Two days, two backyard bar-be-ques, zero writing done. On Saturday afternoon our friends procured a brand new charcoal grill at Canadian Tire. After a run to the stores for beer and meat and half an hour of set up, we proceded to smoke out the entire neighbourhood, “seasoning” said grill for two hours. We’re surprised that the fire department didn’t show up, to be honest. Shortly afterwards we started to cook, as it was getting dark. By the time the meat was finished (chicken, ribeye steaks, pork ribs), it was, in fact, 10pm and pitch black. All good. The food was absolutely fantastic.

The food was so good, in fact, that we repeated the entire process on Sunday, except starting earlier (4pm) and skipping the 2 hour seasoning smoke-a-thon. Just burgers, potatos, and corn on the cob this time, but still excellent. More so because we managed to eat while it was still light outside. After this weekend’s festivities, I am absolutely sold on charcoal grills. Gas is easier and more convenient, of course, but food grilled over charcoal is just tastier. Yum. Double yum.

Of course, having spent most of the last two days sitting in a lawn chair tending a grill and drinking (fulfilling my duty as a Canadian on a long weekend in summer), I’ve totally failed to do anything else. No reading, no writing, no cleaning, no working out, etc etc. And, really, that’s OK by me. Regularly scheduled silliness will begin again tomorrow.

It’s the perfect-weather days that are really the hardest when you’re working from home. Today was gorgeous — beaming sunshine, nigh cloudless sky, not at all humid, not too warm. If it had been Friday, I would have succumbed and ended up on a patio with a book and a pint, just enjoying the weather while it was here. Alas, it simply wasn’t meant to be.

I really don’t have a whole lot to say beyond that. It was neither an exciting nor particularly insightful day. I worked, I went to physio, I made nachos, I did my writing (2750 words, all total garbage), now I’m writing my weblog entry. I didn’t have time to do any reading, unfortunately, but I’ll make up for it on the weekend.

Speaking of which, it’s a long weekend, but only in Canada. I’m not sure whether I should take tomorrow off, actually take all of Monday off (which is complicated given that I work for a primarily-US organization), or split my holiday between Friday and Monday. Probably the latter, particularly if the weather holds.

I have a new regimen. This is a different regimen than my new “do a half-hour of circuit training three times per week” regimen. This is a more intellectual pursuit, and it consists of three parts.

The first part is that I have started writing again. The plan is this: one thousand words per day, minimum, outside of weblogs and personal journals. The trick here is that the subject matter has to be different. No blithering on for one thousand words about the random crap with which I filled my day. No talking about websites or games or other random crap I found on the internet. This is supposed to be more exploratory stuff — fiction, non-fiction, whatever. Exploration into realms about which I do not normally write. Delving deep into memory and self to carve out pieces and put those on paper. It’s actually a lot less cliche than it sounds.

I’ve been on this new regimen for three days now. The first day I managed to get twenty-one hundred words out before I faltered and fell silent. Day two was seventeen-hundred words. Day three (just now) was another seventeen-hundred. I’m not allowed to cheat, either. If I do two thousand words on one day, it doesn’t mean I get out of the one thousand words the next. Minimum one thousand words, every day. Maximum: unlimited. No carryovers. No touchbacks. Tag.

It has been interesting so far, in that I’ve already found myself thinking about what I could write about at various points throughout the day. I could write about my childhood heros, perhaps, or my recently acquired love of cooking. Maybe I could put out a thousand words about Zen and what it means to me, or at least how I interpret it (which, for what it’s worth, is probably quite unlike what any real Zen student would tell you). How about how I learned to love reading and language? Maybe a piece about my utter disdain for current advertising and marketing and how they’re missing the boat by trying to lie to us incessantly, bombarding us with blipverts that we simply Do Not Believe (seriously, guys, your audience is smarter than you think). I could easily churn out one thousand words about joining a (women-only) gym and starting a new workout regimen (don’t let anyone tell you for even a second that women are less competitive than men). A thousand words about the death and secret rebirth of television as a medium for storytelling. A thousand words about my first trip to the local library (which I haven’t yet done). When I think of it, I jot these ideas down for later retrieval, but haven’t needed to use them yet.

