Anti-Sleep Cat

Holden started out the evening curled in a ball at my feet, which meant I couldn't stretch my legs out full length.

Eventually my knees were aching enough that I sat up and picked him up and set him on the bed next to me so I could straighten my legs. I carefully set him so that he was stretched parallel to me, leaving me the maximum amount of room to toss and turn in comfort.

Somehow, in his sleep, he rotated himself through ninety degrees on the bed until he was stretched out across its width, about at my waist level, leaving me barely enough room for the width of my hips if I lay on my back. If I lay on my left side in any position other than completely straight as a board, my butt would be hanging off the bed.

He's lucky he's so cute.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, we regret to inform you...

...that it is, in fact, one of the Monday-est Mondays of the entire calendar year today.

The National Weather Service forecasts that it is likely to remain Monday all day long. 

At least there are Cyber Monday deals to take the edge off the day. Retail therapy can help!

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Ugh, it's starting...

We've reached that time of year when sunset is occurring before the time when normal people are just starting to think about dinner. Combine that with three days in a row of overcast skies, drizzly weather, and the leaves being off the trees, it's time to get the SAD lamp down from the attic and plug that thing up.

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Whupped.

Spent a week in Akron doing work with 4" schedule 40 PVC pipe in an office building at night after the employees had gone home, and then drove the four and a half hours home yesterday and I am just absolutely whupped. I'll probably be hearing sawzalls cutting pipe and drills coring concrete in my head for days.

It was good to get home to Bobbi and the cats and my own bed, though.

Today's gonna be a rest & recuperation day while I catch up on some promised writing.

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Ugh.

I had intended to go to the outdoor range today, but it's going to be swamp-ass hot, like Gulf Coast levels of heat and humidity, and neither the Mustang nor the Zed Drei have any refrigerant aboard currently.

If I were faced with a week- or month-long stretch of this, I'd just cowgirl up and go, but when you can look ahead to Thursday and Friday and see it's going to be more bearable, it's easy to just punk out for a couple days. I'll maybe hit the indoor range on Thursday and Friday.

The next three days are supposed to have highs in the mid- to upper 90s and dew points in the low 70s, and it's those dew points that'll take the starch out of me. Bicycling and walking around the neighborhood will be bad enough, but 30 minutes or more in a car with no A/C? Nah. I'll skip that. Next week is supposed to return to more normal late summer weather.

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Ouch

So I'm feeling this pain in the extreme rear of my mouth and a tenderness in my gum that, if I weren't fifty-mumble years old, I would swear was a wisdom tooth erupting.

I had my wisdom teeth out in my late twenties! Well, three of them, but that's all they could find.

A check with the Google indicates that, indeed, that last one could have just been lurking around waiting to cause me misery later in life.

Still, as thoroughly as my teeth have been x-rayed not long back, you'd think someone would have expressed surprise at a wisdom tooth still lurking around, un-erupted.

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Argh.

Oh, gawd, NBC has some pasture pool tourney in Scotland on this morning, which probably means that half of my usual Sunday morning yelling at senators entertainment is going to be preempted.

Hopefully ABC isn't covering croquet championships or anything. At least I'll have Stephanopolopolopolous.

"If it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press... unless we're preempting it for golf, or motor racing, or the Brightinghamshire Stoats are playing the Twarfton-by-Blight Tea Cozies in the English Premier League."

Sorry, guys.

The week... hell, the whole month ...is off to an unbelievably crappy start.

I'll try to cheer up and be funnier.

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Things I hate, #6,821...

I hate being stuck in "Adult Signature Required" hell.

UPS is very sorry they missed me yesterday (I was sorry I missed them, since I had no idea they were coming) so now I'm sitting here with only the vague promise that I will be released from bondage some time between 1130 and 1500hrs, EDT.

Ugh.

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You're not going to believe this...

...but it's hot as dammit again out there today.

Supposedly a front will move through on Sunday and we'll get some rain and it'll cool off some.

(I mean, for a given value of "cooling off". Other than 88°F on Sunday, highs are supposed to be in the nineties until next Wednesday at the earliest.)

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Travel Rig

If I’m not traveling with checked bags, that really dings my camera choices.

