A Funny Thing Happened…

… on the way to becoming more productive. AKA excuse #0573 for not writing.

The way my new office is laid out, the desk throws a shadow on itself. I have a desk lamp, and of course my spiffy new lap top has a back lit keyboard, but there’s just something about that layout that bugs me. I keep wanting to turn and face west, which puts the desk on my left.

So I spent most of Saturday rearranging my furniture. It’s not as though I could go anywhere, after all. We were in the midst of a raging ice storm. It started out as rain, moved on to ice pellets, then by noon it was freezing rain. In the morning the water on the tarp covering the pool was clear, but as the day continued I watched the steady progression of the ice until it was fully covered. It was kind of neat, although I’m sure I wouldn’t have thought so if I’d had to leave the house for anything.

Laugh if you want, but I think there’s something to be said for the idea of feng shui. I didn’t consult a book or Google it or anything, but I can’t help feel that if I get my office set up in just the right way, I’m going to start being more productive. Maybe I’m crazy, but there you go.

And that is how I ended up spending most of my Saturday cleaning the stuff off my desk and cursing and swearing as I moved stuff around. I stopped when it started to get dark because I wasn’t sure how long the power would last and I didn’t want to be in the middle of something if the lights went out. Although I enjoy the romance of candle light, it’s not exactly the safest thing around stacks of papers and books.

But while I didn’t trust the power to stay on to work in my office, I had no problem with it staying on so I could start binge watching the new Lost In Space series on Netflix. :-D

I loved that show as a kid, and in fact I have the complete series on DVD. I enjoyed the movie with Matt LeBlanc in it too. Normally I don’t like when they make a lot of changes to old favourites – don’t get me started on the changes made to Battlestar Galactica – but I have to say, I love how they’ve updated Lost In Space. I don’t even mind that they turned Dr. Smith into a woman.

But I digress.

None of the changes I made to the arrangement of my desk felt right so in the end I moved everything back the way it was. Of course I’m not ready to give up quite yet, I had another couple of ideas on Sunday, but it was so late in the day by that time that I didn’t have a chance to test them.

After all, I had blog posts to write. ;-)

Of Lists and Flix

Here's how distracted and muddle-headed I've been lately. I wrote this post yesterday, and then posted it to the wrong blog. Can we say D'oh?

Every time I go to type “wordage report” I hear in my head “creature report,” as in the Creature Report that’s included in every episode of The Octonauts. In case you’re not familiar with The Octonauts, it’s an animated children’s show about a team of underwater explorers - Captain Barnacles the bear, first mate Kwazi the cat, and Peso the penguin, among others - who explore under the sea, meet various sea creatures, and generally protect the ocean. Clearly I spend a lot of time with the granddaughter. ;-)

Anyway, this week’s wordage report is pretty slim pickings, especially when you take into consideration it’s been two weeks. One flash story for the Brazen Snake Books prompt that you can find HERE and a long letter to my sister.

Quite frankly, you’re lucky to have got that much out of me. Between a bad sinus cold that blew a hole in my eardrum and other assorted stumbling blocks life threw in my path, the last couple of weeks have been pretty stressful. And while I work well under pressure, stress is a whole other can of worms.

Sometime on Friday I made out a list of all the things I wanted/needed to get done on the weekend. It was quite a long list. The story wasn’t on the list but I wrote it in one session, despite the railroad spike like pain in my head. However, by the end of the weekend I was able to cross exactly zero items off my list. And here’s the reason:

A week ago Saturday my sadistically evil daughter had the hubby and I babysit so she and her hubby could go to the movies. That wasn’t the evil part. The evil part was leaving her Netflix cued up with the first episode of Stranger Things, a show she’s been recommending we watch. So we watched it. And the next episode. And part of the next. And when we got home I continued watching until 3 a.m. I finished watching the available episodes the following day.

Here’s where the sadistic part comes in. That’s all there is until the end of October. Now if you’ve had the pleasure of watching Stranger Things yourself, you’ll know that while they wrapped up the major story lines pretty well, there’s still a lot of unanswered questions. And if you haven’t seen it yet, do so! If you don’t have Netflix already you can try it free for a month. Trust me, it won’t take a month for you to watch those eight episodes.

But back to my list. Despite my neatly written, well organized list, the daughter and I indulged in some out-of-town shopping therapy on Saturday. Then instead of tackling my list, I tackled the first six episodes of The 100, a show I’d wanted to see when it first came out, but it wasn’t offered on our regular TV channels.

Unlike Stranger Things, this show is well into its 4th season and there’s (I think) 13 episodes per season. So that’s a lot to catch up on. I’m going to have to learn to pace myself and get organized if I want to get anything else done.

Maybe I should put that on my list. ;-)