Daily Life: Just Another Day In Paradise (With Clouds)

I drove to work this morning at the leading edge of dawn. The skies were soft gray with the faintest tint of rose along the edges of the clouds. The highway was mostly empty at that hour, so the drive was smooth and pleasant, sipping coffee and listening to “Posiedon and the Bitter Bug” by the Indigo Girls. The album has some excellent songs on it.

The parking lot was mostly empty, a handful of cars, other early risers. The morning was quiet and productive, with forward movement on all items. Lunch was a walk down the street and a simple potato and bacon soup with a Blackcherry soda. The afternoon also managed to stay quietly productive.

I drove home and met my nephew Tom for dinner, then came back to the apartment for an easy evening of wandering the vast expanse of the internet. Google is an amazing thing – you can start with a simple search and start clicking through links and wind up in the most astounding places.

The sun is just now edging toward the horizon in a cloudy sky. I have the patio windows open, but the sky itself is kind of a high hazy gray. I was hoping for some sunshine on clouds for a photo opportunity, but it is not going to happen tonight. The bright indirect light through the clouds mostly washes everything out.

I’m nearing the end of “The Royal Assassin”, which is at a page turning place right now, so my plan tonight is to finish it up. I am waiting on a phone call and then it may be any early bed for me tonight.

Two more days of work and then a nice three day weekend house-sitting. I’ll take my laptop, my Kindle, and a few movies and am looking forward to a quiet weekend, sort of a semi-retreat.

Daily Life: Friday Slips Past

I slept in this morning for an extra pair of hours. The last week pretty much flew by on falcon's wings. Things were what I often refer to as "incidentally busy". Incidentally busy is when many small incidents occupy a lot of time, but you reach the end of the week and looking back you cannot put a finger on any one thing that took up the time.

After sleeping I came online for a while and wandered the internet, spending time in chat and time googling and a very pleasant morning in conversations with T.R.. About eleven A.M. I finally got rolling. I went out and got some lunch (a spinach salad with some chicken florentine), ran a couple of errands, and then circled back home for an afternoon nap. Despite being interrupted a couple of times during the nap (they are re-landscaping the front of the apartment complex, so several dump trucks full of dirt and rock made an appearance) it was a very good nap.

I had dinner with Tom at Frankie, Johnny & Luigi's and then we swung up to Fry's Electronics to look at movies. Tom picked up a pair - "Outpost" with Ray Stevenson (a.k.a. Titus Pullo from HBO's "Rome") and "Night Watch" with Ewan McGregor. Tom is a huge Ewan McGregor fan. I picked up the directors cut of one of my personal favorite movies (though it is not to everyone's taste) and that is "Brotherhood of the Wolf". I looked at a couple of other movies but decided what I really need to do is take an evening and update my movie inventory. I have a sizable movie collection and I have periodically bought movies I already owned.

Then, I slipped home about sunset, had a nice phone call, and then settled in to watch a movie. I tried to find a movie called "Final" on HBO, but it does not seem to be running here, so I made a note to check for it next time I am at one of the movie stores. It is a psychological thriller with Denise Leary. I watched the last hour or so of "Saving Private Ryan" on HBO, sent an email to some of my friends and I plead guilty to doing something I rarely do - a "cc multiple people with the same email because I am too lazy to write to each person individually".

I always dislike doing that, but sometimes it has to be done. Now, it is about fifteen minutes after ten, so I am going to curl up with "The Kings Assassin" by Robin Hobb and read myself to sleep. I am looking forward to Saturday and Sunday - our weather is supposed to be gray, cloudy, and cool, but today, though cloudy, was actually pretty pleasant.

Daily Life: The End Of The Work Week Arrives

The end of the work week is upon me. It was amazingly fast this week, though if I look backwards I could not say why. I am sure part of it is the stunning beauty of spring evenings in the Santa Clara valley. I had a bit of good news today - the doctor gave me a clear bill of health on my stress fractured foot, so I can resume walking and running (gradually of course). I am very happy with that since this is almost the perfect time for those long rambling evening walks with the Twilight Gods.

It was mostly a quiet day at the office. My company works what is called a 9/80 schedule. You work five days one week and four days the next so you have every other Friday off. There are two tracks - the A track and the B track. Most of the people are on the A track and I am on the B track. The good thing about it is that on the Friday when I have to work all of the people on the A track are off. That means my working Friday is usually pretty quiet and a good opportunity to catch up on those things that are not as time sensitive and that require a little more detail work.

I have a folder in my in-box where I drop the items of that nature and then on my working Friday I work my way through them one at a time. This works well for me with the rhythm of corporate life and I usually end the day on my working Friday's with a sense of accomplishment. Today was no different there.

I don't yet have anything planned for the weekend. I was looking at the events schedule on MetroActive (the web site of the local alternative paper), but I didn't see anything that particularly caught my fancy. It may turn out to be a good weekend to just stay at home and do those incidental things that need to be done. I went into this week with a pretty long "to do" list of incidental personal thing and I have managed to work my way through most of the list through the course of the week, so I will be entering the weekend with a handful of things that have to be done. It might turn out to be a good weekend either go wandering or to simply stay home, read, listen to music, and watch movies.

I am also in a writing mood this weekend. I was partially word-blocked due to the post I wrote on stillness. That post occurred to me and then just took a long time to pull itself together in my mind. I found that I was expending a lot of time thinking about how to express what I wanted to express and it was nudging other things out of the way. I kept notes on the other things so that I could write them later, so I will review those notes and see what inspires me.

I've spent the last two weeks reading a fantasy book, Robin Hobb's "Assassins Apprentice". It turned out to be pretty good and I got invested in the character by the end of the book. Consequently, I bought the other two books in the trilogy and have them loaded onto my Kindle. I started reading the second book last night "The Kings Assassin" and have the third lying in wait behind it, "Assassins Quest". It seems to me that it has been quite a while since I have read a good fantasy novel, so I have been enjoying it.

Whatever I ultimately decide to do the weekend is on me with its sense of anticipation, so I am looking forward to it very much.