Another day, another blog. Let's discuss the weather. No, really. :)

...though not one I'll follow regularly. No RSS or atom feed that I could find, as is often the case with blogger-based blogs in particular (not a lack of technology, but an option that I think defaults to off or did).

At any rate, Kathryn (syndicated at mindfullife) referred to this post by Siona today. I'm going to quote the same piece she did, in fact:

I'm inordinately affected by the weather. It took me a long time to admit this; for years I refused to acknowledge that my moods might be linked to something as improbable and distant as the sky. I was a rational person, I thought; my emotions were linked to that which mattered, and not some butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon. Now I'm less embarrassed by my sensitivity. I'm an animal. I reside in a body that resides in the world that itself reclines under a pulsing membrane of pressure and weather and rain. How can my own cells ignore the atmosphere around me? How can my bones disregard the heaviness of the air? How can I not fail to respond to the sun on a clear day? It's more embarrassing to me now to think that I once believed I should be capable of ignoring all this. I'm attuned to the world. We all are. And I no longer mind.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. We are living in the world; how could we be other than affected by it? Whether this is illusion or the core of truth, we experience life through our bodies and our senses, and they are tied to the space they are in, to the air and the wind and the rain and the sun and the earth cool and hard beneath our feet.

Of course, I am quite the opposite, myself, of the experience she writes about - for as the cool of fall comes, as the house grows chill and the rains descend - these light misty sprinkles where it doesn't even look to be raining, yet everything stays wet, pinpricks of water on your face; all the way to the wild storm pouring rain down so hard you can barely see to move about in it - as fall comes on in force, I become more alive, happier. No longer the heavy weight of inescapable heat dragging me down, or hiding back into the few spaces where it's controlled away from that; no longer the too-long light of the days, pretty, missed when it goes, but somehow not quite right; no longer the bland wide-open sky of summer heat, pretty but in many ways unwelcome. There's beauty in summer, and joy, but it's remarkably pale of life, here. We water and water to preserve our plants through that season for a reason. And then the rains come and I at least relax. How anyone who gets moody in the rain can stand to stay in this part of the state for more than a year, I have no idea. It's not suited to them. But for me it is almost perfect. To stand outside, to let the wind tangle my hair up and the rain spatter over me...it's glorious.

It's funny, too, how I react depending on expectations. I went out to get the mail yesterday, and it was raining lightly - a drop here, a drop there - and I just walked in it, face turned up, a bit sorry that it was not actually doing more. When it was storming on Friday, I was running through it toward the house, laughing - and I wanted to go back out as soon as I didn't have the laptop and such in hand any more (those being the main reason I'd been running). I should have. When did I learn I have to be grownup, and not go out and stand in the rain and laugh? It's beautiful....

The joys of pictures and whatnot.

Four pictures added on Buzznet today (also in bn_kyrielle which doesn't have ads) - not new pictures, but older ones, from 2002/2003, that I particularly liked and wanted to share.

I've added some new userpics - used one on the weather post a bit ago - though the one on this post isn't new, just rarely-used like most of mine. mika_vumner let me use a pic of hers, which may show up when I'm aggravated, of a computer user beating their head on the desk. ;)

Been actually playing with beads yesterday and today. Already need to rip out part of this piece as I mis-sized it. Luckily, it's the easiest part to take out. I'm not bothering until I see if the rest of it turns out because, honestly, if I need to take the whole thing apart anyway (and I might), why redo even an easy piece? It won't impact the rest of it, so I can wait and see, and shall.

What is it about me and not being able to stay in a book lately, anyway?

Okay, a fiction book I haven't read, but still. Memory & Dream is still slow going, still going. So I started also on The Wood Wife, recommended to me at the same time and by the same person. I keep stopping this one periodically, as well!

It's for much happier reasons, though. Where I tend to drop out of M&D when I can't take any more of it for a while, what keeps knocking me out of TWW is much kinder, though no better for successfully reading the story - it's a gorgeous book, lush with the sort of phrasing I like, including the poetic bits that show up and also the prose, both the in-character and the narrative prose. I don't normally put up any of my stuff, but I do write poetry - as well as prose that comes close, at times, which you may have seen here from time to time - and what keeps knocking me out of this book is the need to take down notes or start on a piece of my own. I'm loving it, but I'm torn two directions, between wanting to pursue my thoughts and wanting to read the book. I know it will be waiting when I come back, so I leave the book each time, but I suspect I shall have to reread it in one huge gulp later to get the feeling of what that is like - if it can be done, if more images don't leap out at me.

