I expect to spend 80% of the next nine days in this chair, and if I have to leave the house more than, oh, four times I will be upset.
Too tired to think right now; reg’lar bloggery resumes tomorrow.
Tag: spring break
Title!
This isn’t going to be a post about Avengers: Endgame— it’s not going to be a post about much of anything, to be completely honest– but I wanted to take a second and point out that Thor has two different colored eyes now, which I think is a nice touch. I had figured that Rocket giving him the prosthetic eye in Infinity War was a way to keep all of Chris Hemsworth’s(*) pretty face on screen at once and that they’d just decided not to worry about him losing an eye in Thor: Ragnarok, but apparently they haven’t completely forgotten about it.
I want lots of jokes from Rocket about stealing body parts in Endgame.
I haven’t mentioned it, but I’ve actually been on Sorta Spring Break for the last two days, the first two days of my son’s Spring Break, which I had to take off because as usual neither my wife nor I are very bright and we failed to secure alternate childcare. I’m back to work Wednesday through Friday and then I get my own Spring Break, and I’ll have him with me for all of that. Thus far, Spring Break 2019 has been … uninspiring. There’s been lots of The Amazing Adventures of Gumball and video games. We might go to the zoo a couple of times next week, which will be about as exciting as it gets. There will be reading; I haven’t read enough books in March so I need to get a good head start on April. Maybe even some writing if I get completely crazy, but don’t hold your breath.
There’s an actual post– with content! up on Patreon, for those of you for whom that is significant. Normally this is the part where I’d recommend you join us over there, but I haven’t been updating it much lately and frankly feel like I’ve been mistreating my Patrons. But there’s something new over there, and there will be at least two more posts before March is over. So if you’re already a Patron, go check that out, and maybe comment if the mood strikes you, and if you’re not … well, $2 a month still gets you a whole book. That’s not nothing, right?
(*) Whose name I originally rendered as “Hemingsworth,” because my brain’s a touch on the melty side at the moment, and which my spell checker caught and properly corrected. Which, honestly, weirds me out a bit.
#WeekendCoffeeShare: Spring Break Edition
If– if— we were having coffee, I would be ever so glad to be having coffee with you. So. Very. Glad. Because, presumably, having a weekend cup of coffee would mean that I was out in public and having a Conversation with an Adult, which is a thing that has been incredibly rare lately. Don’t get me wrong– I love my wife and my parents, but other than the three of them I think the last time I had a conversation with another grown-up who wasn’t some sort of employee at a place where I was buying something was last Saturday. If I restrict it to specifically social settings, I might have to go back to C2E2, which was, what, two weeks ago?
In other news, I’ve survived the first week of my son’s Spring Break, and there’s another week to go, and then a four-day period where my wife is in Boston for work stuff and I don’t even have her around. I’ve never been to Boston, and I’m insanely jealous. If I’m still remotely human come April 13, I want some sort of award. Also, I have jury duty on the 12th. So … yeah.
Anyway. Have you been watching Daredevil? I’ve liked the second season a hell of a lot more than the first, mostly because replacing the show’s terrible rendition of the Kingpin with Elektra and the Punisher has been an impressive upgrade. I won’t spoil anything just yet, but I am very much in the minority in that I think D’Onofrio’s portrayal of the Kingpin was/is awful, and the less of him around the better. We’ve watched through to the final episode, which we’ll watch tonight, and then I somehow have to spend the next 24 hours avoiding Walking Dead spoilers until we can watch the finale of that Monday night.
I’m showing signs of finally moving out of the Lexapro haze, too, which is good; I’m currently about six days ahead on the A to Z Challenge, and I hope to get much farther ahead today. It’s been about a month since I started taking it, which is supposedly about as long as you need to get used to the side effects. I’m very ready to be done with being unmotivated and exhausted all the time, so that’s all sorts of good news.
So, yeah. That’s me. How’re you?
Oh right this needs a title
So far, Spring Break has consisted of a lot of Transformers cartoons interspersed with occasional attempts to teach the boy to read and preparing a neverending succession of grilled cheese sandwiches. He’s actually getting pretty decent with a list of basic sight words; we’ll see if I can get him up to Dostoyevsky in the week and a half remaining before school starts again. Probably not, but goals are a good thing.
Outside of that and stressing the fuck out about the job market, though, there’s not been much else. I’m growing rather unpleasantly tired of my own bullshit, and am in that stage of bored where I can think of a dozen things I ought to be doing (not least among which would be getting something done on the A to Z challenge, which starts Friday) but being so unmotivated that I’m simply noting that they’re still out there and moving on with continuing to do not a whole lot. Last year my A to Z posts were completely done by now. I have them all scheduled but not a single one written yet.
I am sure that this is at least as exciting to read about as it is to live through.
