6 May 2003

The Sens and the Ducks both won their series, and our Wild stayed alive! 7-2. That's not even a hockey score. That's a baseball score, for heaven's sake. It was good.

And the glories of the internet reveal my favorite band's singer sitting on a hotel bed in his undies. As my favorite band is the Barenaked Ladies, this is probably not particularly exciting to most people, and I have to say it's more bemusing than exciting to me. (It's a dramatization of how he lost in Vegas. One can't really be sure what will pop up on the BNL blog, but one has a fairly good idea that it will involve censored nudity from time to time. As I keep telling people who say "you never know," sometimes, you know.)

And I did some good work on the Not The Moose and expect more good Not The Moosing to follow today.

There wasn't really a lot of specific reason for yesterday afternoon to be wretched, but it was. It was just no good. By the time I went to bed things were better. The afternoon, however, sucked. I think that's all I want to say about that.

I made potato casserole for dinner. Tonight will be chili. Good stuff. I need to figure out what to do with the bunch of fresh cilantro in the veggie bin, but maybe Timprov will start feeling better and use that. If not, I'll think of something, and it was only 20 cents, so I don't feel too badly if I don't use every leaf of it.

They had an ad for fishing and boating in one of the commercial breaks of the hockey game last night. Yet another sign that we were not at home. The ad had a woman's voice saying, "Take me fishing and make me feel 16 again." And if we'd been at home, she would have been saying, "I'm going out in the boat. You can come with if you want," because the day a northern woman has to be taken fishing, she throws the towel in, she's done. Sheesh. Running an ad for fishing and boating in Minnesota/Wisconsin is like running an ad that says, "Air. It's what you breathe." (I hate fishing, myself. It's like reading, only without the book, and with a stick you're supposed to hang onto. This seems like a poor substitution. I've got the hang of the "sitting still keeping quiet" thing. I don't see why I should drag any scaled beings into it. But it's one of those Minnesota Things I don't have to like to consider it normal.)

One of the things I didn't realize about working from home is how hard it would be to keep the place from getting cluttered. If I had a home office, that would help immensely, but I don't yet. I work at my computer (which is in the intersection of kitchen, dining room, and living room), or at the dining room table, or in a chair in the living room. Note that none of these is a desk. So if I want to spread out, say, my outline and page of notes, I need to use the dining room table or my lap desk. If they're in an order I need to maintain, they have to stay on the dining room table or the lap desk. So even if I declare that I'm done with work for the day, there they are. Clutter. We don't have any area of the house where I can stash stuff like that and have it away from my "non-work life," whatever that is. Reference materials have to go somewhere, and putting them on the overcrowded nonfiction shelves, then popping up to get them back again, seems like a suboptimal plan. And it's a suboptimal plan that only works when they're in book form and belong to me.

Well, we'll get something better figured out before too long.

And in the meantime, I'm going to do all sorts of things, including reading Jo Walton's King's Peace and putting together some pictures from Napa and beyond. Have a good Tuesday. Or at least try very hard.