The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

It really ought to be Friday, only it isn't. It REALLY ought to be next Friday, only it isn't. I would settle for it being today with weather I could walk home in without feeling like it's a penance, only that's not going to happen for at least another two and a half weeks. And people wonder why I hate the month of March?

Anyway, I'm taking a week off in two weeks, and the temptation to run off to somewhere warm is pretty strong. Unfortunately getting to anywhere south of the polar vortex seems to be more trouble than I'm willing to go through. Either you leave the night before and get there the next morning, or you spend a lot of money, or you leave ridiculously early in the morning, and so forth. I could stay in Boston and just not go to work for a week, but that's not quite as much fun as going somewhere. I suppose I could go to a travel agent, but that would require me to know where I want to go, and I'm not even that far along yet.

I have discovered skyr, which so far is the only nonfat yogurt-like substance that comes close to being what I want out of a nonfat yogurt-like substance. It's got the texture, without having a pantload of sugar (or artificial sugar, which is worse) and glue in it. Fortunately it's not one of those horrendous expensive things I get addicted to; it's nice to know it's there, but I don't have to keep buying it. It was on sale last week, which is why I was willing to try it. We won't mention the chocolate bars that were also on sale, but since they're good chocolate bars, I've been able to not eat a whole one in a single sitting. And I managed to make black bean soup that gets better when I put not-quite-enough pasta into not-quite-enough soup.

I haven't been able to write anything for several years now, but last weekend I ended up at Newbury Comics in Harvard Square (not really on purpose, but I had a serious case of the fidgets), and went on a used-DVD binge. One of the DVDs in question is the first Captain America movie, and the plot bunnies are starting to wake up. Nothing concrete yet, but at least it proved that the plot bunnies are still in there somewhere. I was sort of wondering about that. Now if they'd just let me finish the long CSI epic I was writing when they went into hibernation...but I'm still not sure that's ever going to happen.

Because I am fighting as hard as I can against a rant about work, a list of good things not related to work:

At breakfast on Saturday, I started writing again, and what I started writing seems to actually want to go places. (Lesson learned for my other piece of writing that isn’t going places: when you have a plot point jumping up and down in your brain yelling “WRITE THIS”, write that, and never mind how the rest of the plot’s going to get there. It’ll figure itself out, or it won’t and you’ll have an offshoot.)

I made a very tasty concoction on Sunday night, consisting of orzo, chicken and pesto sausages, grape tomatoes, baby spinach, and fresh mozzarella. I think for next time it needs garlic, or basil, or both, but its current incarnation is quite nice and will provide lunch for the next several days.

I’ve been socking it to my credit card balance to such an extent that I hope to be able to pay it off completely before I have to start paying for fuel oil again.

It didn’t occur to me that on Friday after the thunderstorms, there might be a rainbow out there. It was a very pleasant surprise when I looked out the window and saw the rainbow over the flagpoles next door.

Speaking of flagpoles, after Memorial Day, Union St. is decked out in flags on all the telephone poles for the rest of the summer. And I discovered that somebody at the other end of Union St. has a koi pond in their front yard. (I don’t know how they keep the koi alive in the winter, but they must manage somehow, because there are at least three or four big ones and a mess of goldfish-sized ones in there.)

The loud Celtics-fan neighbor seems not to be a baseball fan. I haven’t heard anything from him since last weekend; in fact, I don’t think he was home this weekend.

I never use the back doors at home, because as far as I knew, the keys didn’t work without serious arguing. I tried them on Saturday and they both work quite nicely. This is good because the front porch is getting painted sometime next week, and needs a day to dry, so I’ll have to come in through the back. (The porch being painted is also good; it's looking a little sad right now.)

I've been bothered lately by knowing I needed something, but not knowing what that something is. I finally figured it out. My center is off; I need to go somewhere and work on that for a couple of hours, preferably somewhere private but not home. (Or somewhere outdoors, if there was anywhere outdoors that could be relied on to stay dry today.)

Basically I need to run off at the brain for a while, until it clears out some.

On a related tangent, I have to find out if I can get into the main Harvard library system. I need an academic library so I can research the paper I want to write for the next ATISA conference. (There's got to be somebody else out there who writes about colonialism and borrowing; I can't be the only person interested in the two-way linguistic street between colonizers and indigenous peoples. And it is a two-way street.)

When my brain gets an idea and starts yelling "Write this!" I generally listen to it. Grad school has warped it, though; on the way home tonight, it got an idea for another academic paper involving the influence of language on culture and vice versa, and colonialism, and borrowing. So now it's yelling at me about that, and I think I hear a lot of research coming. At least when it yells at me about fiction, I can just start writing.