I have just noticed that the keyboard in that picture is facing the wrong way, and it’s really getting on my nerves.
…yeah, that’s what I’ve got. Gonna take the boy to the comic shop and maybe try to get a short story finished this afternoon. We’ll see.
SPRRIIIING BREEEAAAAAAAAAAAK!!!!!
Is it a sign of something wrong with me that I Google the words “spring break” to find an image for this post and the first thing to come to mind is Jesus Christ, am I glad I never had anything to do with that? Because that’s totally what just happened.
Anyway: I’m unemployed, so depending on how you chose to look at it I either don’t get a Spring Break or every day in March and April is Spring Break.
The boy does, though. In fact, he gets two weeks somehow, the longest Spring Break I’ve ever heard of. So my current jobless status actually kinda works out for us, since the next two weeks can be Daddy Time and we don’t have to scramble to figure out what to do with him.
So far, after three hours of Spring Break, he has built a fort out of couch cushions and I have taken a shower. So we’re living it up over here.
Anybody want to give any suggestions for what to do with a four-year-old for the next two weeks? Other than mainline superhero cartoons, I mean.
In case it’s not perfectly clear already …
I already have a post scheduled for every day in April. I have an immensity of work to do this week, not the least of which is getting Sanctum ready as both an ebook and a print book by the end of Spring Break. That’s a job. A jorb, even.
Point is, while I’ll still be around, I’m not going to be hurting myself to come up with topics. There are gonna be days the A to Z post is the only one. If you need something to read, can I recommend Skylights? I dropped the price yesterday, so it’s $2.99 now.
I will return in earnest once the book is put to bed.
WOO!
Spring Break, motherfuckers.
So … uh … yeah. That’s what I’ve got. That’s my party moment, right there. I managed, miraculously, to get my desk entirely cleared before leaving work today, so I’ve got nothing hanging over my head from school other than some light filing when I get back. That’s exciting.
I have a crapton of stuff that I either need to do or really ought to do over the break. The bathroom needs finishing, and I’ve got my first signing coming very soon after the break ends, and I’m committed to doing it right, so I’ve got a lot of promotional material to create and/or order between now and then and basically all of it has to be done over the next week. Plus I need to get the final version of the book out to my betas so there’s at least a chance of some reviews being ready on the 28th.
What I really want to do is spend the next week playing video games. I’ve got Pillars of Eternity on my computer already, and I’ve been playing it in terribly small bits over the week or so since I downloaded it. I loved the old Baldur’s Gate games, and it feels like a more than worthy update to the playstyle. I should have some time over the next week to put a couple of real sessions into it, not just 20-minute chunks, and I’m looking forward to it.
Also, I really want to buy Bloodborne, which would be an incredibly stupid idea, because I already have one video game to play as is and oh also it’s supposed to be really hard and I will be terrible at it and hate it and stop playing after a couple of hours and I will have wasted sixty bucks. The fact that I know this and I’m still fighting off the urge to go buy it right now indicates a very real problem with my mental health.
How’re you?
In which I have no idea where the time went
Lessee.
I didn’t get the DC stories written down fast enough; the whole weekend is starting to blur together already and I feel like I should have gotten at least two or three more decent blog posts out of it before that happened. All told, it went exceptionally well; the last time I went to DC I got home ready to 1) never talk to anyone on the trip ever again and 2) quit teaching as soon as humanly possible; this trip was easily the best one I’ve ever taken. Any of the snafus or setbacks that happened weren’t due to the kids and got resolved easily (worst problem: we rear-ended another car while merging from a highway, one of those “technically the driver’s fault, but everyone blames the dude who slammed on his brakes” types of situations) and two of the stops weren’t what I wanted from them. I’ve already posted about the fiasco that was Ford’s Theatre; the other was the National Zoo, which does not appear to actually contain or feature any animals. We were there for an hour and a half; most of my kids did not see any animal more exotic than a squirrel. I think they have a giant elephant ass on a stick that they move back and forth from the inside pen to the outside pen periodically to fool people into thinking there’s an elephant; the entire rest of the zoo is an elaborate piece of performance art.
Other than that? The Jefferson Memorial at 7:00 in the morning when you’re the only people there is awesome. The Iwo Jima memorial at 5:00 in the morning, likewise. I got to see the FDR memorial in daylight for the first time. We managed to accidentally find some parts of Mount Vernon I’d never seen before, including a place to take a cart ride behind some huge draft horses that was more fun than it had any right to be. It was a good trip.
Since I got home, I’ve mostly been laying on the couch and moaning. I have to get some work done today and tomorrow (and I have to go to OtherJob in…damn, an hour and a half, and it’s nice outside so we’re going to be busy) so tomorrow is either going to be hella productive and end with me feeling good about the world or be a nightmare of stress and kvetching and Sundaying. Who knows? We can all look forward to it.
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