Tag: work

I’ll Never Love This Way Again

Remote Friday, which used to be Work-from-Home Friday–they call them “remote days” at the office now, so I had to rename the blog entry to be correct, because I am nothing if not a stickler (as if). I was correct in assuming I would be brain frazzled when I got home from work (it was a good day, if busy, and I got a lot done. Even wilder, there wasn’t much back-up of traffic on the highway), so I recharged for a bit in my easy chair with Sparky, and reacquainted myself with what happened in the advancing collapse of the Weimar Republic while I turned my attention away, and wasn’t in the least bit surprised at the most recent Neville Chamberlain-like statesmanship from Democratic leadership. The party just needs to die at this point before it gets too ugly…for them. I believe when MAGA turns on the people they voted for it will be incredibly violent and deadly–which is going to be a true Reign of Terror, since the betrayal runs so deep. The failure, and potential death of the Democratic Party–thanks, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, for your utter failure of leadership–will be less ugly, but ugly just the same. It’ll save me some money, since I will no longer be donating to any politician or party going forward…and I certainly will not be doing any campaign work of any kind ever again, either. Right now, the list of donations for 2026 is looking like it will be entirely to primary opponents. Why on earth would I ever support people who aren’t going to fight for the country and the Constitution?

I managed to get chores done last night, as I wasn’t physically tired at all, but had no bandwidth for reading or writing–but instead of sitting in my chair all night, I got my ass up and started doing chores. I did laundry, emptied the dishwasher, and washed everything in the sink and reloaded and ran it again. I picked stuff up and worked on the kitchen, too. I hate that my mind is so fried by Thursday, but this was also a busy-ass week and I was in clinic every day. I also slept very well last night, and Sparky wasn’t as insistent that I get up at six as he usually is. I also managed to pay my car registration on line, got the bills all paid, and now get to do some work-at-home duties before running some errands before settling in to read and write for the rest of the afternoon. LSU’s final gymnastics meet is tonight, at Auburn, so we’ll be watching that tonight, and we need to find something new to stream–but we also have this week’s Reacher and Abbott Elementary to watch, too. That’s tonight sorted, any way.

Tomorrow the weather is going to be ugly with some sort of super storm cell capable of producing powerful tornados. We don’t really have basements or interior rooms here, and the houses all have enormous windows, so yeah, tornados here are quite unpleasant. Yet another reason for me to get everything done outside of the house that needs to be done today, you know? I just need to get the mail and some groceries, nothing too terrible and relatively easy to get taken care of, which will be very nice. It also appears that the Irish Channel St. Patrick’s Day parade is cancelled, possibly postponed.

By checking the news for the weather, I also saw that today is the anniversary of one of the city’s darkest days in history–the lynching of eleven Italian-American immigrants in the city jail. The police chief had been murdered, and the (bigoted) view of New Orleanians that it was a Mafia or a local Italian crime gang, so when some of them were acquitted…the good white men of New Orleans (sarcasm) stormed the jail and lynched the prisoners. It created an international incident and almost led to war with Italy; to appease the Italian government, one of the things the US did (besides paying an enormous indemnity) was create Columbus Day–which is how that happened….funny that a holiday created to honor a genocidal maniac came about because of bigotry, racism, and murder. I wonder…is this the time period racists mean when they talk about how New Orleans “used to be safer”? Because that doesn’t sound too safe to me…maybe it was when Storyville was open? When the Axeman was killing people? I do want to write about the lynchings some time, but I don’t know how to turn that into a story or a book. Perhaps someday….

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I may be back either later or not till tomorrow morning. I will see you then!

Help Me

Wednesday Pay-the-Bills day, and feel good this morning as I swill my first cup of coffee. I have to run errands again tonight when I get off work; so even if I can’t come straight home, I’ll still get home early enough to hopefully finish Priority Project One tonight and get some good rest. The weekend looms large as it draws ever nearer, and I’m kind of looking forward to getting back to work on writing fiction this weekend. I have another box of books to take to the library sale, and I may even start working on the storage attic. I had a goal this year of cleaning that out completely, and I never even got started on it. But the year isn’t quite over yet, either, is it? There’s still time!

