In Sic Transit Again
It seems like I’ve been working nonstop for a couple of months now, although it’s not really true, I ‘ve mostly taken weekends off and had a nice long Thanksgiving break. It’s just that I’ve gotten so many projects going, I’ve started to be haunted by them, and feel like no second is totally my own. Which, I realize, is a fuck of a lot better than not having any work, and I dig it when I do my billing. Ice berglets forming on Lake Michigan as I flew into Milwaukee Sunday. Benevolently, my Seattle connection was also delayed, and I believe (and fervently hope) that there was even enough time to transfer my luggage, so I’m aloft and headed for a 1am arrival home.
Still, I haven’t had much mental space for reflection, and these pages have fallen a little fallow. Just, coincidentally, as I euphorically told several neighbors about the blog at a New Year’s Eve party, and just after my mom got DSL and started developing an appetite for internet content, and looks expectantly at Perils as the jumping-off place for all good things with an IP address.
As I do every month, I’m just finishing up a week working in Milwaukee. The week started in a deep-freeze, going to 8 below on Monday night before warming up to a balmy 20+ the last couple of days. It started snowing in earnest about an hour before my plane left for Minneapolis, a snowstorm that had actually hit MSP first, so that, as we approached Minneapolis, we were slowed down, sent to a holding pattern, then on final approach waved off of the runway because snow removal equipment hadn’t quite finished clearing it. The upshot: a 40-minute flight ended up taking 2 1/2 hours, maybe longer because, once we landed, we waited another half hour or so as the gate areas were plowed.
One benefit of the elongated flying schedule is that I’ve read over 100 pages of a book I’ve been carrying around and making empty promises to for a week or so - My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk. It’s a selection of the online book group I belong to, and I might have gained enough traction and momentum to actually join in the discussion. I’m a really slow reader, and undisciplined at that, so I seldom finish a book in time to lend my peculiar brand of erudition to the discussions. That would be ok if it were just my own interests I were disappointing. However, I’m also a flagbearer of sorts for the male sex in this venue, and my protracted silences serve to dash the hopes of those in the largely woman-dominated book clubs that there actually exist men who read and appreciate literature. Of course, when I DO participate, those same hopes sustain equal or worse violence.
So, the weekend approaches, although delayed and truncated. I have a slug of work to do, both for deadlines approaching and deadlines I’ve missed, but I’m gonna take a little time for personal decompression as well. The trick is always to use the time well, so that I actually feel like I did something pleasurable or meaningful. Since, in my purview, blogging falls within those categories, watch this space!
