Lorem Ipsum

As this was the first weekend in a while when I wasn't traveling, I figured it would be a good time to sit at home, not see anyone, and get through as much as possible of my remaining magazine tasks, especially editing.

But unexpected (and mostly good) things kept happening.

When I was a baby, before my brother was born, my parents and I lived for a while at a commune in Northern California. (I gather this was pretty much de rigueur at the time.) A couple weeks ago, one of my uncles pointed out that people who'd lived there had an online presence; I ended up applying to join the relevant Facebook group.

Last night, I got home from work and found that they had admitted me to the group, so I posted an introductory note and asked if anyone had memories or photos of my parents. This morning, there was a note from one of the members asking me to point out my parents in a group photo. So I put breakfast together, took it out to my newly usable backyard patio area, and ate while I looked at pictures. I eventually found one (clipped from a newspaper) that was definitely my father, and three others that might've been. I was kinda surprised at how many of the men were clean-shaven.

I finished that up, poked around on Facebook a little more, did various morning things. (Including cleaning up my calendars a bit, which resulted in my tracking down the keyboard-shortcut stuff mentioned in my previous entry.) By which time it was noon, and I was really sleepy. I lay down for a minute, and woke up two and a half hours later.

I'm sure I needed the sleep; for the past few weeks I've been sleepy pretty much all the time, even after getting a full (for me) night's sleep. And I woke up feeling pretty rested. So that was nice, but it did kind of put a dent in the day.

I had some lunch, and was on the verge of settling down to work when I got a phone call, from a friend I hadn't talked with in a while. And then I did a little of this and that, and then got another phone call from another friend I hadn't talked with in a while, and what with one thing and another I ended up not actually settling down to do the day's magazine work until 8 or 9 p.m.

I started in on the editing, made some progress, started to compose a note to an author—

And there was a loud(ish) thud from the back yard, and all the power in the house went out.

I used the computer screen's glow (thank goodness for laptops) to find a flashlight, then went outside to confirm my guess that the whole neighborhood had lost power, then came back in and called PG&E. Their recording said they were working on it and would have an update in two hours.

I lit some candles and settled down in the guest room, which somehow felt more comfortable than the rest of the house. I had been a little unsettled by that big thud outside.

Continued working on my laptop for a while, but couldn't send email. Played a game on the iPad. Eventually noticed a faint glow coming from the direction of the doorway. Realized that before the outage, there had been no lights on in the room I picked, so that if they came back on, I wouldn't be able to tell. So I left the room, and sure enough, all the lights were back on. No idea how long they'd been that way.

Finished up the editorial letter, did a bit of other magazine stuff, realized that for my next step I needed Dreamweaver. Had been meaning to buy the new version, Dreamweaver CS6, for months. Decided to do that, but ended up spending way too long poking around on the Adobe site trying to find a way to buy it. Eventually used online chat with customer service, and just before they could help me, I found the menu that I had missed.

So, all in all, a day filled with pleasant diversions-from-plan. But I think tomorrow I'd better try to focus a little more.

(Of course, in practice, I will happily accept any diversions that come my way. Distractability is my middle name. Or should've been.)

And on that note, it's time for bed. Hope the nap won't keep me from sleeping. Don't think it will, but we'll see.