Tonight I'll be packing. Tomorrow I'll be leaving early (well, about the time I should have left today, 6am) for the bus to the plane to the other plane to Atlanta. Do I know anyone in Atlanta who wants to see me in the next few days? I can't imagine I do.

The end of another week again, already. Work continues to be ridiculous, with technical issues, communications issues, people scrimping with money where they really should not because it causes much greater problems, later, pissing contests, etc, ad infinitum. It's the same thing I avoid writing about every week.

Finally got an email from my brother, Hawk. I had spaced the fact he was going North to visit family and family friends last weekend, I made plans with a friend and Eor and I spent the morning in Portland running around doing stuff we needed to do, and I missed out. Sounds like he had a really nice trip. Wandered around Damariscotta by himself, then meandered on up the coast to Hhumble's Bed and Breakfast, helped him with a dump run (a traditional Old Maine way for young guys to interact with old guys), then on up to Rockland where he met Aunt BeeJay and her husband.

Over the past week he moved out from the place he's been staying in Portland (he's very sorry to go, says the woman who's house it is might be the best housemate he's ever had) and transported his stuff down to his fiance's parent's house in Cape Cod, stopping to visit Uncle Don Jimcito and his wife, P, on the way.

Hawk's upcoming wedding will bring our father's sister and our mother's brother together in the same place, that will be fun. :) Also, we will see Mom, first time in ages. :)

Well, that's all in July. Of other things in my nearer future - did I mention that the class I'm being sent to got changed from the 20th to the 24th? Right smack on my weekend, so when I go back to work on this coming Sunday I'll be not getting a day off until ... crappers, June 1st. When we're supposed to have some people over. But I'm trying to convince myself that it won't feel like working straight through two weeks because I'll be doing something different for a few days, travelling and then attending class.

I had an opportunity to write for a short while at work the other day, which felt really good. I just transcribed it to typing and found it amounted to only a little over five paragraphs of "Swept Away" Ch 14. A little disappointing, but I guess I have to start somewhere. (BTW, I just looked back, and Ch 13 ended rather abruptly, didn't it?)

I've fought with the job placement site a little bit each night for the last couple of days trying to get my resume sorted and saved, finally managed it, and then looked for the proofreader job which someone mentioned they'd seen advertised... nothing. I should have realized they dreamed it. My department would never hire someone to write good English. That would be treating the plebes too good, giving them something understandable. Crap, I've been reading the same briefing over to people for the past few days and I swear that nearly every single sentence violates the most basic premises of how instructional texts should be written. You know how things should really read, "In X case, do Y. If this, then this." Every sentence in this briefing reads like "Do Y and Z in X case, unless Y."

When I posted all the chapters of "Swept Away" to AO3 it calculated my word count total and came up with over 39,000. Crap. Ten thousand more words and I'll be to novel length, and I'm not halfway done. Hm.

This evening I have managed to burn my hand - by trying to brush a crumb off a burner I'd JUST taken a pot off of, DUH - and also scratch my eye right after crushing up dried red peppers with those fingers. Eor thinks if we ever get pepper-sprayed we won't have too hard a time with it, having been inured by doing such things. I do these things so you don't have to! Remember, washing your hands with milk neutralizes the pepper acid.

And at some point I must have mashed my thumb, too, because it hurts when I use it for the space bar, so I'm not going to do a lot of typing.

