Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I have put date labels on more of my old journals, again rereading only when necessary to identify the year. This batch was easier than the previous because I was had consistent about putting the full date on the first entry in most of them (not all). I stopped after half a dozen because I was making scribal errors (1 for 9, - for / in this case), paced a little, and then realized "I'm waiting for something with an unknown time, about which I can do nothing*. Of course I'm antsy." I'm not good at waiting in general, and not knowing how long makes it worse.

I'd been thinking that I was putting a lot less in the paper journals because much of it is going here, but now I'm wondering if I was recording more detail. A piece of that may be more travel, or rather more varied/new-to-me travel. (I used a separate notebook for my first trip to England, for my mother's wedding, and one for the 1995 Scottish Worldcon, but I think part of the motivation there was worry about losing a half-filled journal.)

I didn't do a gym post Thursday, but I did go to the gym. I did a few minutes of cardio, and then a bunch of stuff with Emilie. Apparently chatting about how people deal with earthquakes stopped the muscles at the back of my head and neck from tensing up during ab work. I also did well on the balance things, and my knees felt better after the workout than they had on the way from work to the N train, despite four flights of stairs, squats, and calf raises.

*Or, rather, anything I need to do before the storm, anything useful I can sensibly do connected to it, I have already done.

I think I lost my hat in the gym locker room. If so, there's a slight chance that someone will turn it in; I will check on Monday.

Other than that, I had an okay workout, despite some creaky joints, especially the knees and shoulders. (I have switched back to mousing right-handed at work, to give my left shoulder and hand, especially fingers, a bit of a break.) Emilie thinks the joint thing is at least partly weather-related, which is possible.

( details, such as I remember )

cattitude, adrian_turtle, and I are hanging out together in Arlington. Cattitude and I got here Wednesday evening (the most exciting aspect of the train journey was probably that I dropped and had to retrieve a Scrabble tile), and the three of us cooked together yesterday. We got a little frantic near the end, and the sweet potatoes didn't come out well, but that was okay. We had lots of other good things to eat, and more of everything than we could eat. It will be turkey sandwiches with cranberry-orange relish for dinner in a little while. The apple pie was a failure, largely because the commercial pie crust Adrian picked up was over-salty, so we threw it away, cut up more apples, and made an apple crisp, which was quite good.

This morning we slept in a bit (by my standards, past 8 counts; I woke Adrian about 9:30 because we had plans). Down to Harvard Square for pho and tea (both to drink and to restock Adrian's kitchen) and then we went to the Gardner Museum, which Cattitude's father recommended strongly over the telephone yesterday. It is a very dense and jumbled collection, in a very nice building with an impressive atrium that visitors aren't allowed to enter, only look at. I mostly found myself looking at ancient statues, and at bits of furniture with mother-of-pearl inlays, ceramics, and small silver objects, rather than paintings, but one of the paintings that did catch my eye is labeled as a Rembrandt self-portrait. (I put it that way because there is controversy over the attribution of many paintings that are either by Rembrandt or his students.) The light and dark caught my eye, and my thought was "student of Rembrandt," because mature Rembrandts tend to be darker than this, but if it's by him, he painted it at 23.

We ran out of museum energy well before they ran out of museum. I want to go back sometime on a sunnier day, because there is very little artificial light in there, and lots of large windows. (This is a reasonable choice if they're worried about UV damaging the paintings.)

From there, we went to Central Square, so Cattitude could visit Pandemonium and I could go to the gym. It was 4 or so by the time we got there, and I was more tired than I'd planned on, so it was a brief workout, but worth it. We rendezvous'd at Toscanini's, where I had a cup of tea (caffeine matters) and then a hot fudge sundae. They had gotten there slightly before me, so were already drinking their hot beverages when I arrived (and started their ice cream sooner).

As I type this, they're in the kitchen discussing how to improve stove and oven design.

( gym numbers )

I was a little hesitant about working out this evening, but cattitude pointed out that I hadn't been to the gym in a little while, and that the heavy pieces of metal were calling my name. So I went. I did some cardio and a bunch of weight work, interrupted briefly by banging the back of my head on a handle. I stopped, got an ice pack, applied it for a few minutes, and went on with the workout: it didn't feel remotely like the sort of head injury people worry about, I just wanted to avoid or minimize bruising.

( boring details cut )

As some of you know, I took a deep breath a few days ago and sent off, along with my most recent invoice for freelance proofreading, a cover note saying that as of April 1, I was raising my freelance rate to $22/hour. (They'd been getting $18/hour for a long time--long enough that this is slightly over cumulative inflation for the period in question.) Yesterday I got back a note saying that this rate was fine, complimenting me on the quality of my work, and adding that they're going back to ten issues/year, which will mean a bit more work. That part will make more difference to the total income involved than the rate increase: I do seven or eight hours of work per issue, and I suspect the client thought both "she does good work" and "we can afford a couple of hundred dollars a year extra here."

