talking – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Let’s be honest: if we were having coffee, we would absolutely be talking about politics in one way or another, but I’m not super interested right now at 10:00 in the AM on a Sunday in talking about politics. I’ve entered the Two Weeks of No Romance period of the year, guys; my wife’s birthday was yesterday, today is Valentine’s day, and this being Leap Year we actually get an anniversary on Feb. 29th this year. We’ve been married 8 years, but this is our 2nd anniversary.

What do we do to celebrate these august (heh) events? Well, nothing, really. My wife and I both agreed that Fat Tony’s death was the best birthday present the universe could possibly have arranged for her, we’re dropping the boy off with his grandparents and going to see Deadpool today, and as for our anniversary … hell, we’ll come up with something. What did I get her? Nothing. We aren’t gift people. (For the record, she didn’t get me anything for my last birthday either, and we didn’t exchange gifts at Christmas.) What will we be getting each other for our anniversary? Chances are nothing, although we’ll certainly go somewhere and do something fun together.

Valentine’s Day? Bah. Neither of us care.

I married correctly, is what I’m saying here.

This was an odd week. I got nothing done on either of the two fiction projects I’m working on during the week, a combination of exhaustion, depression, and what was probably a very mild flu completely taking me off my game from Monday through Thursday. I had my son at home with me all day on Friday and somehow between Friday and yesterday managed to get something like four thousand words done on the new Benevolence Archives novella I’m working on. Sunlight is still a little stalled, but I ought to be able to get back to that this week and I still have high hopes (ha!) of being able to get it done before C2E2.

Note that at one point I wanted it available at C2E2. So that tells you how good I am at keeping on schedule for novel projects, if you weren’t already aware of it. For what it’s worth I love the hell out of the BA story that’s responsible for my recent distraction.

The Walking Dead is back tonight, and I have the boy again tomorrow (he gets a four-day Winter Break weekend) and so somehow I have to manage to avoid spoilers for 24 hours. This will be harder than usual, I think. I’m glad the show’s back, although I think The Expanse may have supplanted it as my current favorite TV show.

(Are you watching The Expanse, fellow coffee-drinker? Or, rather, did you, since the first season’s over? I strongly suggest that you get on that right now.)

So, yeah. That’s where I’m at. How’re you?

If we were having coffee, I’d be pretty happy. I badly want to be having coffee right now, but our coffeepot wants for a vinegaring, and it’s running slllooooowwwwww.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad week. The boy made it through a week of school with no poopery issues. At my school, we had a couple of notable suspensions that kept my afternoon class functional all week, and the first math test of the year went way better than I thought it was going to. My homeroom girls ate the thing alive, and my afternoon class showed a somewhat unexpected haves-and-have-nots pattern, where the kids either did great or very poorly. I was expecting the poorly part, mind you, as they don’t pay attention and there’s way too many special ed kids in there to be able to teach them effectively, but the number of them that did really well was really gratifying. What I didn’t see was kids in the middle. They either missed one or two or they missed eight.

I would probably point at my wrist at some point and remark about how there wasn’t a brand-new Pebble Time Steel on it, because the post office is screwing with me (if you want to take it personallly) or having some issues with their tracking system if you don’t. The tracking on the package is simultaneously insisting both that my watch is in California (where it has been since “shipping” on Tuesday) and that it will arrive yesterday. I’m crossing my fingers that a slew of updates will pop all at once and I’m getting it today. We’ll see.

I am looking forward to being mugged when some nitwit mistakes my $250 red and gold Pebble for a $17,000 Apple Watch, by the way.

And then I’d point out that it’s #SilerSaturday again, and Skylights is free, and since Skylights is my favorite of my books you really ought to download it and give it a read because it’s great.

How’re you?