10.4.03

Done and all taken care of. Sheets are back on the bed and all the books put up nicely in the crates that are doing service as bookshelves till I make a new bookcase. I really want to make a bookcase. I came up with a good design for a tall skinny one to maximize paperback space -- twelve inch shelves are just begging for double stacking, so I'm doing it with six inch wide boards.

For the craft project, I hemmed a piece of good crimson fabric to make a napkin for my lady. SCA stuff -- I'll put a corner design on it with blackwork or something a bit like blackwork. Not the counted thread stuff but just a cool design in the shaded like an ink drawing style.

Oh cool -- my blackwork book wasn't the one that got rain damaged. I won't have to rely on guesswork.

Blackwork by Mary Gostelow, Dover Needlework Series, ISBN 0-486-40178-2 if you're interested in medieval embroidery. I hadn't actually done anything out of this book yet, so this should be interesting. Also I am reading for style to refresh myself on what all to put into my own articles when I get ready to do them. Should be soon with the way I'm typing...

Oh great. This still gets so frustrating. I wanted to take a long soaking bath for my back and have clean sheets on the bed on the same day. Definitely a personal luxury given that making the bed is usually a major effort on my back and that I only got one set of sheets since the other set vanished in the move from New Orleans. Which means doing laundry and stripping bed same day. So I got into the stack of towels and was rather glad I did.

Ari sprayed and half the stack also has to go into laundry. That load is washing now. Frustrating and does mean that I will need to do a little more around my room than planned so that all the towels and linens I used to keep on the shelf he uses for his hideaway get put away in tubs. I'm glad I did get that many tubs. That means unpacking and shelving the last two plastic boxes of books so that I have one free for towels. But the cat will not win this one.

Everything else that's up there is already in tubs so that won't be a problem. He isn't happy -- he has to deal with Argent and Argent still invades his territory all the time. I can't think of a way to deal with that except to let them work it out for themselves, but I can at least get my stuff out of the way of it.

Poor little guy. He has had his life disrupted thoroughly several times already, but he is starting to get affectionate again and slept with me last night. I do have to work all the usual cat bad habits into Magic in the Streets or Magic would be too unrealistically perfect.

Oh well -- on with the bath and sorting-out and then maybe work on a craft thing before I do the second part of the effort on the bed. Looks like today will be one of those exercise days....

7.4.03

Doing a bit better on the Dvorak now. I only have to backspace every other word or so.

Adults grouse about daylight savings time, especially now in the spring when you basically lose an hour of sleep. Reflect for a moment on how that seems to a five year old girl who did not understand that her mom couldn't repeal the whole thing. Then on what it's like to be a vulnerable male within earshot of those tears and unable to do a thing... and the poor kittenlet has a cold anyway and was home from school,

I rediscovered Prismacolors today and last night, completing a major piece that turned out pretty well for something that's basically illustration and calligraphy. Ought to get Vel to scan some of the cool things in my sketchbook and maybe put them up on my Author Site. This has helped with the frustration of the Dvorak retraining. I still need to do a story for Dstar, something a bit longer and more elaborate than the ones I wrote before coming down -- but I am not rushing myself.

I have been sleeping a lot -- when not having trouble sleeping, that is. It's weird. A lot of the perpetual stresses of my life are beginning to diminish. I'm living in a good place and my health is gradually on the mend. Purr! Vel just gave me a chocolate straw -- waferish light cookie rolled around a soft chocolate filling -- it was great.

And the result of landing in a great situation? I wind up getting all fried about all the deadlines I messed up in 2002 when for most of the year I was just not firing on all thrusters. Going nuts getting caught up. Including getting around to doing the Dvorak thing because there will be no better time than now to put up with the inconvenience of being too slow for words -- literally.

During the March Madness every hobby I ever had was screaming my name. And today I finally took a little time out to mess with colored pencils because my laptop was at 65% Undefragged last night so even typing practice was right out of it. And I did this art project I had been putting off -- it seriously helped ease my mind a bit. One by one I am catching up to all the things I thought I could do... and I am getting them done. Not all at once but definitely steady progress.

And in a week or two my backup computer will be online on Linux! Another long put off thing slowly coming into focus...