Champagne and Socks

Twelfth Planet Press will be closed to submissions for the rest of the year so that we can focus on the Twelve Planets collection series as well as catching up on our backlog of submissions.

Last Sunday night, C and I went with my uncle to see Wicked. We booked the tickets like 6 months ago and at the time, I was all, “You sure? That’s like soooo far in the future.” And C said, “We’ll still be together in June.” And so we are. In fact, I had spent the weekend manically packing up my entire house. He spent it studying for an exam, among other things. And then, since his birthday was Monday (and Tuesday his exam), he also fitted in some family birthday things. So it was that I rushed to Wicked running very late, having gotten caught up trying to get everything done for the movers first thing Monday, to find C and my uncle mingling with C’s family, waiting for me. And I didn’t even notice who everyone was, such was I so frazzled. Guess that’s one introduction done.

And so we went inside and watched the musical. I’ll be honest, I thought it was kinda meh. And having just seen Cats for the first time last year and also thinking it “meh”, I’m starting to get depressed by contemorary musicals. They’re just not … good. I found the plot of Wicked to be thin on the ground and not worthy of two freaking Acts. There were only two songs I actually thought were good, and memorable, and not just dialogue set to very ordinary and not at all unique music. I thought there was a lot that was derivative of Legally Blonde, among other works. I got a bit bored.

BUT! I loved the costuming. That was fantastic. The staging was also outstanding. The Emerald City bits were awesome. And the thing that in the end sold the whole experience for me, only hit me in the curtain call, when the two leads came out for their bow and I realised the two leads were female. And that I can’t remember the last time I saw two women come out like that (I guess probably Chicago?). Anyway, it’s not often that the leads are both female and for that I did cheer. And you know, have to acknowledge that the whole show is about two women and their relationship. And that’s a pretty cool thing.

Yesterday I was at a training thing and I learned that many of the remnant, isolated portions of vegetation of extreme conservation importance that remain on private land here do so as a result of farmers’ wives. As in, they forbade their husbands to clear them (and up to like 100 years ago) – “if I come back from the shops and you’ve bulldozed that, I’m leaving.”

Grassroots activism.

EPISODE 35

In which “best” becomes “superior,” Pottermore is Pottermeh, one of us wins all the awards, and we visit/revisit classic non-hard works of SF and Fantasy by Bujold, Willis and Pratchett (with bonus Russian fairytales by Valente).

News

Pottermore announcement made during our podcast…

Theodore Sturgeon finalists

David Gemmell Awards…

NatCon professional guests for next year are Kelly Link and Alison Goodman.

Chronos Awards

Sidewise Awards finalists

Translation Awards winners

Stoker Awards announced

Coode Street Horror Special with Stoker winners Datlow & Straub

Gender Spotting Tool – Naff.

What Culture Have we Consumed?

Alisa: Connie Willis’ Passage in progress, the next 3 Twelve Planets.
Alex: so much Bujold (Cordelia’s Honor and Young Miles omnibuses… omnibi… whatever, Fly by Night, Frances Hardinge, Red Glove, Holly Black. Series 2 of V (reboot)
Tansy: Deathless, Catherynne Valente; I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett; Wyrd Sisters audiobook, Terry Pratchett/Celia Imrie.

Next Fortnight: Galactic Suburbia’s Spoilerific Book Club Presents: Joanna Russ. Reading How to Suppress Women’s Writing, The Female Man, “When It Changed.”

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

Grab it from iTunes, by direct download or stream it on the site.

For the next few episodes we’ve moved the recording night of Galactic Suburbia because we have puppy classes on Wednesday nights.

I love that C is so organised and diligent about such things, because I am not. But he determined that we would do such things as attending puppy school, and we should, I just would not have gotten around to it. But the vet is a 2 minute walk from our house and the classes are 7pm on a Wednesday night so it didn’t seem that bad. We had to wait a few weeks for the next class, which started last night, so Sasha is the oldest puppy there, at 14 weeks. Most of the puppies are 9.5 weeks.

I have to admit to stressing out a little before going. Would I do alright? I hate being judged and made to do things in front of everyone else, and then being corrected etc. I have no idea how I did ballet for so long, given that. But then I realised, the worst thing is we fail the 4 week class. So what?