I wasn’t sure how yesterday was going to go when I was writing my post yesterday morning, but Tuesday actually turned out to be not just an okay day, but actually a very good day. I got all my work caught up at the office, and had a pretty good day there (I’m so lucky I enjoy my job!). I wasn’t tired when I left, So I drove uptown and picked up the mail, and worked quite a bit when I got home. I made a lot of progress on Priority Project One, and I should be able to finish that tonight. I even cleaned the house. I know, right? Who am I and WHAT have I done with Gregalicious? I don’t know, to be honest. But last night I felt marvelous, and I really felt great when I went to bed, sleepy, around ten. And I slept well, too, and so this morning I feel a bit groggy but good; nothing my coffee won’t take care of, at any rate.

Christmas is a week from today, too. Yikes! I’m not going to say this year has flown by–January 2024 seems like it happened during the Pleistocene Era–but I kind of feel like I didn’t really accomplish a lot of anything this year other than survival, you know? I don’t think I even completed a short story in 2024. I did start working on another Scotty book, which is something. But it was a fallow year for me, writing and publishing wise, and I need to do something about that in 2025 (if we don’t slide into a dystopian nightmare after January 20). I am pretty much healed from everything physical, and the personal blows of the last few years, well, it’s getting easier to live with those losses. Depression/malaise isn’t a constant anymore; it comes and goes now, and so I don’t think I am completely better yet–I know there are going to still be spells–but conserving my mental and creative energy by not letting either be stolen anymore.

If ABC’s capitulation wasn’t bad enough already, Disney capitulated to tyranny yesterday as well, removing a trans character from a kid’s show, and yeah–I’m done with Disney. Much as I want to see season two of Andor and other Star Wars content, I’ll be looking at dumping Disney and its affiliated brands going into the new year. I finally was able to find the list of all streaming services I was paying for, and found that there were quite a few I was paying for that I never use. I canceled all the extras (to the tune of about eighty dollars per month), so next year I am beginning fresh. The only thing I’m still hanging onto is ESPN, and that’s mostly for LSU sports. Hulu and Disney, on the other hand, can go fuck themselves with a razor-blade studded dildo. I’m really delighted to see how much of the country is going to drain into the sewer over the next four years. I am mostly concerned with mine and Paul’s survival ahead of anything else, quite frankly. I wish I could stockpile my medications before the Affordable Care Act is repealed, and of course the gutting of social security and Medicare will end any hopes I ever might have harbored of ever retiring. Yay!

And on that rather somber note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later–stranger things and all that.

Christmas Time Is Coming

Tuesday morning, up early and dark is pressing up against my windows. I slept better last night than I have since Friday night, but woke up out of a deep sleep to go to the bathroom around two in the morning and wasn’t able to get back to it–my body was relaxed completely and resting, but my mind was still working. I feel rested this morning but I don’t know how long that’s going to last…I imagine I am going to run out of steam at some point this afternoon, but I also have to get the mail and make groceries, too. I had also wanted to cook some things for dinner tonight–or to at least have something to take for lunch this week (today is a Lean Cuisine). I feel better, though, this morning than I have in a few days upon waking, so I am taking that as a good sign. It’s been nice having all this out of the office, but it’s kind of weird going back. Outside of unemployment periods, I don’t think I’ve ever not worked for this long since probably high school?

I hope I can remember how to do my job.