I had to renew M&D. I'm debating - I will either need to renew TWW, or buy it. I normally don't buy a book till I have read it through and I think I will stick to that, and yet, I am fairly sure already - less than 80 pages in - that I will in fact buy it.

The rest of my reading has been books about beadwork, and Peter Singer's Rethinking Life and Death, a book I expected to have a harder time reading than M&D. I actually don't. I dislike the stand that I know this man advocates (though as yet, I haven't hit the worse parts of it and don't know if they are in this book), but his writing style at least is clear. I simply figured I had gone long enough being disgusted by someone whose own words I had never read, and decided to see what I would find in them. He raises some interesting issues, even if I don't like where I understand his answers are likely to go.

I doubt I'll return to his book until I've gotten through The Wood Wife, though. A well-written ethical tangle whose ultimate conclusion you expect to find highly disagreeable, has a hard time competing with an exquisitely written artistic work of fiction that is giving you writing ideas, and you have no idea where it is going.

Minor update....

I posted a link to one of Siona's posts, at Nomen est Numen earlier today - she added a link to the atom feed for her site, so it's now syndicated at nomen_est_numen.

Wheeeeeeeee! Like I haven't posted enough today.....

...but it's getting late and this is likely the last one for today, honest. :)

Wrote a letter to send to Crow, a friend of mine who's stationed in Italy (she's in the Air Force). I envy the whole 'Italy' part, particularly as she seems happy with being over there - though I think she's feeling a bit lonely. Hopefully the letter will help with that. I'll send it tomorrow - going to borrow work's postage scale long enough to find out if it needs one or two stamps, though (address is domestic - it's the weight I'm not sure about). No bills to put in the mail - nothing due this week, yay!

Laundry's done. Dishes are done. Trash is taken out, grocery list is made. I'll still be on call next week, but it will be as the backup, so I will get far fewer calls if any. I've had quite a few this week - a lot this weekend - rather tiringly. But not when I was asleep or when it was really inconvenient (none when I was showering yet, for example), so on balance it hasn't been too bad.

Got several things that have been hanging around waiting for me to handle them, handled on Ephemera. And proceeded to go through jobs that were waiting on input and had been for a while, and double-check what was wanted and happening on them. Since replies are mostly not instantaneous (though a couple were close!), I've got a fair few of them assigned to me right now while I wait to see what needs to happen with them. I think I'm almost ready to take another run at the character generation rooms, too. I know what introduced the bugs, but I can't reverse it (that problem's worse than the chargen not working), so I have to find every single call to those functions and update them. Such is life. I will get them all eventually. Or I'll just rewrite it, which I must confess is becoming a temptation. I'm resisting it because chargen systems are not something I am good at creating, to put it mildly.

Still reading The Wood Wife. Sometimes I take a lot of notes in a couple pages, or divert to write; others I can go for whole chapters without a twinge toward my journal. Either way I very much am enjoying the story. I may, at the pace I am reading it, not need to renew after all, although I think it is due now in 5-6 days. It's only 320 pages or so, and I'm nearly 200 pages in. If I hadn't stopped to backtrack and note-take and muse, I think I could have finished it already, but the tradeoff is well worth it.

Feeling like I accomplished a lot and still had fun. Feeling useful. These are good things. I've felt like I was babbling here a lot today, but actually looking at it is no more than my activity on some other high-energy days. What made it feel so, I suppose, is the amount of writing I've also done in handling stuff on Ephemera, in my journal, etc.

I am hyper, and I want to read and write more. I may do a bit more reading, but soon I must go to bed, since tomorrow I go to the office again (I almost said I have to work tomorrow, but I was working today, so that's not really a distinction; it's only that tomorrow I expect the alarm to go off at 6 and my day to progress from there, whereas today it has been at my whim and that of the cell phone).