It turned out to be a hilariously fun time! There are 5 puppies in the class, none the same breed or cross. There’s a mix of people – two women came by themselves. Two more brought a child with them. And C and I went with Sashie. I always thought that mothers’ group sounded like a hideous thing – being forced to have to socialise with people simply for being at the same place at the same time. (I’ve had previous hideous experience – oh look, you’re all wives/girlfriends of guys who have a sport in common, here, sit together for two hours, you’ll get along. Yeah, I mostly don’t have things in common with random people I am thrust with.) BUT! Now I get the whole mother’s group thing – going through the same experience at about the same time is enough. It was such a relief to find 4 other people who knew exactly what it’s like to have a puppy, right now, today. We’re all wanting to be able to get out of the classes the same thing. And two of the owners had lost dogs at about the time we lost Benji. So, we’re in this together.

The dog trainer is a vet nurse. And I think she’s really great. She loves dogs. She has trained a lot of puppies. She makes it really clear what and why you are doing things. And how to get a puppy to do things because OMG they have a short … oooh look a butterfly! *pounce* So there’s Sasha. And then a border collie called Flo, Gizmo the chihuahua shihtzu cross, Ruby the Australia bulldog and Violet the cavoodle.

The best thing I have learned so far is (and its so obvious and you know it, yet mostly you don’t practice it) – better to give praise at the action you want than vague yelling at the behaviour you don’t. Already today, I’ve had several instances where getting the puppy to perform things like answer to his name, has positively gotten him to stop doing things like eating the laptop cable, when repeated yelling and growling and so on for 4 weeks has failed, or succeeded in making it all into a fun game.

The puppies are gorgeous. We learned how to answer to our name, how to sit, how to come, and to look into our eyes. Then the puppies were all asleep after the first 20 minutes. Gosh it’s exhausting being a puppy! Ours embarrassingly did not like one of the treats we were given for the rewards – he kept spitting it out! We did a controlled play time as well – certain dogs invited down to see how they’d interact. Four of the pups were not interested, and a little scared. Gizmo was the only one interested in playing, checking anyone out and in fact did not nap at all. I think he’s hilarious! All the other pups were terrified of Gizmo, though Flo was too polite to object to him sniffing her personals – but she did NOT enjoy it. I thought C was going to burst something he was laughing so hard. Ruby was kinda slightly annoyed at being made to be awake for the whole class, or she would have been annoyed if she could be slightly less mellow.

It was really a very funny evening. We were told that the puppies would probably be more into play time next week. I hope so! I didn’t think that Sasha was that shy. He’s a terror at home! As we were all going in for the class, people with late vet appointments were awwing over the cute little puppies. I think all of us sitting there were thinking, “yeah cute now, not so when waking you up at 4.30 am for a toilet break and then wanting playtime.”

After I blogged how I was feeling (was it last week?), I realised that you tend to be ready to talk about things when you feel like the tide is finally turning. And truthfully, I have been starting to feel like I am dragging my sorry arse up out from the pull of the abyss. Basically I got stuck into actioning my management tools – and they are these tools because they work. And they do. Every time.

I feel better about myself when I feel productive. So when I feel like I’m struggling, one of my personal management tools is to look around and find low hanging fruit to get some quick productivity runs on the board. Things that might be included in this is easy housework – putting on a load of laundry, which leads eventually to getting on top of the laundry. Likewise the dishes. Or clearing off some surfaces and tidying up parts of the house. Or my handbag. Or running a bunch of errands that are easy but I’ve been procrastinating on so they feel so very hard. Answering email. Filing. Etc. Basically, my management tools are all about faking it, til I make it. And this one is about making myself feel like I am useful and achieving things.

So two Sundays ago I was thinking about the last time in my life that I felt like my to do lists were organised and productive and actually felt like they were assisting and not hindering me. It was back when I was in postgrad and a friend of mine and I developed the Red Tick List System. It worked on a monthly timeframe for goal setting and you’d sit down and figure out the big picture goals you wanted to have done by the end of the month. You’d pick say 10 big things. Then you broke each of these down into all the tasks and subtasks that you needed to step through to complete the goal. Sometimes the hardest thing about achieving big goals is seeing the way. Like “write an essay on 19th century italian wines” might actually require you to read up on the subject first. And that requires you to find the reading. And then do it. Etc.  So the sitting down and breaking each largeish goal into the steps to get there is sort of a planning exercise in hiding. When you finish you think “oh look! Now I have a plan!” And then, a broken down list of small tasks (google “19th century italian wines”, go past liquor shop and buy samples, visit library etc etc) become much more enticing to pick off one at a time, especially if you like multitasking as much as I do. But the thing about the Red Tick List System was that for each thing you completed, you got a red tick and then when you hit a certain number of ticks, you got a prize. Oddly. I am all about the rewards (others would say differently about me).

