stillsostrange

Tonight is our first night in the new house.

Being as we were on the third floor, we hired movers. The movers were scheduled for this afternoon, sometime after 11:00. We planned to get up, have breakfast, tidy a few last minute things and dust everything to be moved. Leisurely.

My phone woke me at 8:00. It was the movers. Their morning job had rescheduled, and could they come early? I made incoherent noises into the phone as I contemplated the likelihood of movers have ever before come early in the history of human domiciles. I made some sort of assenting growl and crawled out of bed. (It's important to note that I spent 18 hours on my feet yesterday.) We threw stuff out of the way and scrambled into clothes. The movers came precisely on time. I placed the exodus under my partner's supervision and fled to the new house to sweep and mop and attempt to sweep the knee-high pollen drifts out of our driveway.

The movers were faster than their original estimate, and very competent. One of them noticed my crash pad, and we discussed our favorite climbing spots in the area. After they left, we ran back to the apartment to throw laundry in the wash, and then we went for a belated breakfast and I ate a plate of migas as large as my head.

The rest of the day was spent scrubbing the bathroom. Last night I regrouted for the first time, earning myself a new adulting badge. I have since celebrated by taking a bath in my clean new bathroom, and am now rejoicing in our functional wireless.

Next up, dinner, and then a serious effort to stay up to watch the bloodmoon.

Yesterday was new house day, one of many. I went over at 9:00 for carpet installation, and left at 23:00. I scrubbed baseboards, wiped out cabinets, dusted, swept the driveway and patio, and reupholstered a chair (three more to go). Later my partner and roommates came over for more dusting and scrubbing, plus toilet seat replacement, new AC filters, replacement doorknobs, and the removal of some unfortunate blinds which will live out the rest of their life in the garage. Still to do: replace some light covers, put up curtain rods where those blinds were, contact paper the kitchen cabinets, call down the cleansing fire of heaven upon the bathtub, and sweep and mop before we bring our furniture in.

For you see, we are getting a very good deal on rent in a lovely, well-situated house by taking over a lease for friends*. The down side is that we don't get the professional cleaning services that would usually be brought in between tenants. So we clean. Everything. Ourselves.

On Friday I'll get a Uhaul and bring in my bookcases from storage. In a week and a half we have movers to carry everything down three flights stairs.

I'll spare you the Unfuck Your Habitat-style before & afters, but expect pictures soon.

* Chuck Palahniuk says that no matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close. I say that no matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll reevaluate your entire friendship if you have to clean out their fridge.

Good morning, and happy holidays! As is the way of my people, I shall soon go have a family Christmas brunch, then return home and have a second holiday with different family. In the meantime, I'm attempting to tidy the hell of beads that my desk has become.

With a bit of diligence, 2015 will be the year of me being more productive in things like blogging and non-writing artistic endeavors. Looking back at the past year and a half, it becomes clear that a grue made of stress and/or depression ate me in 2013, and I've only recently crawled out of it. It's no fun inside a grue; I cannot recommend this.

I've finished two short stories in the past few months, and need two more by March. I'm also working on The Poison Court, and a still titleless project known as D2: Byakhee Boogaloo.

Our house has acquired a new mammal, and this time I'm not responsible for the addition. Our rodent friend has made a little hole in the garage ceiling, and we can hear him* scampering through the walls. Steven has seen him at least once hanging out in the garage, probably eating the cat food.

Have I mentioned we have four cats? Which means that statistically, at least one of them should be a murder cat. And yet a rat is camping out in the garage eating their food. Their shame is great.

Since my cats are abject failures at what should be both a duty and a joy to them, I see live traps and crawling through attics in my future.


* I pray this rat is male, and not possessed of a wife and children for whom he intends to send.

I seem to have fallen into an elementary school schedule-shaped hole, which has stronger gravity than usual. I may need another daily posting meme to keep me tethered. Anyone feel like joining me in a mutually-assured destruction blogging pact?

We can't be sad, though. Not today. Today is Rex Manning Rammstein day. Or it will be as soon as I clean the house, drop off a dog to be boarded, pick up Agent F from school, pick up the CSA and split the spoils with fadethecat, feed animals, feed and medicate a child, and wait for the babysitter to show up. Then we will drive to San Antonio to enjoy pyrotechnic goodness.

All of mine today has gone into cleaning my room. I'm getting better at embracing the unfucking lifestyle in the rest of the house, but there is something about cleaning my room that makes me feel like an eight-year-old badly in need of a nap. Something about the combination of the dark gloomy gothcave atmosphere (great for sleeping) and the near-constant enormity of the chore inevitably leads to me falling asleep mid cleaning. But it has to be clean by Thursday, so on we trudge.

And this is really the lamest post ever, but it's what you get today.

I'm late to Unfuck Your Habitat, like every other party I attend, but holy crap it is the best thing ever. It isn't telling me anything I didn't already know--except maybe drain volcanoes, which I'd at least forgotten--but the repetition and challenges and breaking down of tasks is amazingly motivational. The public areas of my house have been clean for a week now, which is pretty outstanding around these parts. The bedroom is a minor disaster (but only a minor one), and I may turn that into tomorrow's challenge.

My other challenge besides the bedroom is to unfuck my novel proposal. I have four chapters of Isyllt IV that are full of bits I love, but are also deeply flawed in a stakes/motivation way, and I need to take everything apart and rebuild it in a more stable fashion. It would also help to foreshadow the other half of the plot if I knew what that half was.

Peace has once more returned to the land. Now maybe I can get some work done on this short story, and finish the two scenes that are still missing from Dreams.

Good morning, LJ. I'm back from Hawaii, having not been eaten by sharks, eels, or mongeese*. Now I have a head cold; it's like con crud without the con.

What are you doing today?



* I never saw a mongoose, but the hotel warned us very strongly not to feed them.

I have three chapters of That Book Thing finished, but need at least one more to have a proposal-sized chunk. My current trouble is controlling the flow of information--usually I'm told to clarify things, but this time I'm trying not to let the first chapter turned into a bolus of exposition that would choke a horse.

Austin's Midnight Madness scavenger hunt--which I'm helping run this year--is on Saturday. I've started making my clues, and need to put together prop packages for the teams. And buy a wig. And make sure all my cohorts have fedoras.

I've bought the first round of supplies for my Halloween costume, but haven't begun assembling it yet. Next week will be a frantic wing-making rush. And I need to find--Cod help us all--a pair of leggings.

The pile of gravel in my driveway is much smaller (we can park one car in it), but not yet vanquished.