It’s also cold this morning–forty-nine degrees, according to my phone–which makes going outside less agreeable and certainly undesirable. I can put the brace on over a jacket, take it off to remove the jacket and put it back on, which makes total sense and I don’t understand why this is something I am initially hesitant to do? The PT went well yesterday and I have the full range of motion back for the elbow; and my fingers are getting more dextrous and ny hand grip stronger. (I kind of felt guilty when he said, ‘yes, keep doing your home exercises because they are working’–because I haven’t been doing them…I told you, I am a terrible patient.) I was exhausted from the PT and from not having slept for two nights, so I wound up not doing much of anything yesterday other than reading deeper into Calypso, Corpses and Cooking by Raquel V. Reyes, which I am enjoying–I really like her character, Miriam–and a likable main character is crucial in a cozy mystery. Nurse. Sparky spent most of the afternoon curled up asleep in my lap, which was comforting and calming and adorable, and then when Paul got home we started watching the Big Vape documentary on Netflix (I think?), which is interesting and got me started thinking about smoking. I smoked from ages 16 to 50, a whopping 34 years, before finally quitting, and frankly, I don’t miss it. I do remember how much i used to actually enjoy smoking, but I’ll never smoke another cigarette in my life. The cultural view on smoking certainly has changed over the course of my life–when I was a kid, you could smoke anywhere and pretty much most people seemed to smoke. My parents did, my grandparents did (not my maternal grandmother; Mom was the only smoker in her family, but pretty much everyone on my dad’s side did), and they used to smoke with the windows up with us in the car. No one thought much about it, of course; despite the surgeon general’s warning about carcinogens getting more and more explicit and fervent as the years passed. I tried smoking in junior high but didn’t inhale, and didn’t much care for it; I tried again the night I graduated from high school and essentially smoked for the next thirty-four years. I still smoked cigarettes when I started writing–which is why Chanse was a smoker and all of his friends were (I did get some pushback from readers about the smoking; a friend who was also a smoker joked that his favorite thing about Murder in the Rue Dauphine was that all the good guys smoked and all the bad people didn’t) but I never really addressed him quitting in the books; I just stopped writing him as a smoker after I quit–and the reason I quit was because Skittle died from cancer. That guilt–that I helped contribute to Skittle’s death–was all it took, even though the cancer he had wasn’t caused from second-hand smoke…just the thought that it could have been a contributing factor was too much for me and I refused to do that to another cat–because by then we were definitely confirmed cat people and it just doesn’t feel like home without a cat in it.

There will be more on Big Vape when we finish watching.

I also am going to be getting back to writing. I signed a contract for a sequel to Death Drop and need to get that finished and out of the way. I wasn’t able to get as much done during this lengthy time off because, well, I had surgery and the recovery–while not as painful as i feared–did drain a lot of my energy, and the enforced rest also made it a little harder to get motivated. I did manage to read more than usual, but the ceiling disaster and repair, the recovery, the physical therapy, and the just now changed medications to deal with my brain chemistry issues was a lot to deal with. I’m also not beating myself up over not getting more done because for fuck’s sake, even as mad as I get at myself for not getting things done…I’m giving myself a break on this. It’s not been an easy year, from beginning to end; but like I always say–if you’re going to have bad things happen, isn’t it best for them to happen all at the same time? That probably sounds insane, but in all honesty–when Paul was attacked and lost his eye? That was the best time for the Christian scum to come for me because I was so focused on getting Paul through what he was dealing with that I couldn’t give them very much attention, one way or the other. (At any other time, I would have been freaking the hell out.) And the weird thing is, professionally this was a great year. I was nominated for an Agatha and a Lefty for the first time, I was nominated for three Anthonys, and I have two books out, and I did some short stories that I am pretty damned proud of–it’s just weird that the highs always come with the lows…or maybe the highs make up for the lows? That’s probably the best way to look at it.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a great day, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back at some point.

