witchchild

This week, I give thanks for:
*improved health on many fronts.
*my beach trip and ocean submersion on Sunday.
*getting in meditation many times already this week. Yes! Another improvement.
*Flourless cupcakes
*Getting another writerverse challenge done though it would be nice to do them at a time not just before the deadline.

I consciously commit to:
*continuing to keep my physical space clean and working on my inner space
*setting up my new computer
*picking up some new clothing and realizing my weight gain is going to be around for at least a little while
*focusing more on my own healing, prioritizing more, and pushing myself less.

I swear we do not get taught this specific skill in library school but this is often what happens when a place redesigns their library web site.

On Sunday I went to the beach with siduri, where I taunted seagulls by tossing rocks into the water and got my base needed dose of salt water. Despite the fact that clouds covered the sky for the entire time we were there, I got color anyway. Aside from my short time in the water, we just spent the whole time catching up with everything. I so needed that.

Having a bit of a dip in energy again this week and I think it's me pushing a little too hard and not getting enough sleep. TV needs to go off when I head to bed but I don't like doing that.

Also, I have started reading Harry Potter. One of my big reasons for avoidance is that I have found a lot of hyped stories to be poorly written, plus I hit saturation fast when they first came out. It's what happens when you work in a bookstore. But damn, this is one time when there is serious merit from the state. Right now Hagrid's on the boat with the family explaining everything.

First day this week in which I feel well-rested and calm. I like it. Also noticing that even when I do have dips in health, I am coming out of them faster. Reminds me of how my body now handles acute illness: things hit hard and fast but they also go away almost as quickly.

Working, got Groove Salad going because my usual daytime talk is airing repeats this week. Also pondering the amazing (to me) amount of writing I now do. The food blog is getting closer and closer to being a very regular deal. My goal for each month now is three posts a week: new information/recipe/etc. early in the week, Friday reviews of media, and weekend wrap-up of news and good material from other people in my blog network. I've been doing Pagan Activist regularly for over a year and have yet to hit a true block in anything to say. The woo blog is still too neglected, like my more active spiritual practice. And I am still working on getting into the fiction groove with writerverse. There are also two anthology/journal submissions to be done before the end of the month. One I've been trying to put together for over two years (side-eyes alfrecht) and the other I just hit upon for the House's publication.

maybe it would help to set up the new MacBook and get a formal keyboard for the iPad. Getting a new desk might also help; the one I have now is driving me bonkers with its poor design for laptop work. It was great with a desktop though. Time to peruse IKEA again.

About two weeks ago, I was walking down the hill from work to get some food and doing some scrolling through Tweakdeck. When it was active I was a big fan of Tweetdeck. Twitter and Facebook in the same stream, no frills, letting me see the social media world easily. I loved it. Then Twitter had Tweetdeck shut down and something new showed up in the almost exact same vein, Tweakdeck. Same idea, even the same sort of minor glitches. But still, I loved, and every day I scrolled.

Until that one day. Around the 12pm marker, I was only seeing Facebook updates. This was not so uncommon and often a hit of the reload button would do the trick. Not so this time. A little hunting of Twitter tags and I found that Twitter had shut it down.

I miss them both. Maybe it's better for my time management that I do not have it there to scroll through, get distracted, save, etc. It would also be nice to see everything together and not have to go through multiple hoops.

As well. I am getting a little more work done now.

Can someone give me the info on setting up cross-posting between here and eljay? I am writing more but forget to paste it in here as well.

1. Would you link the eljay to this thing already?

2. would you stop getting sucked into nasty mental vortexes and writer some more? Seriously, you have this, LJ, two blogs, a third where you contribute, and just got accepted into a writer challenge community. Get the words moving!

The icon (Gregory House facepalming) is in tribute to the fact that I keep having to restrain myself from running out of the office to scream and cut people downtown because they are messing with our stuff in the system for no good reason. And thus making my backlog bigger because I have to fix things they never should have touched in the first place.

At least my weekend was a good one. On Saturday I headed down to Manhattan to celebrate the Queen goddesses of ancient Egypt with several members of the House of Netjer. For those interested, in attendance were Wasi, Kit, Ibu, shefytbast, Imti, Mose, and Qed. Qed and I were named on the same night back in 2007 and she had been the only person from that night I had never met in person. So that alone made me happy. Our celebration was a lot of conversation while sitting in the shade next to Belvedere Castle in Central Park. I don't think it's possible for me to have a bad or boring time when I go to a House event, and I think that speaks well for the community.

(Though we will ignore my getting lost twice on the way there, taking a route I know well, and the fact that I never found anything for lunch so I was ravenous when I got to Grand Central and hunted down some dinner. Thai food, if you wonder.)

