Life updates
And yet again, two weeks have gone by without a post from me here.
What've I been up to?
- Day job
- Things continue to be fairly stressful, though the stress at the moment is just that my group is getting smaller while still being responsible for the same amount of work.
- Hugos
- I have now read or skimmed all of the fiction in the fiction categories. (Deadline for voting is July 31, six days from now.) There are a couple of not-awful and somewhat-interesting Puppies nominees, but none that I would consider awardworthy.
- Movies
- Have finally gotten back to my usual-in-recent-years rate of two or three movies a week. Am very close to being done with my big Movie Rewatching project. Have also seen and enjoyed four movies in theatres this month; my favorites of those were Inside Out and Minions.
- Bookcase
- I apparently haven't yet posted here about my magnificent new bookcase, which covers one whole wall of my living room. The library ladder hasn't yet been installed (I'm hoping that'll happen sometime in the next week or two), but even without that, it's pretty cool.
- Books
- A couple weeks ago, I brought twenty-one boxes of books and magazines from the garage into the house. About two-thirds of those are my father's books and sf magazines that I salvaged from his house; they've been sitting in boxes for ten years because I didn't know what to do about the soot damage, and didn't have anyplace to put them anyway.
- But Kathleen did some research and found out that art erasers are good for removing soot damage from books, and so she's been cleaning them. I then do a triage pass, sorting them into (a) giveaway box, (b) almost certainly giveaway box, but I want to take a cursory look at them first, or (c) bookcase for later more thorough examination.
- I've given that cursory look to maybe a dozen books so far; there are a couple dozen more on that stack left to go through.
- I've now filled eight shelves of my new bookcase with Peter's books, and there are probably about that many more books still to be cleaned and put on the shelves. Even with the huge new bookcase, I'm not going to have room for all of Peter's books plus all of mine; I have probably about six more shelves' worth of my own books that've been in boxes in the garage since I moved to this house six years ago. So I'll have to do some more triaging soon.
- Anyway, it's really nice to finally be making progress on this long-delayed project. Thank you, Kathleen!
- Socializing
- I don't seem to have mentioned here most of the social stuff I've done lately. I attended a bat mitzvah for the first time a month ago; a couple weeks ago, I saw Arcadia live at the Pear Theatre in Mountain View with Amy (it was mostly excellent); Kat B was in town; Lori and Brian were in town; I spent some time with Kam and her new dog Ruby; have had a couple of lunches and dinners with new friends. Chaos was in town last week, so I had a boardgames night; was expecting it to be small, but I think more people ended up attending than ever have before. I had a good time, and it was lovely to see everyone, but it took a lot out of me. Then Sumana was in town. And this past week I showed the new Visitor Center at work to Kathy et al. And amidst all that, I've completely failed to arrange social time with various friends and family who I keep intending to see.
- Not writing
- I went to a writing day a couple weeks ago and made some significant progress on revising the opening of my novel, but then I stalled again. Last weekend, I was too low on social energy to attend another writing day; I told myself I would write at home during the hours that everyone else was writing together, but I didn't. Hoping to make some more progress this weekend, but we'll see.
- SH awards page
- Spent some time a couple weeks ago updating the Strange Horizons awards page, which I had last updated in 2011. I believe it's now up to date.
- Online-prozines article
- I seem to have stalled once again on finishing my long-delayed article about the history of online prozines. It's really really close to done. I keep hoping to finish it. Soon.
- Constellation Press
- I've finally started moving forward again on my small-press project; have filed for incorporation. Still a lot left to do there, but glad to be making progress.
I'm sure there's more I could say here, but I think that's a reasonable overview of my past couple weeks. Off to work on some projects now. Or possibly take a nap.