So I decided to bring back the Red Tick List System. But work it on a weekly time frame to start with. And with rewards for 70% completion of list and then full completion of list – a good list will mean you get about 70% of it done so I never really expect to hit 100%, but you never know!

Compiling my list was revealing in and of itself. Firstly I discovered why my lists weren’t working – I had too many! I never referred back to any. I never updated. And I just started new ones. So it took me some time to compile all the to do lists I had floating around, that I could tell. And I decided that the most important thing is not the stationery but the constant consulting and updating and so on. So I just threw everything into a small ring notebook. A different page for different lists – I have Things I want to Do now I don’t have Swancon, Moving House, Crafting, Twelfth Planet Press, Galactic Suburbia etc etc. Anything I want to keep track of gets its own page and a small post it marking it in the book. And one page for the Red Tick List System. And at the end of the week, I transfer what is left over from one week’s to the next and rip out the page. And I constantly consult and update pages and then will rewrite and remove older lists. Keeping the whole thing familiar and current.

I tried to keep it to 10 largesish goals and then a few quick runs on the board like errands etc.

But I really struggled with what the rewards would be. Last time I used things like buying yarn or Body Shop products. I tried to have those on here this time but I don’t know if I just don’t want things like that anymore or if it’s more, moving and seeing all the crap I have makes me reluctant just now to acquire more. I really and truly struggled with rewards (like a $15 reward basically). In the end, I went with coffee. An odd thing but … I discovered my favourite coffee The Five Senses, has a website that you can buy from so I don’t need to wait til I’m up in North Perth next time. And I can finally sort out my coffee issue at work (buying coffee every day at $4 a pop and adding caramel shots to it because the coffee is so foul when we have an espresso machine in our office and if I liked the coffee, I would not add sugar to it. Been meaning to stop being lazy about this for a while.) AND if you check out the site, they have a bunch of awesomely looking blends and single orgins that I don’t think you can buy in the store. And OMG! I fell in love with the Ethiopian – Sidamo Reserve (Ok. fine, its because you can only order it on Tuesdays) AND the cleanskins AND the Single Origin of the Month (Tiger Tiger used to feature these and I loved trying them out when I worked in the city).  AND this is an spoiling myself without it being junk food thing that is perishable and thus not recluttering! It’s a Win Win Win Win.

But see, I’m not that nice to myself. I’m in counselling for that. For four years now. And so I had on my list Pack House. As one item. And there we are in my place on the weekend, madly packing the house, C and I. And he turns to me and says, “How many ticks do we get for this?” (I love that man) and I said, “Well, firstly you don’t get any and secondly, one.” Yup. For three days straight of about 18 to 20 hours of physical labour, and lots of emotional torment, I got one lousy tick for the week. Sigh. I came in 5 ticks short of the reward this week (had to get 19, got 14) but decided to cut myself some slack and get the reward anyway. I’ll report in on the coffee when it arrives! SO EXCITED!

Friends, did I not say last time I moved that I would never ever ever again just pack up all my crap and relocate it? Did I not promise I would go through everything I packed up last time, and sort and cull it before I moved again?

Well. I failed. I just spent the last weekend, with help, madly packing up an entire house, with no sorting, no downsizing, no decluttering. It was the usual madness of rushing to get everything ready for the movers. I ran out of bin space, I could see many many things I actually didn’t need and could part with but I ran out of time.

Sigh.

And so I promise AGAIN to never ever DO THAT again! And yet? Now, after a half day of loading and unloading a truck, wrestling couches in and out of too small doorways. Well, now I am inside this house so … it kinda doesn’t matter til I move again. Oh no! Well, actually this house is smaller than where I have moved from. It has two adults with multiple collecting hobbies. And almost no storage. So I shall have to be very ruthless in coming days/weeks, in order to get my space back to something that is not stressful to me.

I present the before photo, something you might have seen on Hoarders: Buried Alive:

It’s taken me a while to write this post. I’ve been dancing around it. I’ve been struggling with what this space is, what it means and what it represents. And what it’s for. The intention is for this blog to be a more professional voice for me. But what that in itself means, has been something that I’ve been wrestling with – what to talk about here and what not to talk about. What I’ve been really struggling with is whether to talk about here what I am personally going through right now- that I am staring into the abyss, as I call it, and it’s winking back at me.

