Scraps (n. ,fem., singular)

Too sleepy to be witty.

Good news: January articles in the can and invoice submitted. Black boots dropped off for heel repair, apparently ‘no problem’, and will be ready Wednesday afternoon. Tomorrow’s comic was finished on Friday.

Not-so-good news: Accidental Florist was probably the least satisfying Jill Churchill novel I’ve ever read; where was the actual story? the mystery Jane and Shelley were supposed to solve? how in the hell did all that get pushed to the side for a wedding and such? and she referenced herself point-blank which just totally turned me off. I made the point of finishing this book during/after dinner and now I’m too sleepy to concentrate on Thursday’s comic. There is nothing on television and I actually resorted to the easy listening music channel for background, non-distracting music.

zzzzzzzz

Oh, apparently the property inspection went well? No further notice on my door so I guess I’m good. *shrug*

I knew people sacrificed for their art, I didn’t think it would be the pads of my fingers from sharpening colored pencils! Ouch! I have a blister after prepping 48 of them this evening. Apparently you pay through the nose for them AND still have to sharpen them yourselves. Oh, well, they’ll be fun to play with.

Slow day at the office today. Not that work was especially slow, but I was. Sleepy, tired, etc etc etc I just couldn’t keep focused for anything. So I took a lunch break and did a little shopping (40% off coupon plus a $25 gift card made the colored pencils much more reasonably priced, lol) at Michaels and Fashion Bug, hoping that would snap me into a more productive afternoon. Not exactly. Actually got a little light headed for a while. Shopper’s high or is that cold coming back? It passed so I’m not going to worry about it.

Mostly lounged and watched TV tonight so far but I did manage to get Tuesday’s Random Acts… inked and uploaded. Now to work on an eHow article. I’m kinda hoping I get a second (well, first) wind in a bit.

Being a girl sucks somedays. Example of the lovely hormonal ennui? I’m eating supper and watching the first episode of Girls Next Door Season 3 which is their Christmas epi and Holly and Bridget have adopted this family and are getting the presents ready to send over and I tear up. I’ve seen this episode two or three times already with no adverse reaction but tonight I get all emo over it. Sheesh.

And the weather isn’t helping. The gray drizzlies just make me want to curl up and sleep 24/7 so productivity was way down. It was only through sheer force of will that I got the two articles I wrote on Tuesday finalized tonight and only a little bit done on Tuesday’s comic. I suppose between the busy time of Monday evening through yesterday, today’s slackitude is balanced out, but still: I need to be able to be a bit productive every day and not have the highs and lows.

Maybe tomorrow will be better. It’ll be Friday, after all.

Whoops! Tuesday was insanely productive: I drafted almost an entire article before work (yeah, I was up _that_ early) and wrote another one once I got home, plus did visuals for one of the articles. There was actually video involved but something pesky happened when I resaved it and the audio just went absolutely horrible. Oh, well, took alternate stills and got those edited tonight. Article 3 of the remaining 4 will be knitting related and I’m working out a kink in the pattern but should get it done tomorrow night.

Also, after I posted Monday night I actually completed Thursday’s comic a few days early and just finished the pencils for _next_ Tuesday–holy cow, y’all, I’m actually crawling ahead again! If I can keep it up I might build up enough to increase my update schedule again. That would be sweet! It would also tighten up the lag (possibly, I could also end up extending occurrences into arcs, but then again maybe not) from it’s current 8-9 months to maybe only 3 or 4. Dare to dream, right?

Also got the taxes mailed off, several of the shipments for the Vegas welcome bags in at work, and a fair amount of work done on a variety of projects. Tonight, since I was ahead on the comic, I went to dinner with Palmetto and then we stopped by Target because I wanted to pick up the next season of Girls Next Door and then wandered Kohl’s because I hadn’t been since before Christmas. Found 2 shirts and a red case for the iPod. Best thing about the case? 2 things, actually: 1)80% off and 2)it’s made so that all the ports are accessible! No more having to take it out of the case to charge it or transfer tunes! Rock on!

Having someone (professional) do my taxes this year. A rather expensive experiment. Granted, I came out ahead by a little bit when all is said and done and I did learn some things from the tax dude and got to ask some questions about the self-employment tax estimates, etc. The system wasn’t set up to prepare those forms so I still have to do that on my own, but he gave me pre-addressed envelopes. (*mutter* for what I paid them they should be pre-stamped and filled with cash */mutter*)

Will I do it again? Not sure. I feel slightly more comfortable about my ability to do it myself but I really do like the fact that someone with WAY more experience than me is the one who scheduled the business deductions, etc. And at least I know now what this sort of thing runs and won’t face the same sticker shock. Not to mention I get to take today’s fee as a deduction NEXT year. I suppose it all washes out in the end.

