Tag: schedule

Time is meaningless

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

My schedule lately is messing with my head, and I don’t like it at all. There’s something deeply weird about it being 12:30 and being home from work for the day. Like, I’ll get home, eat some lunch, fiddle around on my phone, read a bit … and then look around and it’s only 2:30 somehow and my wife isn’t even home from work yet, and mentally my day is over, and then it just, like, starts over again somehow? I’m doing this weird thing where I’m somehow packing two days into every day, and as a result I continue to not have the vaguest idea what day of the week it is at any given time. I thought maybe it was just an artifact of my wife being out of town for a week, but it’s still going on on whatever day today is, so clearly it’s gonna stick around for a minute.

Meanwhile, the horror hell storm that we heard about for two straight days appears to have curved south, and so far my social media hasn’t filled up with videos of tornadoes, so hopefully that’s because there hasn’t actually been any destruction and not just that I haven’t heard about it. There was all kinds of chatter about losing tomorrow again because of power issues, but at least as of right now the northern part of the state appears to have been spared. We’ll see what happens. For all I know, the kids will stay home anyway. We’ll see, I guess.

Also, I just found out that this exists, and I’m experiencing Big Weird Feelings right now, so I’m gonna go.

And the livin’ is easy

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

So today’s my first real day of summer vacation, or at least I’m counting it as such– I suppose I could have counted Friday but I had all kinds of shit to do and the boy started his summer camp today so let’s say it was today.

I am, therefore, at the same place I’m always at whenever summertime starts: looking at something like seven or eight weeks off before school starts to ramp up again and pretending that I’m gonna be super efficient with all that extra time and Make My Summer Count.

Let’s take a moment and just contemplate the pure American-ness of being given time off and immediately feeling guilt that I, in the future, won’t spend it working hard enough, and mourn our deeply stupid culture.

But anyway. This is the first summer in a very long time that I haven’t actually had a job. Since the summer The Sanctum of the Sphere was written, I think, and technically I did have a part-time job that summer so this may be the first genuinely job-free summer since early in high school.

So, therefore, knowing that my one real responsibility all summer long during the weekdays will be to get the boy to his summer camp and pick him up a few hours later, I would like to do each or at least most of the following things every day until school starts again, excepting weekends and major holidays:

  • Eat something vaguely resembling breakfast;
  • Write a blog post;
  • Write a minimum of 500 words fiction and preferably 1500;
  • Be showered and dressed by 10 AM, if not before I take the boy to camp;
  • Once a week, at least, put something on Patreon, preferably a microfiction or excerpt from item #3 up there;
  • Play video games (yes, I have to schedule this);
  • Clean and/or organize and/or maintain something;
  • Move around a bit somehow so I don’t gain 300 pounds in the next two months;
  • Spend an hour reading, and time before bed doesn’t count.

So far today I have done all but three of those things, and I’m betting you can guess which three if you’ve been around here for more than a couple of weeks.

I want a new book ready by Kokomo-Con X in October. And unlike my last several I want to launch this one right. That’s only gonna work if I get to work now.

Anybody wanna take bets? Let’s take bets.

On doing nothing of value

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

Stuffed-Animal-VACATION0616I’ve actually stayed pretty busy the last couple of days– I had the classroom portion of my CPR renewal class to attend yesterday and spent most of the rest of the day scanning dozens of documents and uploading them to the Indiana Department of Education’s slow, overworked server so that I can get my teacher licensure renewed.  This is the first time I’ve ever had to do this, as moving to Indiana meant I could let my Illinois licensure expire and my Indiana license was a 10-year.

This doesn’t change anything, mind you; I still have no plans to return to the classroom, but letting my license expire still seemed like a kind of terrible decision anyway.  I’m waiting for a bunch of recalcitrant ducks to get themselves lined up properly at the moment so that I can finalize everything, but in between now and then there is the World Cup to distract me– I’m sitting on my sofa with my laptop and watching soccer right now– so I’m pretty content.

I am taking next week off from work.  I am not doing this for any particular reason other than five things managed to piss me off in the first half hour of my day on Monday and I get two weeks of paid vacation this year.  I looked at the calendar, this upcoming week hadn’t been claimed by anyone yet, and so screw it– mine it was.  I’m actually going to go in for a few minutes Monday morning after dropping the boy off at day care because I have a pre-established appointment that is going to result in a (possibly somewhat sizable) sale, but after that I’m not going back in until the following Monday.  And frankly, with Sunday being Father’s Day, I don’t plan on spending a lot of time at work on Sunday either.  So I basically have a full shift tomorrow, part of one on Sunday, and maybe an hour on Monday and then I’m off for a week.

Plans include Dark Souls, working out a short story that is trying to pound its way out of the inside of my skull, soccer, and … that’s it.  At some point the family and I will go see Incredibles 2, which I’ve been eagerly anticipating for years.  But that’s all.

I’m pretty psyched about it, to be honest.