I wasn’t going to write about it here but for reasons that made me feel ashamed – that talking about depression and other mental illnesses is something to hide, to be ashamed of, that admitting and talking about my personal (sometimes) daily battle might affect my professional business. And maybe it might. But I’m not ashamed and I don’t like the idea that I cannot tell others not to feel ashamed if I won’t similarly talk openly about my own battles and confrontations with the abyss. I’ve been thinking about it all weekend and I feel like, if I am to be judged for my weaknesses, if the fact that I suffer/struggle/battle/manage mental issues will affect how I and my business are perceived, then both should be considered within the whole – my dance with the black dog has been going on for about 8 years now. So … my capacity to achieve, to produce, to create whilst I also dance this dance should speak for itself.

Depression is a symptom of Crohn’s (related to lack of absorption of Vit B etc) and I would have to say that mine probably kicked in around the same time as my Crohn’s surfaced. There were triggering issues in my history that added anxiety to the mix which in turn kickstarted the OCD. I’ve spent a long time fighting this, without drugs, and learning a series of management techniques. My OCD funnily enough left the building, mostly, when I headed off to WFC in 2007 (and I knew that I would come home single, and I did). It now is there but in a much less dominating presence all the time but worsens in situations of extreme stress. The depression, well I’d have to say after the first bout, which was hellish, and took a long time and a big fight to come out of, has only really emerged a few times since and never as bad. I never ever want to go back to the place I was in about 2004/2005. And I keep watch carefully on myself for any early warning signs and break out my management tools to bring myself back over the line.

So that’s a big preamble to get to the point, eh? Which is to say, right now, I’d have to say that I’m struggling to keep my head above water. It’s been a while. My counsellor is watching it. And it’s been worse and less worse over the months this year. And yeah. I get where it’s coming from. I talked previously about burnout and I’m well aware of all the things that got me to this point. I’m not sure if it’s partly just total mental exhaustion with no serious break even on the horizon to catch up and chill out. Many others who have been on convention committees have told me much of this is normal, and how they felt (that should really be in the handbook) postcon. And I have a lot of change going on. Change is good. And all. And I *want* to live with C, very much so. Being with him feels so right in the way that being with anyone else has never felt anything but wrong. And he is unbelievably patient and kind and understanding and supportive. I feel like I’m part of a team with him. And for the first time, I don’t feel alone in the world. But still, moving house is one of the most stressful things and I’m still dealing with some things that I’ve been procrastinating on – ticking emotional time bombs from stuff from the ex, mostly. But at the same time as it being really emotionally confronting, there’s also a lot of forcing myself to work through old feelings and put em to bed. So good, and bad.

But mostly at the moment, I’m fighting one day at a time – to get through the day; to do what I need to do; to slough off the stuff that I really don’t need; to survive. I don’t want to slide into the abyss so I’m doing my best to troubleshoot for it. Mostly though, to be honest, I just want to stay in bed and not.

I have a confession to make. I have gotten addicted to the Real Housewives of NYC. I have inhaled three seasons since Friday. I’m buying Bethenny’s book. I’m about to watch Bethenny’s Getting Married, I got this real bad. (C doesn’t mind – there’s no having to share the TV right now!)

I’ve learned some very very interesting things about social behaviour. Maybe I’ll write about it some time.

But I wanted to say, that last night, I knew that C really loved me because whilst we were cleaning the kitchen, he let me tell him all about everyone on the show, who was friends with who, who was fighting with who and what I thought about the whole thing, why I didn’t really think Kelly was crazy etc.

That’s love.

After my whinge yesterday, I should add that solutions do seem to keep presenting themselves. I realised yesterday morning that if I took the train (and bus) to work, I would find 2 new hours in my day for reading. So yesterday I did just that. I had thought that the paid parking at the train station was hourly but when I actually had the will and interest to investigate it, discovered it was $2 for the day. And realised how silly I was to not have looked before – what was the price of two extra hours of reading a day? I happily read a goodly chunk of Connie Willis’ The Passage yesterday. I don’t love public transport. But I think a couple of times a week would really be great and help me find a way to start eating into the huge pile of books to read.