A Love Song

Yesterday was pleasant and relaxing. The kitchen ceiling didn’t leak from the torrential storms (but the leak over the stairs came back; it’s always something). I watched some football games (the Alabama-Georgia game was very entertaining, if the Texas-Oklahoma State one was a massive snooze-fest) while reading Christmas Presents by Lisa Unger, which I really enjoyed (more on that later), and then capped off the evening with the Florida State game on in the background while I did things–some more reading, some brainstorming, some cleaning and organizing. I didn’t finish watching, and went to bed early. It was a nice, restful, relaxing kind of day, and that was really nice. Being forced to recuperate and rest hasn’t been terrible, to be completely honest; it’s kind of amazing how quickly I have adapted to not being active and just keeping my mind free from stressors and relaxing. The house is a mess, of course, but I am not letting it get to me and am just doing the minimum I can, with the occasional big thing–dishes, laundry, something. I’m not going to say that I’ll be glad to go back to the office, but this has kind of given me kind of a taste of what retirement will look like, and it doesn’t suck. It’s still a long way off, to be sure, but it’s also making me rethink paid time off. Is it better to do dribs and drabs with long weekends, or is it better to save the time and take an entire week away? I kind of liked this long period of not going to work.

It’s also really easy to lose track of days and dates, too. I often find myself wondering what day it is, or what the date is, and have to check. I also slept deeply and well again, staying in bed late this morning, which is also fine.

Today I want to get some writing done. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this new book, and it’s really time for me to buckle down, put my ass in the chair, and really start writing this thing. I also want to get cleaned up today–I really need to shave my head; I’ve not done that since before the surgery and it’s getting frightfully long for me (does anyone else remember when the length of a man’s hair was something we were judged about? Like men with long hair was such a huge issue, one that would define our culture and society) and I also need to shave my face. I was a little worn down yesterday, too–it’s hard to remember sometimes that my body needs rest still because it’s not finished healing yet–and for someone who is pretty active (or restless, anyway), getting tired doing things I normally do is bothersome. But I have another week and a day before I have to get up to an alarm and head back into the office, which is going to be the real test: can I make it through a shift in the clinic? The jury is still out.

It’ll be interesting to see what the college football selection committee will do when it comes to picking the final four for the play-offs this year. Who will be included? We have three undefeated teams, two one-loss conference champions, and lots of noise. It will be weird to have no SEC representation in the last play-off series ever, given how many times the SEC has won it–and not just with the same team, either. This century has seen national titles for Auburn, Florida (two), Georgia (two), LSU (three), and Alabama (six). Five teams from the same conference, four of them winning more than one. (This is why I laugh when people talk about “SEC bias”–well, how many national titles has your conference won since 2000 and with how many different teams? The most is two–the Big 12 with Texas and Oklahoma, the ACC with Florida State, and Clemson1, and the Big 10 with just Ohio State. There’s a reason for the bias; it’s called success on the field.) But I can see how they would pass over Alabama for Texas; Texas beat Alabama in Tuscaloosa. On the other hand, the last four titles in a row were won by the SEC (LSU, Alabama, and Georgia twice), and the Big 12 hasn’t won a title since Oklahoma back in 2002. Texas is kind of SEC-Lite, though; beating the SEC champion this year and coming into the conference next year. I saw LSU’s schedule next year and it’s brutal; USC, UCLA, and Oklahoma on top of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas A&M, and Arkansas, with Vanderbilt thrown in on top as lagniappe. No Auburn or Mississippi State, but at least there are two easy FCS schools on the schedule. Talk about a brutal schedule–and we’ll have a new quarterback. Looks like another rollercoaster of a season. This last season’s defense was terrible, but still–LSU only lost to Florida State (undefeated, ACC champ), Alabama (one loss to another one loss conference champion AND SEC champ) and Mississippi (two losses, to Alabama and Georgia); which, given how shitty the defense was, is kind of impressive. So, not a bad season, really, if a bit disappointing. But I didn’t believe the pre-season hype, either; I thought LSU was overrated simply for beating Alabama last year, and was correct. And now the season is effectively over; I have idle curiosity about the play-offs and will of course watch whichever bowl LSU winds up in, whether it’s a New Year’s 6 game or not (probably not; there are a lot of good two loss teams–Missouri and Mississippi–and they need to find a high profile bowl for Georgia and possibly Alabama, too). But it was a fun season, even if a bit disappointing for LSU fans, but I’ll take 9-3 over Orgeron’s last two years as head coach any day of the week. I am not completely sold on Brian Kelly yet, either, but he’s better for the program than Orgeron was, and he’s not insane like Les Miles, either. (Kelly, at least, knows how to work the time clock, which Miles never quite had a grasp on.)