In other news. Yay for a weekend spend mostly snuggling with Spectrum. Despite the rain we did manage to hit all four comic shops on Saturday along with Word Traffic. A couple of ethnic restaurants and Comedy Zone Saturday nights, some movies at home and dinner Sunday night with Mom and Molly rounded out our long weekend together. Oh, but I hated to see him drive away this afternoon! He did make it home safe and sound, though, so all’s well. And Vegas is only 2.5 weeks away

And that’s that!

There was a wait at the nail place (totally worth it and the two people ahead of me decided it wasn’t, lol) and then I went ahead and tackled the grocery shopping, then home to clean out the fridge to make room for the new stuff, tidy up the apartment as best I could without going bonkers and I’m done I tell ya! It’s not perfect, but it’ll do. Spectrum’s arriving around 5pm tomorrow so I wouldn’t expect any updates until he leaves on Monday, lol. I’m going to be mostly avoiding the computer for more amusing pastimes.

last night and this one–way too busy to blog, even. I’m getting what needs to be done, done, but it’s a fight along with trying to get rid of the blasted sniffles! Who ever heard of getting a head cold AFTER battling full-on bronchitis??? Try to be more talkative tomorrow night if the to-do list doesn’t get the best of me!

But only just. So I slept through the majority of the weekend which means I’m a bit behind the eight ball but this is nothing new: I merely have a better excuse this time. Intent on not falling behind I picked up dinner on the way home so I could get right to work when I hit the door. I had to bribe my way through finalizing three articles (with chapters from “Grave Apparel”) and force-march my way through tomorrow’s Random Acts… (which is much better art-wise than last week, when the cold just killed whatever talent I generally pretend to have) while listening to the end of Charmed Season 5 play on Minnie. I feel like I haven’t really stopped since I got home. And work wasn’t much better. I need another day off!

Anyway, with Spectrum coming for a visit this weekend I really need to get caught up on everything AND maybe get a little ahead so that I can fully enjoy his visit without having to squeeze work in. Meanwhile nothing really wants to give me a break, so I deal. Also gotta fit taxes in ASAP, at least to make sure I don’t owe anything with the extra 3rd quarter income I ended up with. Yay writing, boo self-employment taxes. Yay being responsible and taking care of them!

And it was a productive two hours, too. 2-3 hours seems to be my limit right now for being up and productive. The most taxing thing I’ve done today after getting home around 10:30 was unload/reload the dishwasher. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll find some energy. After my second nap I noticed that my voice is coming back–still gravelly, but improving, and then pain in my throat isn’t quite as bad. My neck is rather swollen, though. I’m hoping that goes away tomorrow. One thing I shouldn’t be able to complain about, now, is getting enough sleep! Now heading for more meds and bed for the night. I had thought the cough syrup wasn’t working well at all, last night, since it didn’t seem to help the congestion or the cough, but today I figured out I wasn’t taking enough. Always a trick, right?

It’s bronchitis. I hurt. And I still have to go to work tomorrow to at least run a batch of payables checks. The apartment is littered with juice bottles and crumpled tissues and everything else scattered hither and yon. Going to bed, again.

You know, if there is one thing, one single thing I absolutely despise about Tallahassee it’s the idiot drivers that exponentially multiply at the beginning of each college semester. Oh, I know, it’s not specific to T-town and some places are cursed with idiot drivers year-round (and we have our share of those, trust me) whereas we do get a bit of a break over the the holidays and for a couple months each Summer.

Case in point: 5 o’clock rush hour, congestion (and not just in my chest), stop and go, the usual. 2-lane left turn from Stadium onto Pensacola, I’m in the right of the two lanes, pausing at the light because Pensacola is backed up and I have no wish to block the impending oncoming traffic from Tennessee, Call and the parking garages. Locals, you know where I’m at. This little sorority chick (ZTA by her rear window sticker, big ol’ starfish hanging from her rearview mirror) in an Ivory VW (license plate beginning with A86… oh, yes, I went there) decides to pass me ON THE RIGHT while I’m making my way through the slowly clearing intersection. That blonde bimbo better be glad _I_ can at least drive because that little antic could have cost her a trip to the body shop and a hike in insurance rates. Oh, wait, I’m sorry, it would have cost DADDY…

Instant karma? That little leapfrog didn’t actually save her any time as I passed her stuck 4 cars deep at the Ocala light as I pulled into the right turn lane with no lines, no waiting. It’s small, but it’s something.