I didn’t train it in today, though

And in all the sorting through craft projects, I found a cross stitch I had been avidly working on like two years ago that I had, for reasons now forgotten, abandoned. I picked it up over the weekend and have been working on it – got my crafting mojo back! It’s not any of the projects I had been working on earlier this year but, I think I’ll take what I can get. It’s a WIP that with a bit of concentration could be easily finished soon. And I think I’m not really into the rest just yet because my craft space hasn’t been set up – still kinda trying to work out where it should be and how I should do it. And I need a tonne of storage which I’m going to think about *later*. I did discover a couple of things about the cross stitch that I think are interesting to observe – I never ever mark up the grid when I sew. Because why? I think because “in case I want to do it again” – as if you ever would!! So. Me two years on is all, “right, let’s get a highlighter and get right in here and see what’s what”. Issue 2, I think I discovered as being maybe a few stray crosses stitched in the wrong place in the background texture. Me two years on is all “it can be finished, or it can be perfect, wing it”. So I’ve been being a bit liberal with which stitches go where and it’s all good. It’s totally fine. And then issue 3 was, I think, that I ran out of one, maybe two of the threads, and/or I used pale grey for pale silver and didn’t know what to do about it. So this one was tricky, for all of an hour or two. Then I remembered I bought in a catalogue on sale once, like 300 different colours of thread. Cause they were cheap. And I’ve been looking at all those shades and rainbow of colours and wondering what in the hell I was going to use them for. Because all my projects (probably 15 years worth) are kits that come with their own colours. Yup. Stashing in the finest of forms. So I wondered if I might be able to match the colour I’d run out of in this 300 options. And you know? Maybe it works, maybe it’s so slightly off you can only tell under brilliant lighting but … it helped me move on from the problem and get the job done.

So at least in two years, I have managed to learn how to maneouver myself out of previous points of project perfection paralysis. And the question now arises – what are the stalling points on the other WIPs? Are they as easily solved? Is it a matter of taking each one and working on it one by one to discover and solve? I guess stay tuned.

As for the book pile. I decided to catalogue in a spreadsheet before they got moved around. And this process highlighted 6 books that didn’t need to be there and so they were removed. Win. And then a few more of the graphic novels that I think I have read (and were there because C was reading them) but I can’t remember,  so they might be quick to get out of the to read pile eventually. And then I sorted the books into variuos categories. Not quite sure what I am going to do with them but I think I’d benefit from mixing up what I read a bit. So I’m reading before bed one short story a night from The Locus Awards Anthology. I’ve been wanting to read it for a while. I also want to work through some great collections I have there. Maybe if I read novels on the train, one punch out short a night before bed might be the right balance (assuming I find time for Last Short Story elsewhere). I’m trying to get into a new bed time routine and this has been good so far – I had to take a break from Joanna Russ for a bit. So last night I read Octavia Butler and the night before Connie Willis. Can’t much complain about the standard

Well they say that moving house is on the top 5 most stressful things you can do in life but ah … yeah, I’m finding moving to be deeply stressful, anxiety-filled and so on. A good friend of mine called Bullshit on my blog of late, and he’s right. I’m only talking surface feelings and whilst they are true and honest, they’re not all of it. Not by a long shot. I got a lot going on. And I still feel quite self conscious [1] about expressing that all to the fullness that I used to do.

So moving house is stressful. It’s a hoarder’s nightmare really. And now the truth about why I was mainlining so many episodes of those shows is out! I promised myself after the last time I moved house, which was so deeply traumatic and stressful that I haven’t been able to even contemplate it til now, that I would slowly go through all my possessions and declutter. So that next time I moved, it would be less stressful. And for periods of time, I did do that. But I had the luxury of space and as long as I couldn’t see things cause they were packed away, I was happy.

But now… now I am moving again and I have to look at things. And I am upset as to why I have so much stuff; why I need to hold onto so much stuff; and why I can’t seem to just part with it now. The other thing is, when you’re living in a place, you have the luxury of not having to deal with something if you don’t want to. You can just put it away for later. And later, you know, you’ll look at it and deal with it. When you move, that “later” becomes “right now”, whether you like it or not.

I imagine this experience is on some spectrum of what it would be like to go into a diagnosed hoarder’s house – the degree of hoarding such that they sleep on the floor by the front door because they physically cannot get further inside their house due to “stuff” – and telling them they have to move. Now! How I feel seems somewhat akin to  the anxiety they experienced at having to face up to what is in their home and make decisions about what they can trash, donate or giveaway. But I’m a typical Pisces – always swimming in opposite directions at the same time. I want to both keep things and be ruthless and throw it all away and have clear spaces, no clutter. And so, my “later” is “now”. And if I had less stuff, this moving would be less prolonged.

Two examples of stressful situations for me this weekend.

