Mood-swingy
On the plus side:
- Recently acquired a lovely glass Klein bottle.
- Warm sunshine and blue skies have lifted my spirits every time I've gone outside in the daytime the past few days.
- Trees are blooming in my neighborhood, thousands of tiny pink blossoms.
- Plenty of songs that I like have been coming up on my random-order music playlist.
- Bought a Blu-ray of Arrival, and DVDs of Dangerous Beauty and Cradle Will Rock. Also bought a couple of games: San Juan and Red November (cooperative game about a bunch of gnomes trying to survive on a submarine that's falling apart) and Takenoko (gardener grows bamboo, panda eats it).
- Watched the movie of Ballet Shoes, which is almost as good as the book, and better in a couple of ways.
- Got to see Kam recently.
- Got to see Sumana recently.
- Got to see Karen recently.
- Got to play boardgames with friends last weekend.
- Logan has opened, and I hope to see it soon.
- Figured out a way to productively address concerns that some colleagues have had over one of my work projects, and have been making progress on that.
- Have now labeled 12,000 digital or digitized photos; only about 23,000 left to go.
- I got out my typewriter the other day to write a note to a friend, and I left it out on the table, and it makes me happy every time I see it.
On the minus side:
- There've been like six times in the past week when I've realized that some task that I had been only vaguely aware of was suddenly due immediately. They've all been things that I would have had plenty of advance notice for if I'd been on top of things, but I wasn't, and suddenly it was the last minute and I had to scramble to get things done on time. I've managed to get almost all of those things done so far, at least to a minimum degree of competency, but they've all been more stressful than they had to be.
- All of my tech seems to be mysteriously failing in a variety of ways. (Though that's significantly improved since a week ago; I did coax various devices into working a little better.)
- I've been having an even harder time than usual dealing with email, both work and home, in a timely way; exacerbated by my literally not having seen several time-sensitive messages. (One of them got automatically marked as spam; the others I apparently just didn't notice even though they were right in front of me.)
- My sleep schedule has been kind of wonky lately.
- I'm not making progress on any of my big long-term projects other than the photos.
- The anniversary of my father's death is next week, which is probably a significant part of why I've been tense and anxious lately.
- And then of course there's the national political situation.
I'm not nearly as stressed or as distressed as a lot of my friends, and I have much less reason to be. But I have nonetheless had several bouts of mullygrubs lately.