...so there is this thing called LJ that I seem to have completely forgotten about for the past few months.

Life in a nutshell:

Work: I've relocated, at least for the next couple of months, to the Capital Region to perform oversight on the Hudson River dredging. While it is interesting, the 12 hour days are taxing and all I've been able to scrape together the energy to do outside of it is sleep and watch the occasional TV show. I'm hoping to get used to the schedule and maybe expand that list to working out, seeing friends, and writing...at least once I flip back to the day shift. Right now I'm working 1 pm to 11 pm. In other work news, my company was bought by global-environmental-PRP-loving-megacorp. That is a topic for another post entirely.

Writing: Not much happening on that front, lately. I've let work stress and homebuying stress get in the way. Not much of a writer, am I?

Apartment search: Yeah, I'm looking in the hopes that I can take advantage of the first time homebuyer tax credit. But so far it appears that a coop is all I can afford, and that the coop boards who approve new residents are extraordinarily choosy about who they deign to allow in. So I'm not optimistic. But I have pre-approval from a reputable bank, a realtor, and numerous listings to slog through.

Everything else: Not much energy for anything else. Did take a cool combination yoga/pilates/marital arts class the Saturday before I headed north. It was great fun, but drove home that I'm not quite as flexible as I'd like to be. That is something I can work on, though.

I think that I might need something that I can control right now.
 

I can feel the rain in the air...I wish that it would hurry up and get here.

It's been horribly hot and humid all day, and I could really use some relief. The heat makes me think of work--relentless, oppressive, and taxing beyond reason when a deadline looms close overhead. That spell finally broke last Friday when the last of my submittals went out. I spent an awesome Saturday at The Cloisters and at the Met with C, feeling very much like me yet again. We walked many miles, had a few subway adventures, and were even treated to a bit of serious eye candy on the ride back to GCT. The feeling never truly vanished from the previous Saturday...it just got a little lost in the long hours and restless sleep. I used to believe that I maintained a decent balance between work and everything else. It's pretty clear that I'm deluding myself. Or maybe it just goes in cycles and I'm getting myself back on track.

Sunday...well, Sunday I am half-ashamed to admit that all I did was laze about researching my computer options with a few chores tossed in there for good measure. I took yesterday off entirely without using a single vacation hour. I think that I can settle for 20 hours of overtime rather than 30. The extra day did more for my mental health than the extra money would have. I wasn't eager to return to the office today, but the thought of walking into the building didn't turn my stomach.

Steeping myself in art has made me eager to write again, internal editor be damned. That's the other reason I was hoping it would rain tonight--the sound draws my creative energy from where it hides. That little push would be welcome. Perhaps Thursday...tired now, and singing tomorrow night. Mozart Requiem and Bach Magnificat. Adore the music (even the Kyrie has started to grow on me), but like about 2/3 of the group I am having trouble memorizing it. Maestro will not be pleased.

Still waiting for the rain. But it's time for sleep now. Perhaps it will come tomorrow.

I got up this morning, all ready to face another weekend day at the office. I was going to get in early, too, so that I wouldn't be stuck working late. Working on the weekend is kinda crappy, but I was all prepared to be productive and get through enough that Monday and Tuesday wouldn't be as bad as they're shaping up to be.

I sat down at my desktop to check the weather, and was treated to screen filled with partial windows...some had menus and some didn't, some had words and no images, and others had images and random lines in place of the words. The recipe that I opened up to make for my dinner had the picture of the dish and a bunch of random characters, mostly squares, where the words should have been. And it was running ridiculously slow. I rebooted. Same issues. I rebooted again. Fewer of the same issues, but still running like a turtle though peanut butter.

Fuming, I went into the kitchen, started my crock pot dinner from memory, and started searching for docking stations compatible with my laptop so that I could prepare for what felt like the inevitable demise of my desktop. I mean, I don't really need two machines.  A docking station would let me easily connect my laptop to the big pretty monitor and the full-sized keyboard when I felt like working/writing in my office (and to the plethora of other devices like my card reader, ipod, scanner, and printer when necessary), and when I wanted to be somewhere else, I could just pop it free and go. Perfect solution, right?

Wrong.

Fuming exploded into outright livid when I couldn't find a single reference to anything other than a battery for my Vaio. So, instead of getting to work at 9:30, I got there at 1, stayed until 7, grocery shopped until 7:45 and made it home in time to eat something before my scattered brain sent my tired body into shutdown mode. I was wandering through the aisles talking to myself. People were giving me funny looks. It wasn't pretty.

The desktop is behaving a bit better now, though I don't understand why. I downloaded the newest version of Norton 360 and got it set up and running...maybe that helped, though the lack of viruses or operational issues turned up by the scans fail to reveal how. I have a sinking feeling that this is far from my last scare , and suspect that it may not bonce back next time.

Anyone have any recommendations on where I can find accessories for a 3- or 4-year old Sony Vaio Model PCG-7M1L?

Ever have days where you feel more like yourself than usual? Today was like that for me. I'm not sure if it was the time out in the sun, the productive time spent at the office, or the evening of dancing and good company. Maybe it was the balance of having all three. Whatever spurred the change,  I felt like a whole person today and not just the shadow of who I want to be. I hope I can figure out how to hold onto it.

It's funny...I call this space "Eclectic Musings," yet I never actually spend much time "musing" while here. I'm not certain why, really.

That isn't entirely true.

I do know why. Well, now I do...I didn't five hours ago. My friend C blogs regularly, yet she won't let anyone she knows in person read it. I guess it is a sort of therapy for her. She loves the freedom that anonymity provides and thrives on the thoughts that strangers give her on some of the more personal aspects of her life. I can understand why she's so hooked on it. When tenner posted his "confession" entry last month (or was it two months ago?) I actually shared something that I've been keeping to myself for a very long time (anonymously, of course) in the hope that doing so would relieve the suffocation that had jumped from merely distracting to crushing in a matter of weeks. It did help...more than I really want to admit.

I digress, as usual. But I have a point...really, I do. I promise. Maybe.

We were talking about blogging over dinner, and I tossed out that I was never sure what to say when I feel like blogging. M looked at straight at me and said my internal editor was the source of my trouble and that I had to put her in her place. I  sat back in my chair for a moment, and in that heartbeat realized that she was 100% right. My internal editor continuously screeches that  nothing  I write is worth the virtual (and sometimes actual) paper it is written on. And, of course, I believe her. I never realized just how far her influence had spread into the other parts of my life...my work, my thoughts...my feelings. So this entry is an experiment...a "can I write down what is in my head without sanitizing the meaning out of it or deleting it" sort of experiment.

Part of the experiment should probably focus on how to make said musings shorter.