether I ever met the person who died; the reminder that death can come out of nowhere, without warning, shook me. Nothing to be done, no help for it; just the way it is. But it scares and upsets me when I think about it too much.)
In unrelated news, I've been feeling a little dissociated and a little socially overwhelmed lately. Had dinner with some high school friends the other night (including one whom I'm not sure I've seen since high school), but though I was very pleased to see them, I didn't really feel like I participated much in the conversation. Kind of drifting. Partly lack of sleep, I think.
Also unrelatedly, I posted four entries this past weekend, but somehow didn't manage to say anything about the wedding itself. It was a nice wedding; the first Catholic wedding that I've been to in which the homily started out with a discussion of mitochondrial DNA. I liked a bunch of stuff from that homily; I worried occasionally that it was going to go awry, but it didn't--just kept being fascinating and entertaining. The bride and groom were resplendent in their finery, the wedding went off without a hitch (someone already made that joke at the time, but I like it so much I'm repeating it), and afterward there were good food and good company and Perseids. Then more hanging out the next day, by the lake, before I had to head home.
What else? Finished watching the rest of the first season of the new Dr. Who; good stuff, though I could've done without the reality-TV parodies near the end. I can't really say much of anything else without spoilers, so for now I'll content myself with noting that I think Captain Jack is the best thing to happen to the show in ages, possibly ever. (I do know the meta-news about the character, so no need to tell me about that here; but I can't even talk about that without spoilers for people who haven't seen any of the episodes, so I'll save it for another entry.)
Unrelatedly, the ants are still in my kitchen.
Also unrelatedly, Mya and I went to a couple of places to look at materials for use in a patio: Lyngsø Garden Materials and Peninsula Building Materials. (The current plan is to remove my deck and put in a patio.) I took a bunch of photos of pretty pieces of stone. The guy who'll be doing the work suggested concrete; I had an immediate gut negative reaction, but it turns out they can do some impressive stuff with concrete these days. Sadly, I am a materials snob; even if I can't tell the difference by look or feel, just knowing that the "stone" outside was actually fake stone made of concrete would probably nag at me. So I think I'm probably going to go with slate pavers instead. The prettiest ones we saw were the "black gold" slate at Lyngsø and the "Mariposa" slate at Peninsula; can't find photos of the former online, but the latter is apparently also available at Lynsø: Mariposa slate flagstone. Oh, and here's black gold slate at another site.
(Part of me thinks I should put yard plans on hold and look into buying one of the houses down the block; the two million-dollar houses sold, but it turns out there are three more new houses around the corner, for a little less money, that I think were made by the same people. It probably makes a lot more sense, financially, for me to stay where I am and proceed with the yard, but the houses are tempting. Meanwhile, the condo next to mine has a "sale pending" sign out front, so apparently it sold pretty quickly once it went on the market, but I know nothing about the new buyers.)
I'm sure there was more. Did I mention that there are still ants?
And that I'm tired?
I think I may also be a little bit sick, though I'm not quite sure of that.
Oh, right--we went on an offsite to Angel Island on Tuesday. It was quite nice, even though half of us missed the ferry on the way there and had to wait for the next one. I had never been to Angel Island (and, it turned out, was even confused about where it was); nice place. And good company.
(Also work-related: we released the Blogger data API documentation, helping developers write code to interact with Blogger.)
I've got more travel and socializing in the near future. For example, I'm woefully unprepared to go to WorldCon next week. Perhaps fortunately, I won't be on any panels--apparently they had too many people who wanted to be panel participants. I feel a little weird about WorldCon lately; it seems like most of my friends in the sf world are more interested in World Fantasy, and few SH folks will be at WorldCon so we're not doing a tea party even though it'll be our sixth anniversary. (Someone offered to help run a tea party, but I wasn't even organized enough to take them up on that.) So it's already feeling a little anticlimactic, and it hasn't even started yet. Still, to me WorldCon is still the big convention of the year (though of course WisCon is where my heart is); I think it may have something to do with the fact that a lot of my friends didn't arrive in the sf world via fandom, whereas much as fandom occasionally irks me, it nurtured me when I needed it, and on the whole I'm still rather fond of it. I've been meaning to write an entry about all that for years now, but doubt I'll manage it anytime soon.
Huh; I seem to have forgotten to mention that it was good to see Mary Anne during her visit the past couple weeks.
I suspect there's all sorts of other things on other topics I'm also forgetting to mention, but I think it's time for me to toddle off bedward.