I’m hoping the Saints draft Jayden Daniels, to be honest. This was a truly dismal Saints season–and we won’t even talk about the disappointing Tulane loss yesterday, or that it looks like they are going to lose their coach to a higher profile program, either.

I think my next read is going to be David Valdes’ Finding My Elf, which is a holiday-themed young adult romantic comedy. I met David earlier this year (he’s also a friend of my friend Kelly) on the y/a panel at Saints & Sinners, where I didn’t really belong (my feelings about being considered a y/a writer are a subject for a different time; but the short version is I write books about teenagers now and then, and because the characters are teenagers they’re classified as y/a, but I don’t write them any differently than I write for adults. Maybe I am making too big of a distinction, and this doesn’t from any sense or mentality that y/a is somehow lesser, because it’s not–there’s some absolutely terrific y/a and middle-grade work out there. I leave categorizing my work to the industry because trying to make sense of it is too much for me and I don’t want or need my head to explode.) Anyway, David was absolutely marvelous; his book You Spin Me Round was already in my TBR pile, but I can’t pass up reading a Christmas y/a romcom during Christmas season, can I? I’m also considering writing a romance myself–a gay one, of course–and already have the set-up and the opening scene written up in my head. Maybe I’ll be able to find the time to write it this next year; stranger things have happened.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Selection Sunday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back with some blatant self-promotion later.

  1. Miami also won a title in 2001, but they were not in the ACC at the time. ↩︎

Whatcha Gonna Do

Friday, I think? It’s very weird to lose track of days and dates and things like that. Not that I am good with them regularly and never have to stop to think about it, but not having the structure provided by having to go into an office every day has kind of unmoored me. I don’t know that I can honestly blame it on the surgery anymore, since it’s been nine days, right? I don’t know. I slept for another ten hours last night, and feel so rested it’s marvelous. I did ask my surgeon to clear me for work earlier yesterday, and he said no. “I’m afraid you’ll overdo it and spoil all the great recovery you’ve already experienced.” Probably just as well. I’m worried (of course) about the unpaid leave and money, but I think I’ll most likely be okay because everything is going well so far. Things might be tight for a while, but that’s..well, it’s not like I’m not used to that already after the four years of car payments. (I shudder even thinking about that horrible period of juggling bills and running up credit card debt that I am still working down.)

I wrote yesterday and boy am I rusty. It was a serious struggle. I had dictated about thirteen hundred words the other day on my iPad, so yesterday I cleaned that up (I don’t speak clearly, and have always had a bit of a lisp; the dentures have exaggerated that, so voice-to-text isn’t the best method for me, but it’s an option I can use in a pinch; it’s something I could potentially even do in the car with the phone on long drives) and tried to finish the chapter. I didn’t finish it, sadly, and it took me hours to get the additional new 1200 words yesterday down on the page. I’m a little rusty– one of the primary reasons I do this blog is to write something every day so the muscles don’t need to be retrained or warmed up again–but that’s not a surprise. I’m trying not to freak out or stress about it, because that’s pointless and a waste of energy that I don’t have to spare right now. I have finally found a comfortable position to sit at my desk and rest the brace on the edge so my fingers are freed up for the keyboard, which is enormously helpful. I am hoping to get cleaned up this morning and run some errands a little later on–I have to pick up a prescription in Midcity, and thought about making a grocery run and stopping at Five Guys (yay!)–before coming home to curl up in my chair with Nurse Sparky and read. I’ve picked out Lisa Unger’s novella Christmas Presents as my next read; I’d like to kind of keep the Christmas theme going, too, which might mean reading the two latest Donna Andrews novels out of order (just typing that made my stomach clench; my brain wiring is so completely fucked up it’s not even funny), and then picking out Christmas-related titles from the TBR pile–which won’t be easy, the Unger and Andrews might even be the only ones, honestly; which is interesting. I myself have only written one Christmas season book (Royal Street Reveillon) and published one story (“The Snow Queen” from my Upon a Midnight Clear anthology from a million years ago), primarily because I was worried about the temptation to descend into cheap sentiment.