Title: Swept Away! - Two Boys' Adventures on The Great River (“With A Thousand Elephants!”) - A Pseudo Victorian Boys Adventure
Author: Derien
Genres: Science-fiction/Victorian Adventure/Queer Teen Romance.
Summary: In the distant future a group of settlers try to recreate Victorian England on another planet, with mixed results. Two boys from quite different social strata find themselves alone on a raft on an uncharted river.
Notes: My initial notes can be found at the top of Chapter 1, where the story so far is now archived on AO3. I don't know if this is a good idea or not, but hopefully I'll get back to archiving it on my own site, soon.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Chapter 13: The Dangers of Mud

I was one of the first group of people on LiveJournal, back when it was invite only and you had to get a code from someone, and then I started paying for my account so I could have a lot of icons - that I never actually used because I prefer to be known as me by a standard icon. Now I'm making the transition to DreamWidth and have decided to let my LiveJournal account expire. Today, for the first time, I saw an ad at the bottom of someone's page, and was sort of confused by it. Well, mostly confused because it was so unobtrusive, actually; far less intrusive than FaceBook's ads, which people don't seem to complain about. I find it weird that people get so annoyed by their being ads on unpaid accounts on LJ. Although I know that the ads one gets when one is not a member and wishes to comment are far more annoying, because I've tried to comment on things when I was not logged in. :)

( I grow verbose over online identity. )

It's my weekend, now, and I did finally get a break at work on Thursday afternoon. There's plenty more craziness coming up, so I took the opportunity to roust out some old class materials and shred them, freeing up some space in the cabinet. Shredding is so cathartic. :)

Today I've been reading (short) plays, something I normally don't do, and, completely coincidentally, reading Stephen Fry's stories about writing plays, and re-writing other people's plays and musicals. It's been edifying. We were thinking of inviting people over to read the parts of a play, but I feel that I should try to find something that won't take long and has only four or five characters. I wish I were the sort of person who usually read plays and had a storehouse of thoughts on the matter of plays to draw from in order to find something appropriate, but I'm not - I actually hate reading plays, for the most part. Especially with the older ones they often tell at the outset and closing, and sometimes all through, the feeling that the audience should be feeling. we may be sure that he will soon be bland again. We have a comfortable feeling, you and I, that there is nothing of Harry Sims in us. I understand that they are giving a sort of stage direction "this is what you, the actor, should be striving to get from the audience," but if the play is working I don't think we should need this, or it could be stated differently so that I'm not being given an order to feel a certain way.

Does anyone have any plays they'd like to recommend to me? I mean, that I'm likely to be able to find scripts for.

Yesterday I got handed two new hires who'd had their first week of training and told to get busy on giving them the three classes extra they need for here. Now, it's one class that requires two hours, one that requires four hours and one that takes eight hours to finish, so you would think it would be easy to get that done in two days, but then I got handed three other people and told they needed a certain test, and another person who's not had any training yet, then had to compete with other people for time in the training room, and then one of the first two I mentioned here actually failed the test after the first class so I basically had to give the class over again to just her. Moose did not show up for work, today (which means he's at death's door, because one never calls in for work on the first day of your week), and I, basically, am beat. That's the upshot of everything. I almost managed it, and can finish up with the two new hires tomorrow, but more time would have been a really f-ing good idea.

I got the word, yesterday, that on the 20th (supposedly) I'm to go to a training. I don't know why I'm feeling so cranky about this. It's just that I was told to get a class together for a subject (lots of people need it and I've been pushing for it for at least a year), and then I was told that, no, there won't be time for that because you're going to actually be running the testing that other people were supposed to be running, and then oh, no, now going to training for this other thing - and that was all just during yesterday. I know I'm projecting, here, but I sense that when I get back from this new training I'll actually be teaching a completely different subject that I was trained for a year and a half ago and have completely forgotten. It's hard enough for me to keep my own train of thought going in one direction and finish one thing, but when I'm faced with so many directional changes on a daily basis (yes, this is not at all out of line with most days, really) and every one is "TOP PRIORITY!!11!!!" all I can do is roll my eyes, anymore.

First day back at work, today, was, as expected, a kind of super-Monday. I took it slow and tried not to think about too much. :) The place has not fallen apart while I've been gone, any more than it's always on the verge of falling apart.

Yesterday afternoon we pulled a bunch of bamboo that had grown while we were gone, and my back and legs are SO dead.