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Ten good things!
Oct. 6th, 2014 08:56 pm1. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH (Zen Cho has released Spirits Abroad as an ebook WITH A COVER BY MIA, and it is $2.99 for the first week with prices increasing thereafter; Zen is absolutely one of my favourite writers and I expect this to be one of my Hugo nominations, one way or another)
2. The internet is shot all to hell, but I'm curled up on the sofa next to my housemate [or was at time of writing --ed]; she's coding and I'm occasionally managing to remember useful bits of python syntax, and I'm attempting to get VP work done in the brief spurts of uptime. THIS IS HARDER THAN IT SHOULD BE UGH but I am getting things done.
3. Bread is on; washing-up is largely done; housemate is Making Dinner Happen (I was going to heat up leftovers and then had a strop about them not really existing any more); cake for tomorrow is made.
4. I have done a very quick editing job on the photos I took at Kew yesterday and will upload them... later. And then you will have pictures of an overenthusiastic crocus, a stripy cactus, and a shot of a set of lily pads with which I am very pleased. I think I am beginning to get the hang of my point-and-shoot digicam.
5. I continue to enjoy Amitav Ghosh's writing, though he also continues to feel like very slow going for me - for all I find them engaging and interesting and enjoyable, they are also very densely written and all come in at about 400 pages and are completely unapologetic about the fact that they're Not For Me, and while it is getting easier to read them I'm still extremely aware that there's an awful lot of context I am Not Getting. But! I am enjoying the current one, even if it is inevitably going to take a back seat when Ancillary Sword comes out tomorrow, and even if I am also flailingly excited about Spirits Abroad.
6. ... the house smells of baking bread and warm carrot cake. It is very nice. I feel pleasantly as though I have Achieved Things.
7. Which I was struggling to manage at work, even though I got both OSes up-to-date, installed Office on the Windows partition, and managed to persuade the Debian install to let me, like, mount external drives and shut down and other advanced and fancy stuff like that. In addition to having welcomed some of the new batch of PhD students and shown them around this morning. (I think partly I'm deeply frustrated about this because I was really wanting to get a particular piece of lab work done today, but the air handling unit was out which meant no entering the lab, and it's not going to get repaired til tomorrow morning earliest, which sets this particular experimental stage back by another week, sulk sulk sulk, and more to the point the delay makes the next step actively more dangerous - I've been refluxing my samples in conc HF at 140degC since Friday night; two days is a reasonable time to leave them, but the longer you abandon them to their own devices the more likely it is that you'll get droplets of HF trapped in the screw threads of the beakers they're in, which in turn makes opening the beakers up again more risky - but so it goes.)
8. I left work such that I was heading west during most of the sunset - the advantages of living due west of work! - and it was glorious.
9. ... and in terms of Good Deeds Of The Day, I actually (somewhat unusually) had my lanyard + ID on and visible on the bus this morning. I was staring into space, as you do, when the kid sat opposite me went "... um um um you are ESE right? ... can you tell me where G38 is?" because he had enterprisingly spotted that it was an Imperial lanyard, then read my department off the card. He's a new PhD student and was fretting about where it was he was aiming for, and as it happened it was exactly the same place as me because he was rocking up to be shown around and I was rocking up to show people around, and I think it all worked quite well. And then on the way home aunty decided I looked like a nice approachable young thing and very sweetly asked me if I knew how to get to such-and-such a street, and I went "yes that is where I live look I will take you there" and made polite small talk for the 5 minutes it took us to get to the point of parting ways again. LOOK AT ME SUCCESSFULLY EMULATING HUMAN INTERACTION.
10. I have made some progress on Sekrit Essay Wot Needs Writing. I begin to have a feel for the shape of it; I am going to bash out the rest of an outline, I think, then sleep. (Topic of at least one upcoming post: my creative challenge to myself for next year, a la this year's a year in poems. I am mulling over several options.)
2. The internet is shot all to hell, but I'm curled up on the sofa next to my housemate [or was at time of writing --ed]; she's coding and I'm occasionally managing to remember useful bits of python syntax, and I'm attempting to get VP work done in the brief spurts of uptime. THIS IS HARDER THAN IT SHOULD BE UGH but I am getting things done.
3. Bread is on; washing-up is largely done; housemate is Making Dinner Happen (I was going to heat up leftovers and then had a strop about them not really existing any more); cake for tomorrow is made.
4. I have done a very quick editing job on the photos I took at Kew yesterday and will upload them... later. And then you will have pictures of an overenthusiastic crocus, a stripy cactus, and a shot of a set of lily pads with which I am very pleased. I think I am beginning to get the hang of my point-and-shoot digicam.
5. I continue to enjoy Amitav Ghosh's writing, though he also continues to feel like very slow going for me - for all I find them engaging and interesting and enjoyable, they are also very densely written and all come in at about 400 pages and are completely unapologetic about the fact that they're Not For Me, and while it is getting easier to read them I'm still extremely aware that there's an awful lot of context I am Not Getting. But! I am enjoying the current one, even if it is inevitably going to take a back seat when Ancillary Sword comes out tomorrow, and even if I am also flailingly excited about Spirits Abroad.
6. ... the house smells of baking bread and warm carrot cake. It is very nice. I feel pleasantly as though I have Achieved Things.
7. Which I was struggling to manage at work, even though I got both OSes up-to-date, installed Office on the Windows partition, and managed to persuade the Debian install to let me, like, mount external drives and shut down and other advanced and fancy stuff like that. In addition to having welcomed some of the new batch of PhD students and shown them around this morning. (I think partly I'm deeply frustrated about this because I was really wanting to get a particular piece of lab work done today, but the air handling unit was out which meant no entering the lab, and it's not going to get repaired til tomorrow morning earliest, which sets this particular experimental stage back by another week, sulk sulk sulk, and more to the point the delay makes the next step actively more dangerous - I've been refluxing my samples in conc HF at 140degC since Friday night; two days is a reasonable time to leave them, but the longer you abandon them to their own devices the more likely it is that you'll get droplets of HF trapped in the screw threads of the beakers they're in, which in turn makes opening the beakers up again more risky - but so it goes.)
8. I left work such that I was heading west during most of the sunset - the advantages of living due west of work! - and it was glorious.
9. ... and in terms of Good Deeds Of The Day, I actually (somewhat unusually) had my lanyard + ID on and visible on the bus this morning. I was staring into space, as you do, when the kid sat opposite me went "... um um um you are ESE right? ... can you tell me where G38 is?" because he had enterprisingly spotted that it was an Imperial lanyard, then read my department off the card. He's a new PhD student and was fretting about where it was he was aiming for, and as it happened it was exactly the same place as me because he was rocking up to be shown around and I was rocking up to show people around, and I think it all worked quite well. And then on the way home aunty decided I looked like a nice approachable young thing and very sweetly asked me if I knew how to get to such-and-such a street, and I went "yes that is where I live look I will take you there" and made polite small talk for the 5 minutes it took us to get to the point of parting ways again. LOOK AT ME SUCCESSFULLY EMULATING HUMAN INTERACTION.
10. I have made some progress on Sekrit Essay Wot Needs Writing. I begin to have a feel for the shape of it; I am going to bash out the rest of an outline, I think, then sleep. (Topic of at least one upcoming post: my creative challenge to myself for next year, a la this year's a year in poems. I am mulling over several options.)