It’s gray and rainy outside today. It started raining last night and continued overnight; which was nerve-wracking. I haven’t mentioned this, or I don’t think so, but a few weeks before my surgery roofers were here working on the patio deck above my kitchen. I came home from work one day to find an enormous hole in the kitchen ceiling–I could look up and see the workers and blue sky–and ceiling debris all over the kitchen. There was rotten wood up there, potentially termite damaged as well, and it just caved in while they were working. They came into the apartment and boarded up the hole with a piece of plywood. Fine, I figured; but that’s a stopgap and not a fix. The next time it rained I could see that the plywood was wet, and then it started dripping. Not good, but not bad. Then after my surgery we had a huge New Orleans storm, and the kitchen ceiling was leaking–all around the board, and elsewhere. I got up that morning and noted there was water on the counter and the stove, and my rugs on the floor were wet. I got out a couple of buckets and went back into the living room to my easy chair to read or watch television. About an hour there was a crash from the kitchen–part of the ceiling had collapsed, and you could see soaked insulation hanging and dripping–and about another hour later more came down. They came out the other day to fix the leak–and there’s no water in my kitchen this morning, thank the Lord. They told me since we had rain forecast this weekend they weren’t going to fix my ceiling–because if the fix didn’t work, it would all just come down again anyway–so when I got up this morning Paul said, “It’s rained all night so be prepared when you go downstairs” which made my heart sink (without my hearing aids I can’t hear the rain) but I came down and checked and all good. So they’ll come back next week and fix the ceiling and that’s the end of that.

I am also very impressed with myself for not freaking out over the ceiling–but at this point, my primary and only real concern is my arm and recovery. I also made my first physical therapy appointment for next week, which is cool. It’s also taking some time for me to get used to having greater mobility and more use of my left arm, too. I tend to walk with it in the bent position it needed to be in for that first post-op week rather than just letting it hang or moving it in unison with the other when I am walking. I think I need to get up every day and go for a walk, really. (Not today–I am not walking in the rain, but if it stops later, it won’t kill me to walk down to the park.) I need to be taking walks and things anyway; at least be stretching periodically to keep my muscles active and not let them get even more flaccid and weak from inactivity. And of course, running errands will get me out of the house today and walking the aisles of the grocery store is good exercise. And I have my wagon to help bring them in from the street. (I am so pleased with myself for buying that wagon, Constant Reader, you have no idea. I need to Scotch-guard it so I can just leave it outside under the overhang so it’s not always getting wet when it rains, or maybe even get a waterproof tarp to put over it.)

I’m also thinking it’s time to get a new microwave. Ours is over ten years old, it doesn’t work as great as it used to, and the instruction manual is long gone. I am also going to get a taller ladder for the downstairs; the five foot one works fine for the fans upstairs, but I need something taller for downstairs, and again–it can be kept outside and brought in when I need to use it. It’s ridiculous that I’ve waited so long to get a ladder that I can use without paranoia and fear of falling as I fully extend to reach the blades of the downstairs fans; get a fucking taller ladder, dumbass. I think it was primarily because I worried I couldn’t fit the ladder into my car and bring it home; now I can have Lowe’s deliver it. Thanks, pandemic! At least it was good for something.

And on that note, I am bringing this to a close for today. Have a fabulous Friday and I’ll probably do some blatant self-promotion later.