And what, pray tell, is looming? Aside from deadlines I’m afraid it might be bronchitis. I was going with the hope that maybe some OJ just scorched my throat but, um, no. I took a 3-hour nap tonight and when I woke up (supposedly refreshed to do tomorrow’s comic, yeah, right) I coughed and it was there. That feel, that taste, that hideous knowledge that before the week is out I’m going to be very icky to be around. Sigh. I’m still hoping that I can stave it off (this is SO not a good time: dual deadlines at work, IKEA trip with Palmie this weekend, and the usual other things to do) or that it won’t really develop but, y’all, it’s not looking good. I went all of 2007 without a case of bronchitis, and that’s some kind of a record since way-back since I started getting this in high school. Looks like 2008 isn’t going to be so lucky.

Some nights you just have to recognize when you’ve been beat. Tonight was one of those nights.

The plan had been to head somewhere after work for dinner and some clickety-clack on the laptop, draft out an article or two, before the SCA meeting. But after having the Worker’s Comp audit pushed back almost two hours and the ever-present exhaustion and the return of the stabbity headache what I really wanted to do was go home and go to bed until, oh, Monday. Instead, I compromised: I went home, had soup for dinner, and took a one-hour nap. Then the nap became extended another hour. Oh, well, I figure I needed it, right?

Anyway, the other part of the compromise with myself was that I would get up and write after the nap. Well. One of the compelling arguments for not writing away from home tonight was my idea that doing the visuals before I wrote the article would streamline the process more and prevent the pictures from holding up the works. Ergo, I’d stage some photos tonight and be on the right track. Sigh…

I turn on the dining room light and it goes out. Drat. Plus I still needed to clear the New Year’s decorations away from the prime photographing spot (the dining room table) so I took care of all of that and then climbed up to get the globe off the ceiling fan. Man, I hate that, I’m always afraid I’m going to drop it. Anyway, I get it safely off and go in search of spare bulbs. Now, being the good little do-bee I decide that I need to use one of the CFLs that I picked up at IKEA last April. Ta-Daa! It works (after having to search for them) so then I go to replace the cover. Yup. The CFL? Is too long. Not compact enough, apparently, so I have to go get one of the not-as-earth-friendly incandescents. Bother.

But now the stage is set, as it were, to shoot some pixels on practicing calligraphy. Except I recall from Monday night that the camera batteries are caput (I had to take the holiday pictures with TheQ). I go to the box for a refill and there are two. The camera? She takes four. Oh, yes, she’s a greedy little bitch like that, total prima donna. And right about there is where I pressed the ‘fuckit’ button and decided that particular task could wait until tomorrow.

So, instead of writing or photoging and the like, I’m going to swap nights and chart out another chapter of Wedding Tarot. Take that, plan, I call bullshit on your ass.

That was a discussion for the talking heads this morning: whether cold weather in January is actually news. Of course, it is nice to be altered when a hard freeze warning is in effect (which it is for the next 2 nights) but as far as headlines go, a freeze in January (even in Florida) really doesn’t qualify.

And speaking of cold: I can’t decide if I caught one over the holiday or not. I know, I know, I’ve been teetering on the edge of catching something for the past several months, I just wish it would make up its mind already. Granted, even if this stabbity headache persists I have to go to work tomorrow because of the annual WC audit (which I am actually ready for, thank heavens!) and just in general the EOY duties that need to be done.

But in productive news I created two new blogs (no links until I have them a bit more put together). One as a production diary for Wedding Tarot (guilt is a great motivator) and one as a place to stash the Illustration Friday submissions and updates on my writing, etc. Over the next however long I’m going to work on setting up an online portfolio for writing pieces and art with the plan to be able to increase not only my productivity but also my marketability in those areas. Time (and effort) will tell how well this works, but I’m at least going to give it a shot!

Well, might as well, right?

Last night was fun: Palmie and Swanjun came over for movies and wings to ring in the new year in a relaxed, fun fashion. Slept in this morning and got up just in time to catch the Rose Parade from the beginning (though now I know that Travel Channel broadcasts more parade and less ‘hosts’ whereas the network feed spent too much time with Al Roker, et al. and cut out the last half hour; Travel Channel also replays the parade all freaking day, along with a text message banner running along the bottom of the screen) for the first time in probably ever. Biscuits with strawberry jelly and mimosas made from last night’s champagne were breakfast.

After that I’ve pretty much done not much today. Of course I cooked the traditional cabbage and black-eyed peas for wealth and health, respectively, but at 8:30 I realized I was ridiculously tired for someone who hadn’t done much of anything all day. I really don’t know what’s with me! I did brainstorm article ideas for January but there’s a pair of them that might be too close to other articles, even though I really want to write them. If I can figure out a good angle I can justify the similar content so we’ll see. Until then I need to work on the five I know I can write.