In which I need my knees broken

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

67788272.jpgSo I just found out this is going to be my schedule in the latter part of March:

Saturday, March 18: Work from 9-8
Sunday, March 19: Work from 12-6
Monday, March 20: Board plane to Denver– which, to make sure we’re clear, is not where my wife or my son live.  Upon leaving plane, attend sales meetings.
Tuesday, March 21-Thursday, March 23:  Lots and lots of sales meetings.  Probably involving some sort of roleplaying, with my days and evenings full of the sort of alpha males who might attend these sorts of things.  I don’t drink and will have nothing in common with any of these people and will probably be having to share a hotel room with someone.
Friday, March 24: Attend morning sales meetings and then fly back home.
Saturday, March 25: Work from 9-8
Sunday, March 26: Work from 12-6.  I have been informed that I will receive my “average daily pay” for the days I’m in Denver, and that if I manage to exceed my average sales for an entire week over the 25th and 26th I will receive a bonus of… wait for it… fifty dollars!
Monday, March 27: Work from 9-8
Tuesday, March 28: Work from 9-8
Wednesday, March 29: Work from 9-2:30.

And then come home and die.

I’m going to need someone to badly injure me on the 19th.  Anybody wanna get in on that? Is there a line already?

In which something’s gotta change

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work4 Comments

This is, I dunno, the third Thursday in a row that I’ve completely wasted.  For several weeks now my Thursdays have gone like this: wake up, take the boy to school, come back home, deliberately go to bed, wake up sometime in the mid-afternoon, and laze about for the rest of the day.

I work three eleven-hour days a week.  Those days I get home, hug my wife and my son, and go to bed.  Maybe I read a bit.  I can’t afford to waste a fourth day doing absolutely nothing when I only have one other day to get shit done during the week.  We’re, like, a foot deep in dog hair around here.  This nonsense has gotta stop.

Obviously, the solution is more caffeine.  Way, way, way more caffeine.

Friday fooferall

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work, Writing2 Comments

tumblr_np8s6k7CdK1sgfpjwo1_500.jpgOkay, that was the last day-of-the-week themed post title, I promise.  The young lady in the picture is the first result when you GIS “fooferall,” I have no idea who she is or why she appears when you do an image search on that word.

Anyway.

A bit of history on this blog: when I initially started this round of blogging I called the place Infinitefreetime because the joke was I had absolutely no free time at all and therefore it was an insanely dumb idea for me to start blogging again.  This was back on Xanga before Xanga killed itself.  Then, a month later, of all the people I knew who had started or committed to blogs during whatever month it was, I was just about the only one left standing.  Despite the last several months of my life, where I have been unemployed and generally able to do whatever the hell I wanted with my days, the title of the blog was meant to be ironic.

After I get back from OtherJob tomorrow night, I will have gone to work six times in the past six days, for the first time in months.  Understand that six-day work weeks have been par for the course for virtually my entire life.  This represents a return to normal, not an exception to the rule.  This is how my life is supposed to work.

My only real problem, at the moment, is that the 9-5 M-F thing is only going to last about another week.  I’m still not entirely sure exactly how much detail I want to reveal about the job, but some bits are going to be unavoidable and “high-end retail” is probably close enough for now.  My schedule is about to get a lot more complicated, as the way things work at this place everybody has at least a couple of days where they are there all goddamn day.  It’s going to affect my blogging schedule one way or another.  I’ve been able to post every day for well over a year by now– I haven’t missed a day since December of 2014.  I will be amazed if that record survives for another three weeks.  I am categorically not planning on abandoning the blog– it’s too important to my plans for the next several years of my life if not longer than that– but it’s likely that my posting frequency will be changing somewhat or, at the very least, I’m going to have to start pre-scheduling a lot of posts.

Bookwise, I have secured a cover artist for Tales of the Benevolence Archives.  I will likely only have one new release this year after initially hoping for two, but I should have that out this fall.  I should have a couple of days each week where I’m home and the boy is at school or day care, so I’ll be able to keep working on those days this week.  But that’s something else to look forward to.  I’m hugely excited about seeing what this artist comes up with.  The main reason?

Brazel, Grond and Rhundi will be on the cover of this one.

Booyah.

Transforming into a Greasy Lump: Progress Report

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy6 Comments

4507847940_4fe3b00225_mSo far, so good, actually.  I think I’ve hit upon a summer schedule, at least for the days when I don’t have the boy around:

  • 6:15 AM: Wake up.
  • 7:30 AM: Be dressed, showered & have boy to day care.
  • 8:30 AM: Breakfast eaten, morning BS procrastination completed.
  • 8:30 AM-12:00 PM:  Morning writing session.  Goal is 2K words on novel; extra time can be used for other writing projects, including blog posts.  (Realistically, a blog post will probably be first, but this is the schedule.)
  • 12:00 PM:  Lunch.
  • 12:30 PM-4:00 PM: Miscellaneous errand-running/reading/cleaning/SOCCER/lazing about time; possibly other projects (SEE: Bathroom, comic books)
  • 4:00 PM:  Wife returns home with boy; rest of evening spent with family.

I pulled this off once; I can do it four times a week for the next eight weeks… right?

Sure.

Today’s agenda

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

20130830-183623.jpgTake shower- go to work- don’t go to jail- give a bunch of math tests- hope the buses all show up on time- go to staff meeting- sit at a desk for 45 minutes checking people into contract ratification meeting- read new proposed teacher contract- listen to presentation about new proposed teacher contract- hopefully vote for new proposed teacher contract- go to birthday dinner for my mom- go home- put boy in bath- put boy to bed- go to bed my damn self.

Note the word “blog” doesn’t show up in there anywhere.

Have a good day; the next time I see you I’ll be asleep.