When I actually sit down to write, of course, all bets are off. As yet, there has been no pre-planning. Tonight’s Daily (I’m calling them Dailies) started off with a somewhat vociferous rant against Margaret Atwood which churned itself into a thousand words about Canadian Culture. Yesterday was about cooking, food, dinner parties, and some reflections thereupon. The day before was (quick pause while I go check) about embracing change, later turning into a bit about the strange clash between horror and beauty that we all endure every single day. None of these topics were preselected — they just happened to be what poured out of my brain and into the keyboard while I had the word processor open to a blank page.

Naturally, the vast majority of what I’ve written is utter trash. Breathless at times, totally disorganized, wholly unrevised. Just raw. But that’s ok. For now, that’s all I want — I just want to get into the habit of producing a certain amount of raw content on a daily basis. Writing, you see, has two phases. Generating raw content is, by necessity, the first. The second, which can only happen once the raw content is available, is revising. Unlike sculptors, writers don’t start with a block of material and just spend their time taking away the parts that don’t belong. We need to create the block first, and only then can we start chipping away at the edges. Right now, I just need to produce giant chunks of rough marble.

The second part of my new writerly regimen is this, my weblog. In addition to the one thousand word not-for-other-people minimum, I intend to spend ten to fifteen minutes churning out an entry for my weblog (not including revision and additions). This has two purposes. First, it will mean my weblog gets updated daily, which I’m hoping will draw in more readers. Behind this interminably timid exterior, I really do crave an audience. Second, it will get me used to the idea of actually writing for an audience every day. The one thousand word minimum is all well and good, but if I don’t get used to the idea of having other people actually read my writing, I’ll eventually end up cheating by typing the word “house” a thousand or more times, until the word itself becomes utterly nonsensical and loses all meaning. So, yeah. The weblog entries are intended to keep me at least partially anchored in reality. Writers write to be read. Anything else is just intellectual wanking.

The third and final part of my new regimen involves reading. I used to read a lot. Books upon books every week. I had no TV, I wasn’t caught up in the whole gaming craze, I wasn’t yet jacked into the Matrix (read: Internet). I had a lot of hours to fill, and I gleefully filled them with books. In bulk. When I lived in Montreal I would spend $300-$500 every paycheque on books, often going downtown daily just to browse the bookshops.

Then I stopped reading. Not entirely of course, but from a diet of three or four books per week, I ended up down to about one per month, usually read in ten page increments right before bed. That’s no damned good. I love reading, and so I’m going to make time for it again. I don’t have a minimum daily allotment, but I’d like to be able to spend a couple of hours every day, on average, just sitting on my butt with a book.

And with that, I think I shall.

(43 mins, including revision. 1056 words. So much for 10-15 mins.)

Technically I’m a bit late, but Happy Canada Day!

Our day was relatively sedate, but that was largely because we began our celebrations Thursday evening, finally crashing at around 2am. Today was mostly sleeping in, eating bacon & eggers for breakfast, having a nap, cleaning some, and doing laundry. Dinner was garlic-ginger pan-roasted pork tenderloin with asparagus. After dinner we did what we usually do (gaming, reading), and watched an episode of Deadwood. Now it’s time for bed. All in all, not a bad day off.

I’ve set up reading spot in my office now, with a comfy chair, a table for my tea, a reading lamp, and an ottoman. I’ve finished On Writing Well, and am now rifling through the shelves trying to find something to read next. Oddly, the next book about writing I picked up — Getting the Words Right — isn’t terribly well written. The Invisible Computer, while interesting and written by someone I’ve admired since I did my thesis (Donald Norman), isn’t quite what I feel like reading at the moment. In the interim, I’m poking my way through the collected short stories of Roald Dahl. I haven’t yet gone to the library to get a library card and a book, so maybe I’ll do that tomorrow.

Also on the topic of tomorrow, I think I’ll use the leftover pork to make ginger pork fried rice for lunch. Yum.

