Tuesday, 02 July 2002

Busy. Very, very busy at the day job. The result is that I'm tired and grumpy when I get home. I'm in no mood to write. I'm in no mood to do anything, in fact, more challenging than watch a video. At that, I'm prefering videos that I've seen before. On top of everything else, I'm not sleeping well. It's just job-related anxiety, but the mere fact that it's not something more serious than that doesn't change the fact that I don't function well if I don't sleep well.

Anyhow, the lack of journal entries here lately have just been to avoid droning on and on about how I'm unhappy and not writing and unhappy about the fact that I'm not writing.

I made some good progress today at work, though. I've been working on something new and using tools I haven't used before, and all my estimates about how long things will take have been horribly over-optimistic, because I'm not allowing enough time to learn how to use the tools. But today I finally made some real headway, so I can begin to imagine there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

Well, enough of that.

Today I finally did do a bit of writing, sort of. I made revisions on my mini- and micro- stories and then submitted them to the-phone-book.com. It's not much, but it's better than sitting in front of the TV.

The writing group met Sunday. One of our members had to take a break from the group due to excessive summertime busy-ness. Another was away for this meeting. So there were just three of us. It was still a good meeting, although I like it better when there's five or six.

The Clarion reunion is in just a little over two weeks. That'll be fun.

Saturday Jackie went to the Vermillion county fair to do a spinning demonstration at the llama show. There were about six spinners altogether. I went along as official photographer. I also learned how to spin.

I sort of already knew how to spin. All the time Jackie was learning how to spin, and all the time since then that she's been working on perfecting her skill and occasionally teaching it to others, it has been a topic conversation. So, I had a good idea of the theory. In addition, I've watched her spin, so I have a good idea of what it looks like when it's done right. So, this time I just went ahead and did it. It worked okay. My yarn was all slubby, full of bits that were much thicker than others. But not much more so than some specialty yarns are on purpose. Anyway, it was fun.

Steve is traveling without access to email. Without messages from him, the spam-to-content ratio in my inbox is higher than ever.