The Think Tank Airport Advantage has to stay home, and I’m limited to my Peak Design Everyday Messenger that’s big enough for my 13” MacBook Air, one camera body, and three lenses, plus ancillary gear. Plus the cheater body & travel zoom lens I hang around my neck for the trip, that’s two bodies and four lenses.

I can free up a little room by leaving the portable hard drive and the cabled Compact Flash card reader at home. I have a temporary “Travel Photos” folder on my desktop that gets kept synced thanks to Apple, so that’s not a problem, but leaving the CF reader at home means I’m limited to cameras that use SD cards, which can be read via the slot on the notebook.

Only a couple of my Canon DSLRs use SD cards, and they’re still full from TacCon. Plus, two of them are 1D pro bodies and those use enormous batteries with a double charger the size of a literal brick, which kinda defeats the purpose.

Good thing all my Fujifilm gear is in a handy grab-‘n’-go Peak Design Everyday Sling… that, oops!, is too small for the MB Air.

If it’s a one or two night trip, I might rough it without the laptop and just make do with the iPad and its Logitech keyboard cover, but three or more nights in a hotel room, I’m gonna need to get some work done, so it looks like there’s gonna be unpacking and repacking and cross-loading of gear before I leave.

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FML

Well, it’s been six months since I felt the need to jostle the tip jar suggestively with my elbow while wiping down the VFTP bar top here.

A sudden work trip popped up at the end of this month (and you’ll get the details here at View From the Porch as soon as I’m free to release them) but it’s one of those ones where the public relations agency handling things is like “…and be sure to save your receipts and we’ll reimburse them!”

Now, they’re handling airfare and a hotel and whatnot, but when I read things like that, I’m like “Dude, I’m a freelance writer. Reimbursement of expenses is nice, but I can’t just poop out a thousand bucks on command!”

If you’ve just found a twenty in the sofa cushions and can’t figure out where to spend it, the tip jar in the side bar would be much appreciated!

So basically...

What happened was that pollen season got started with a bang and I was late noticing and starting prophylactic Claritin use. So both my sinuses and lungs began filling with fluids and then, unusually, I managed to pick up a low-grade upper respiratory tract infection and a flareup of bronchitis at the same time.

I'm finally on the mend, but it's been an unpleasant week

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Here comes the rain again...

And not a moment too soon, either. The amount of pollen in the air has been giving my sinuses fits, such that every time I blow my nose, the bones in my skull creak and groan like the hull of a u-boat changing depth.

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...and back to Ouch.

Between torn external intercostal muscles from grappling with a very large dude while trying to shoot him with a sims gun, and strained internal intercostal muscles from a day of violently trying to cough my lungs clear of deep-seated nastiness, I gotta say that the former may hurt worse, but the latter is no picnic either.

Robitussin, take me away!

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Brr...

I somehow ended up out from under the covers last night, and just to make it worse, the legs on my pyjama bottoms had ridden up nearly to my knees. So I lay there, with my metabolism as low as it ever gets during the day, radiating heat into the chilly bedroom air until I woke up shivering with my teeth chattering.

I bundled myself into a fleece woobie and burrowed back under the covers but I still haven't recovered from that. I'm sore all over.

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Ouch.

Something had my back all jacked up last night. I didn't get a lot of really good sleep.

Hopefully tonight will be better.

I did have a really long detailed dream that was likely caused by watching The Three-Body Problem before going to bed. Very science fictional dream. Lots of space kablooie.

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Sorry...

I absolutely have to get some chrono testing done this morning so I can ship off a review this afternoon.

I won't go to the outdoor range on the weekends... it'd be impossible to get any chrono testing done then anyway ...and today's the only dry weekday in a solid block of rainy weather stretching from last Tuesday to this coming Friday. We're on pace for one of the wettest Aprils on record here in Indy.

Duty calls.

More this afternoon...

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Oof.

Left Dallas yesterday morning slightly after 0800 CDT and got back to Roseholme Cottage sometime just before 11PM Eastern. That's a long day on the road and I am wiped out. (And I was just passengering. I find that, when I'm driving these days, something around six hours is nearing my limit.)

I'm hoping to muster the energy to deal with a suitcase full of dirty laundry sometime this evening, but I have a feeling that today's otherwise gonna be pretty much a write-off.

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Ugh

/me looks out window at snow on ground

/me goes back to bed