Late late late. Got up at 5:15a EDT to catch a flight to Chicago then to San Francisco. It’s now 10:45p PDT, which is, like, a million o’clock EDT. Sleepy. Got in around 1pm, made the mistake of pinching pennies and taking the airport shuttle to the hotel. An hour and a damned half later, finally get to the hotel. Ho ho. Screw the airport shuttle. Got in, met up with shaver, headed in to the office, finally managed to get out for dinner. Excellent food, but now I’m just exhausted. And so it goes.

Yesterday I decided I was sick of my old weblog theme, so started hacking a new one together, based on the theme I cooked up for my photoblog (which is already falling behind, but such is life). I finished it this afternoon, and here it is.

The biggest change is that it’s finally flexible-width rather than fixed width, which I much prefer. It seems to work fine in Firefox, Safari, and Camino (on Mac), and kinda-sorta mostly in IE on Windows. I haven’t tested it in any other browser/OS combos at this point, so if you’re seeing problems with it anywhere, let me know. Oh, the photoblog archive pages are still messed up in IE, but I’m starting to not care. I’ll fix it eventually, I just mostly can’t stand browsing in Windows because it renders fonts like poop.

Snippet from IRC this morning:

[07:54] < dria> i dreamed most of an episode of CSI last night
[07:55] < dria> murder at an art gallery followed by a robbery attempt by some hamfisted thieves armed with grenades
[07:55] < dria> it was neat because the episode focused on showing how the CSIs and normal people react differently to crime scenes and the stuff that happens in and around them
[07:56] < dria> I, of course, was a CSI
[07:56] < dria> later, i had a dream about a high school, but it was much less intricate

Does anyone else have whole-episode dreams like that? They happen to me relatively regularly and are always quite a lot of fun. During my X-Files days I probably dreamed a half dozen full episodes (one in which Mulder died when he got crushed by a train, but somehow Scully developed a weird psychic link to his spirit long enough to sort out the criminal conspiracy surrounding his final demise).

I’ve also dreamed whole books, including one during my thesis that I really wish actually existed because it was perfect for what I was working on.

Anyhow. I have seriously bizarro-world dreams sometimes. Sometimes they get too scary tho and I wake up screaming. I hate when that happens.

1) I would start many, many more wikis. These would be wikis about all sorts of crazy things, and chances are that only one or two would ever amount to anything, if that. Still, I would start them, and I would do what I could to fill ‘em up and promote them and get more people adding to them, and so forth. Wikis, I have discovered, can eat your life, however, so I figure just the one will do for now.

2) I would play, to completion, in no particular order: Neverwinter Nights (all three campaigns); Diablo II + Lord of Darkness expansion pack; Dungeon Siege + Expansion pack; Bard’s Tale (maybe…it looked a little weak); Morrowind: Game of the Year edition; Thief 3. There are several others.

3) I would read the ridiculously massive pile of books that I own but have not yet read. I would also bum a few books off some select friends and read those, too. I would sit on a patio somewhere with huge pitchers of iced tea and an unending supply of popsicles, and I would read my way through an entire summer. I have fond memories of doing just that during summer holidays when I was a kid. Popsicles and the entire Hardy Boys series, for example, on a lawn chair in the backyard at my folk’s house beside the pool. (There’s something in that story that probably explains my current love for crime drama.)

4) I would sit down and finally learn all this DOM and CSS and JavaScript stuff properly. CSS positioning still makes my brain hurt as often as not. I have lots of ideas for cool web designs, I just never get around to doing anything with them. I’d like to do a bunch of WordPress themes, for example, and a few dozen MediaWiki skins. This is something I’m more likely to get to than some of the others, however, so there is hope here!

Well, there’s four things I’d do. There are others, but now my head is getting all filled with cool ideas and vague frustration, so I’ll stop.

1) Sin City is great. Go see it. I’m already looking forward to getting the DVD and watching it again, then watching the commentary track. Usually I don’t care about commentary tracks, but this one will be interesting. It’s really a piece of art.

2) There are a lot of people on the internet who seem to care way too much about really stupid things. The examples of this are endless, so I won’t bother going into specifics. Mostly I just want to say that a lot of folks just need to get a grip.