In some sense, I should have done this sooner. But my own shyness about asking for things aside, it was easier to ask now, when we could have afforded for me to lose this gig, than when the $140 or so a month was a significant piece of the household budget.

( I also went to the gym yesterday )

Today was my first day on staff at Triumph (rather than through the temp agency). About 20 minutes after I arrived, one of my coworkers said she was looking for "a burly employee." I asked what she needed done. She asked if I was an employee, and I said "as of about half an hour ago." Then she asked me to take a (light-weight) side table down from the high place it had been stashed for the weekend carpet cleaning. [She believes, I think incorrectly, that if a non-employee were injured doing something like that, they wouldn't get worker's comp; hence the "employee" part.]

I got everything packed up to move to my new desk before lunch—and then waited. It eventually transpired that the person who was sitting in my new spot was working on something and didn't have time to move. (I am not convinced.) It had transpired earlier in the day that they hadn't figured out where to move her to before this morning. I am promised that I will have my spot when I arrive tomorrow morning. I had to remind the IT guy that he needs to move my monitor, because they aren't all the same, and I have one of the fancy large ones. The current project is being one more reader to catch any errors in a math book. I've found a few already (well, a few that matter; I also marked a few typos like a duplicate "the" and a stray multiplication sign (something like "a² x b x" instead of "a² x b," but that's not why they're having me take a day and a half out of science editing to do this).

Being staff means they want me there by 9:30, instead of the 9:45-10 that was fine as a temp. (This isn't my boss's policy, or under her control.) I made it in at 9:15 today. The good thing about arriving earlier is it means leaving earlier--and that gets me to the gym when it's less crowded. Tonight's was a good workout.

( numbers )

Today's was mostly an upper-body workout: my hip pain from Sunday was gone when I woke up this morning, but I didn't want to take (too many) chances. ( details )

It seems that if I think I'm going to just do a brief workout, I wind up exercising more than my average. I had a good time. ( details )

cattitude and I went out for sushi tonight. Well, mostly sashimi: we had blue crab sushi as a starter, and then each had a sashimi deluxe platter. I didn't finish mine, but it was nice fish. I realized a couple of days ago, when we were planning this, that the previous two times I'd had sushi recently had been without him--once in Montreal with several cool people, and Wednesday lunch by myself, a three-rolls-for-$9 special at a Chinese and Japanese restaurant near my office.

Work was a bit irritating: too much leaked noise from someone else's headphones, and random chatter. When I got there this morning, one of my coworkers was talking to another about marriage and said that the Bible contained "everything you need to know about how to love your husband." I went and got my tea, and refrained from saying anything on the subject. Though I was tempted to point out that he was taking marriage advice from someone who had no practical experience, and that I don't need a book to tell out how to love cattitude. Most of the other chatter was less irritating, but it just kept coming: this is an effect of people not having a lot of work to do. (The people in question don't do the work I do, so I can't just hand them some of mine.) Steve likes to tell jokes, on the least thread of relevance to whatever else anyone is talking about, even though he acknowledges that the people he's telling them to know most of them, and even though it's very rare for anyone to laugh.

I also spent a chunk of the afternoon wrestling with a bookmap. The task itself is merely tedious. The Excel workbooks they have us use for it are annoying: there's a page where you put in columns of information, consisting of actual page number, displayed number if any (either the same as the actual, or blank), and a column or two saying what's on that page, e.g. "Chapter 3 opener" or "Chapter 3 Review, questions 3-5." There's a second page, derived automatically from the first, that's supposed to display that in a neat table, except sometimes it displays an error instead of the content.

On the positive side, I think I've finally figured out a reasonable thing to do with a particularly annoying piece of reused art-plus-copy, one where it's clear that the person who wrote the text didn't actually look at the graph they claimed to be describing. Or, remotely possible, they gave bad instructions on how to draw the graph to go with their text, and then didn't look at what the art department came up with. (My last attempt at a fix was ugly, but at least not actively false.) If I still like it on Monday, I'll save a copy to my hard disk for next time.

I went to the gym yesterday, and had a good workout, despite having thought on my way in "even if I just do a little cardio and leave, it's better than nothing." ( numbers cut, as usual )

The gym was crowded today. It probably will be for the next few weeks, and then go back to the usual number of people, including some who started this month. I avoided some waiting around for machines by rearranging the order of my exercises, which is not a bad thing--the only fixed points are cardio first, crunches only after a few weight things (for further warmup), and stretches last.

( numbers, cut to avoid boring everyone )