Writing In Twilight

We've moved, but the whole saga of moving is still going.

On the new home front there's the unpacking, the sorting, the storing, the rearranging.

At the old house front there's the sorting, the selling, the cleaning, the throwing away.

( long rambly things about family and health and stuff )

Things should ease off after the 14th November - the day we hand in the keys to the building corporation who is going to turn our house and the four others in the land parcel into a bajillion apartments that will sell for about half what our house was worth.

Didn't happen.

( moving saga )

The finger is better. I can type without it hurting, although it still feels a bit funny, and I've been substituting my middle and little fingers for my ring instead.

Picture-heavy post about the finger, the house, and a little bit of quilting:

( health )

The finger has come at an annoying time, because we've been packing up the house and it's nowhere near as done as it needs to be. B2's movers are supposed to be next Wednesday (they're not booked yet, because B2 and weekday). Our movers are booked for Saturday week (the 18th).

But the house is coming together!

( house pics )

Writing and quilting have kind of ground to a halt in the face of the house and the health. It's just been too much to deal with all at once, although I am picking up my profic again. I think that once I finish one MS, it'll be easier to just finish another. That was how it went with fanfic: once I'd finished a long story (at the time, 9K was a long story for me), it wasn't so daunting.

This is just an 80K-long story. With my own characters doing their own thing. I can do this.

Got the house rekeyed the day after we got it.

Except now we're doing renovations and the builder was given the key to get in and out of the house. And the various tradies will also be using the key to get in and out for the next three weeks, unsupervised.

So we're going to need to get the house rekeyed again for safety's sake.

*grr*

I'm so annoyed with myself for not thinking it through.

Saturday
8am - get in to work, check all the communications, drink lots of coffee
9am - testing starts
9am-3pm - troubleshoot, troubleshoot, troubleshoot, fix any issues that arise, pacify all clients running around like headless chickens,
4pm - final house inspection
nighttime - collapse

Sunday
8am - get in to work, drink lots of coffee, check on anything that was working yesterday that it's still working today
8am-11am - troubleshoot, fix issues, pacify client
11am-3pm - 2 hockey games
3pm onwards - drinks with the hockey teams at the RSL (maybe)

Monday
8am - get in to work, watch everything go crazy
2pm - settlement happens, get a call saying everything has gone fine (or else that everything has gone pear-shaped)
5pm - finish work, pick up keys to house, go to house, BASK.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, I have to finish this PH and write an assignment.

. rarepairfest due tomorrow - wordcount: 809. It's going to be down to the wire and very terse. And probably not what the recip wanted, but so far as I can tell, the recip didn't leave a letter and I have no idea what they want. Other than the pairings listed.

. marvel_bang has 8K due at the end of the month. Current wordcount: 99. Plot is 80% worked out, but that last 20% with the conflict? Iffy. Very iffy. I may need an alpha willing to discuss plot and ideas via email. PM me if you're up for it. (eta: got someone - thank you!)

. Writing: so hard right now; I have these little "oh, yes, I want to write that" but I have no writing brain. And I want to write this YA series that I've had in my head for years but I feel like I can't. Or that people will look down on me for writing YA. Or that I'm just not good enough. It's all so terrifying and just freezes me.

. Renovations: had the builder around to the place on Monday to talk renovations/repairs, he's supposed to get us a quote later this week. But our changes look doable, the question is the price. We have quite a bit of room in the budget, though, so I'm not worried about the financials. It's just one more thing to think about as we go along.

. Garden planning. I have SO many ideas for the garden. Currently the plans are at about 20 fruit trees of varying types and kinds, with 2-3 chickens in the 5m x 7m backyard. We need a hedge to give us a bit of yard privacy, so I figure we might go with a 'fruit and nut' hedge (avocados, citrus, almonds). There's space for raspberry canes on one side of the lattice next to the driveway, and blackberry brambles on the other. And my sister loves strawberries, so we're going to have as many of them as we can plant! Lots of plans, which are going to have to be implemented in phases.

. Packing and sorting: going to start this weekend. Toss clothing, sort books, probably divest myself of a bunch of fannish stuff that I'm no longer into. Question: should I just throw it out or offer it to other fans? I know I've benefited from a bunch of other people who've passed on their collections to me, and it feels wrong to just toss it out.

. Work: pretty much two weeks to go-live and I'm still working full-time on this project when I thought I'd be only a couple of days a week. Frustrating, because I come in and spend most of the morning writing journal entries and fic, because I'm waiting on people for the first half of the day - and then everyone brings their problems around in the afternoon. Like, at 3:30pm in the afternoon. It's exhausting.

. Sisters: specifically B2. She has a place; there's a deposit down, the bank is speaking with her on Friday, the parents are standing guarantor. And now I'm fretting about her being alone and managing okay. We'll only be 20 mins away, and B1 intends to go and stay over every now and then, but still. Big sister syndrome.

. Quilting: I was quilting madly up until a week ago, and then all my creativity just drained out of me. I'm going to pack up all my fabric this weekend - sort through and box up everything I'm not using, leaving out only the projects that I'm working on right now.

So it's a neat little house on a relatively small plot of land. Not entirely tree-free, but they're not hanging over the house, and are reasonably manageable.



Still having occasional WHAT HAVE WE DONE attacks, but coping.