3) There are a lot of people on the internet who care a great deal about things that aren’t so stupid. Sifting these few delicious grains out of the deluge of chaff is hard. I’m becoming increasingly impatient with the internet and the content it provides. We need some sort of system that can help with this. Google is good at what it does, but it does not help sort by quality. Technorati and Blogdex and other similar services also suffer from the quantity-over-quality disease. There has to be a better way.

4) House M.D. is a good TV show. You should watch it. Hopefully it won’t get cancelled.

5) The new Battlestar Galactica, I’ve decided after long consideration, is the best sci-fi television series in history. I’m not kidding. It blows all the Star Treks clear out of the water, and I actually liked some of those. Firefly is the only other sci-fi series I can think of that even comes close.

6) I am sad that Enterprise has been cancelled, but not nearly so sad as I was about Firefly.

7) I wish the Max Headroom Show would just come out on DVD already. Come on, people.

8) Over the past couple of years I’ve realized that geek culture is now mainstream. Games, Comic Books, Bad TV Shows, Computers, and all that. I guess there were a lot more of us holed up in our parents’ basements playing Space Invaders, reading X-Men, programming NPC-generators on our Commodore 64s, and watching Kung-Fu than I thought. I wonder what constitutes “geek culture” now that will become mainstream when today’s young geek hits her 30s? I bet I wouldn’t recognize it if it hit me in the face.

9) I like ecto.

10) RSS feeds change how I use the internet. I am not entirely sure I like these changes. With RSS feeds, I do not browse, I scan. I also find myself relying on them, when there are a large number of sites out there that do not have them or to which I haven’t subscribed. Push technology just ain’t all that, no more now than it was in 1997. There’s a lesson in here somewhere about quantity over quality again, and how the sheer quantity of poorly-filtered (it’s not really unfiltered any more) information forces us to skim reams and reams of garbage simply because we don’t have time to dig through it all to find the stuff that’s actually worth reading.

11) We need much, much better filters. Also, librarians.

Haven’t been updating my blog(s) very regularly. The reason is simple: I’m busy. The new job has me doing more in less time than I’ve really attempted since, oh, The Puffin Group¹. Between email (more in a month than I’ve had to deal with in the last year), planning, thinking, digging, writing, hacking, and dogfooding², I’m a busy, busy girl. Happily, it’s all a lot of fun³.

My previous job, I’ve come to realize, was really draining me more than I thought. Between the daily rush-hour commutes on the gawdawful busses, the spirit-sucking and somewhat grimy cube farm, and the sheer powerlessness of my position within the organization, I was just burnt. I like being able to do good work. I like being busy. I like having the ability to solve problems and to put those solutions into action. Take those three things away and apparently I turn into a zombie drone like so many other people.

I wonder how much more we could accomplish, collectively, if we were a whole lot better of matching good people with useful work.

In other news, I got a new mouse for my laptop today. It’s a tiny little three-button bluetooth doodad with a scrollwheel. It’s very, very nice. It’s a Rad-Tech BT500, and it seems like a pretty solid purchase. Cute case, too.

I also paperworked like crazy today. Filed filed expenses, filed current expenses, sorted out travel insurance for my next trip (Apr 4-8, back in MV), made a doctor’s appointment, filed business purchase receipts, filed personal paperwork, and headed downtown to renew my health card. All of this inspired by the new stapler I bought this morning. I tried to find a red Swingline, but settled for a black one. Also got paperclips, staples, some envelopes, and a filing…er…box. Case. Thing. Anyhow, it’s all in order now. Just have to keep it that way.

Other than that, not much is going on. I’ve got a birthday coming up, at which point I’ll be 34. For some reason that seems sort of old. 33, not so much. The only other birthday I’ve felt like this was 27. I have no idea why. The “milestone” birthdays — 19, 20, 25, 30 — have all just blown by like nothing. For no apparent reason, 27 and 34 stick out.

That’s it. New mouse, new stapler, busy busy, birthday. My life is like partying 24 hours a day.

1: The Puffin Group was an Open Source consulting company I joined in 1999. My boss then happens to be the same guy who is my boss now. I guess I did something right.

3: No job is all fun. As my dad says, “that’s why they call it ‘work’.”