Had various invitations to Thanksgiving dinner for today, but although they were tempting, I ended up declining all of them. For a variety of reasons, but the main one was that I'd decided that this weekend I was going to make significant progress on various projects at home, most especially dealing with my father's books. (Also magazine stuff, like editing; also trying to catch up on various email and journal activity; also submitting a story of my own; also a host of other assorted projects.)<\/p>\n
And I knew that if I spent today socializing, then it would be easy to spend the rest of the weekend socializing, and Sunday night would roll around and I would've once again failed to get anything useful done, and I would be stressed.<\/p>\n
So I decided to forgo most of this weekend's social activity in favor of staying home and being productive. We'll see how it goes.<\/p>\n
On Monday a colleague innocently asked what I was doing for Thanksgiving, and I told her I was going to stay home and deal with my father's books, and mentioned something about the smoke damage, and she asked why smoke damage, and I realized that she didn't know about the whole mess. So rather than tell the story, I pointed her to my summary journal entry<\/a>, but also mentioned that there was more in my journal's \"Death\" category archives<\/a>, which made me realize that there were a bunch of entries about Peter that I hadn't tagged with category names. So I went and tagged them, which involved re-reading a bunch of them, which got me all mopey and sad.<\/p>\n Kam came over that night and we watched Howl's Moving Castle<\/cite>, which was mostly just about the right fluffiness level for my mood. I thought the movie was just as odd as the book, but I think I liked it slightly more--it contained about 80% of the characters and incidents in the book, kind of thrown together in a blender with some of Miyazaki's usual obsessions (flying; clouds, smoke, and steam; war; environmental impact; the effect on outward form of inward feelings and actions; etc). There were some delightful moments, and plenty of just weird ones.<\/p>\n Anyway, so I've spent much of the past couple days alternating between happy-and-cheerful and glum-and-maudlin. On the downside, been missing various distant friends quite a bit. On the upside, been listening to good music, reading good books, spending time with cool people, and even making progress on my spam-fighting project.<\/p>\n