Listening: the rumble of the tv of the guy downstairs

Reading (perhaps quality): The Group by Mary McCarthy

Reading (definitely pulp): Fametracker and Television without Pity

Drinking: agua.

September 17, 2002
9:44 pm

Took a writing hiatus. Have a couple of half-finished dailies lurking around my hard drive, but for the last couple of weeks have been experiencing some serious writer's block. All's well - have been good-but-crazy-busy at work, am enjoying my graphic design course, been out and about with friends to the point where evenings alone are becoming a reluctant luxury, but... I don't know. Been doing a lot of thinking that I don't care to share with whoever wanders past, so not writing seemed the most sensible thing to do.

My body is laughing at me right now.

Joined a gym yesterday. Have been pondering doing so for a while - last summer at the FDIC I had use of their extremely sweet gym but now at the Library there's no such deal. There are a couple of gyms near where I live, I checked both of them out yesterday and armed with what I saw and what I've heard from friends in the area picked one to pay catastrophic atmospheric amounts of money to.

Other than the predictable pangs of buyers remorse I'm really pleased. This morning I got up, threw on some workout clothes, tossed work clothes in my backpack and stumbled there in the early morning dark. Did 50 minutes on the elliptical machine, showered/ got ready, talked with Marie and D, and still got on the metro to work by 8 am.

Of course I'm tired, though. My butt is sending me little ouch-pains, and despite my normal coffee infusion I'm still hazy. Listening to Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville" and finishing some projects here at work - mostly quiet non-creative coding and troubleshooting. Don't know if I could handle much more excitement than that. Then again, I think my fingers are the only part of me that won't be sore.

Damn, not even the 5K a couple of weeks ago knocked me like this.

Been adding metadata to some quick-and-dirty finding aid text-to-html conversions I'm working on (one of the areas of the library has about 220 of these babies so I've been dumping the text preformatted into basic basic templates). The metadata we're adding is pretty simple - description, keywords and ususally just involves the name of the collection and occupation of the collection subject.

Did 40 or 50 of them this morning; it is innoffensive, mindless work. But occasionally amusing - one of the collection subjects was an "insurance executive and piano tuner". Now there's nothing wrong with either of those professions (remember, I graduated from High School in a town right outside of Hartford CT - the insurance capital of the world), but they're pretty funny put together.

Other than that today has been pretty calm, especially after the craziness that was the September 11th online exhibition a couple of weeks ago. Have a couple of cybercasts to look at - one to do and one to figure out so someone else can do it. I like working with streaming media and video, it is something new to me and an area here that's not completely staked out by someone else. A couple of months ago I wrote up an introduction to creating webcasts, recently someone started working on one using my directions and hit a snag so I'm contentedly going through bit by bit and trying to tease out what I told him to do, what he did on his own, and how I can fill out and clarify things to avoid similar snafus in the future.

Doing (life and related tasks): Work. Friends. Fun.

Doing (crafty stuff): Working on a new sweater and getting all arty for the Corcoran class.

Wanting: still am content.

Anticipating: just trying to figure out what lies ahead.