(more…)

So, I’m moving house and complaining about how much stuff I have and asking why I have so much stuff. I didn’t think I had that many books (been feeling down about how many books I have) and yet, in moving them – I have a lot of books. So we spent the morning working on culling, packing and moving and then headed past the Planet Books sale. We needed some books on puppy training.

My haul (for a mere $37 – ridiculous!)

– Enchanted Glass by Diana Wynne Jones

– Villette by Charlotte Bronte

– Passage by Connie Willis

– Wizard Squared by K E Mills

– The Margarets by Sheri S Tepper

Now, I’d been starting to think, since I HAVE been reading, that I could justify some book accumulation. Probably not 5 new books though. So am blogging here to remind myself to either finish 5 books and/or remove 5 books from my current collection/to read shelves.

I expected burnout to hit end of April. It’s just the way I am – my business model, as Tansy would put it. I work better under pressure and that’s when I tend to excel, and I give everything I’ve got and then, after that, I’ve got nothing. I usually get sick going into a convention, lose my voice by day 2 or 3 and come home and nurse a bad flu or something for a week or 2. After Natcon in Adelaide, I swear I had Swine Flu. It’s the way I’ve always been, for as long as I can remember.

So it was really weird when I didn’t get sick at the con or in the days after – usually burnout hits just as the pressure finally is off. I wished I’d had a couple of extra days holiday after the convention but I didn’t have the leave to take (I’m still hoping to somehow get to World Fantasy this year and I really really want to have leave to take over Christmas.) As much as I need the time off now, I know I  can’t afford to trade that for time off at Christmas. And the really weird thing is, my long service leave entitlement is kinda just round the corner. It feels weird to have been with this agency this long but, I’m sorta hanging out for it and hoping to make it that far. I have plans for that time, and am hoping I get to have it. We’ll see.

So, what I wasn’t really expecting was this kind of slow burnout rather than the crash and burn. The crash and burn I know how to handle. Take to my bed with the Gilmore Girls and some hot chocolate and just … chill the hell out. And then I’m good. Back to it. This though … this is weird. It feels like a malaise or an apathy or a … a complete lack of energy and a lack in making myself find the energy. I’m still working full time. I’m still working pretty full time on the press – juggling the promotion and marketing of the recent books, readying book 3 for the printer and starting to get stuck into book 4 of the Twelve Planets. And I’m still far behind on the whole TPP to do list to even contemplate thinking the last couple of late nighters I pulled this week have brought me up to speed.

But … I just can’t get enthused. Or energised. Or moving. I haven’t exercised since before Swancon. I’m eating a lot of sugar and chocolate, craving the buzz, I guess. I’m not being super careful with my dos and don’ts for food allergies. I still haven’t managed to make inroads into the gritting my jaw thing. And I have the puppy – so, puppies don’t sleep through the night. I’m not sure I knew that!

Today I got to work, and (societal norms mean that often for me in order to be at work in the times expected, I don’t wake up until I’ve sat at my desk for half an hour or an hour) realised that I felt vile. The first person I spoke to was when I was ordering my coffee and I sounded like I had a head cold. I told her I felt foul this morning and she asked me if i had a headache, that I sounded off this morning. After sitting at my desk for a while, I realised I felt sick and was feeling sicker. I know I can’t work as hard as I was before and expect the physical and mental robustness. I’m burned out. But at the same time, I don’t get the option of … not doing so.

Eventually, my workmates talked me into going home, without take home work, and I did. After a couple of hours of almost no work and a lot of reality TV, I started to feel a little more normal. I’m hoping to get a lot of downtime this long weekend. Of course, I’m also hoping to get more packing and moving done and I’m not currently living in that location so, these things seem at odds. But we’ll see.

The really awful thing is I’ve lost my crafting mojo. I haven’t really worked on any projects since before the con. Normally I find sewing a really good craft for when I am doing fine tuned thinking like line editing and knitting better for project development and reading. But right now, I have no will or interest to do either. In the first place, my hands were really really sore when the change of weather happened and I laid off anything too much (though my mother says knitting kept my grandmother’s fingers limber). But like the rest, above, I just haven’t felt the energy to craft, like I don’t have the creativity in me right now. Burned out and unable to take the stimulation of colours and textures and patterns. Though, at the same time, I’m also doing a lot of project planning, business vision and direction and development. So in some ways, I feel highly creative in that area and not needing the craft. I miss crafting though. I have a sock I am knitting that I pick up and do a row here and there but I really miss the intensive crafting. And worse, I’ve replaced that time with recreation reading. And I’m really scared that it’s a one or the other type scenario.