Doctor visit happened on Friday. Frustration there in a big way. Because all my test results are normal, there is nothing he can do for me at this point and I am just going to go back in six month. Sigh. Won't rant about how I feel about a lot of doctors, since my quality of life is still piss-poor compared to what it was just two years ago. Thank gods I am working with bearfairie still and it's helping. Yesterday and today I feel better and even wake up without feeling like I could sleep 3 more hours, regardless of how much I got during the night. The sunshine and company might be helping with that one.

Tomorrow is Valborg, better known by its German name, Walpurgisnacht: Night of the Witches. I don't have some big set plan for it, but I will do something.

Thank you SomaFM for providing beats to keep me from getting caught in a wave of hysteria at the end of this trying week.

I do enjoy a good winter storm when I am prepared for it and don't have to go out into it unless I decide to.

This ha been my life over the past 18 hours or so.

Last night: Go back and forth on whether I would go in to work today. With the storms of the last few years, the meteorologists now go into panic mode, lest they be wrong. Blame Irene in 2011 for this happening, and then tack on the snowmageddon of 2010-2011. I remain backed up with things to do at work and thought I might be able to go in and get at least two hours of work done before I would need to leave so I could go home safely. After a while I decided that I had enough personal time and self-preservation that I would just claim a personal day and not need to worry about it. Parent was in agreement, as she would have likely been the one to transport me home. What I would have done if I had thought about going in was to wake her at 7am and discuss options.

The decision I made was right. I woke up this morning around the time I would be walking out the door, and snow was already falling. Executive decision WIN. The snow accumulation was minimal until around 11am or so when it started to pile on. Right now I'd guess we have about 4-5 inches on the ground, and the forecast is calling for a foot. We still have a lot of time to see just what happened.

I did go out in the snowfall late in the morning. The cafe where I have lunch on the weekend was slated to be open until 11.30 with a limited menu. I called them and asked for a cup and a bowl of French onion soup. Yes, I hate making lunch that much, that I will go out in fast-falling snow, walk a mile total, just so someone else can prepare my lunch. It was also delicious, and I picked up a last bit of snack food at the grocery store down there.

I have had beers, I am watching Sherlock (Hounds of the Baskervilles, for the fan types), am working on cross stitch again, talk some life stuff with tyrsalvia, and plan to take a nap soon.

Life is pretty good right now.

5 days until I am in California.

As usual, I have a slew of items I want to get done today. Including a holiday celebrating using both Anglo-Saxon and Celtic elements. The focus will be on my personal healing, and I'll be offering milk to the Goddesses. In awesome news, my weekly milk purchase has a higher cream content, due to people at the farm pouring warm milk into the holding vat in an attempt to unfreeze what was in there. Because the water in milk freezes quicker than the fat, I wound up with very fatty milk. Yum!

Last night I went to the monthly goth night and ended up doing an unintentional summoning. I got there, saw next to no faces I recognized for the first time since I started going back. And I said to Matt (one of maybe three people I knew) that there were all these faces I didn't know. Introversion runs high so just going up to people doesn't work as well as I would like. Not long after in the conversation, I saw my friend Dan who I have not seen in a VERY long time. There's good reason, since he spends a good portion of his time in war zones now. He was doing photography for a while and now he is working as a researcher for an NGO in Iraq. He comes back for about a month, then spends three over there. Then more people I haven't seen in far too many years, Chris and Karin. Oh my gods, I had a moment of disbelief. But it was nice to have more people to hang out with and reconnect. Also did a phone number swap with one of the people I've only gotten to know since resuming my club-going activities.

During the day yesterday I was up at Mohegan Sun with my mother. She wanted to go to a book fair which a friend of hers was working. I will never turn down an opportunity to go book shopping. Alas, none of the books there were anything I would have wanted. Instead, the money I might have spent on reading material went into the slots. It also stayed there. But I do want to go up again sometime to play the tables. What I need to do before that is find out what kind of limits are on the tables for betting, because if I can't just go in there with $20 I might be screwed. Once the money was gone we went to dinner, because seeing oysters on the front of a restaurant is a guarantee I want to go in there. Some raw oysters and sardines for me, and oysters and smelts for my mom. Damn that fills you up well with a small amount of food! We both also found some clothing in one of the shops and I have never had better service when shopping. Well done, ladies.

The plans for today are preparing for tomorrow's Italian class, watch two DVDs so I can return them to their respective homes (work and Netflix), some dance practice, and talk with my co-presenters for Pantheacon. Less than two weeks before that is happening, and at least I am not quite going to the very last seconds with getting things ready.

And with that, I need to get moving. Have a good Sunday all!