( Deutsch )

I have about two, maybe three more exercises in this German book and then I'm done. And then I have to work on translations all day. Bzuh. When the fuck did this happen?

Actually did get some header templates and full page templates up! Woo! And I even smashed a fucking conclusion out of that one story for submission, and I have no idea how I did that but I'll take it. Did not get the full scene out of line edits but the day is still young. Ish. Okay, it's middle aged. And I still have time and room for some line edits between doing the various posts. What I do not have time for, brain, is doing things with the desert world. Put down the painted man and step away from the wild child sand witch. Let it go, woman.

I also really do need to put my amaryllis bulbs into pots and tie up the sage before it starts turning into a sage creeper instead of a sage plant. I'm not sure whether or not raised beds will actually happen this weekend, but I definitely need to do some actual tending of the plants I have. And possibly dig around in the pots I have and get rid of the ones that aren't growing anything so I can put other things in those. Maybe try tomatoes and peppers again, but maybe try other things like, um. Thyme. Since that's all my Scarborough garden is missing.

Something something stuff. Potatoes. I am not fucking going back out in that coldass wet weather to get the kind of potatoes I usually use for, um. Not really steak fries because they're not fries, but. We call them onion potatoes. Chunky hash browns? Something. So, mashed potatoes it is. Hell with it. I'm really loving this whole domestic thing. I know it doesn't magically make everything better to have the perfect house or whatnot, and the thought of the house getting so messy that I have to clean all of it is a pain, and there's all the gardening to do, but. Oddly. I'm really, really enjoying all the little domestic things I'm getting done. Go figure. In a way, it feels weird to think of myself as being domestic. And yet it's the right adjective to attach to all that set of things I love doing.

( Deutsch )

I think that exercise was more to practice asking someone to speak slower and listening comprehension than anything I could do written. That said, I'm deeply pleased/amused that I understood all the sentences just reading them. Possibly this means I need to sit down and watch Lola Rennt or something and see if I can understand spoken better.

I did go ahead and make me a blog for the website. Something more along the lines of a grown-up blog? I don't even know what the difference is between a blog and this journal, except that this journal has much less thematic, structured blather. And language practices. And dragon eggs. Probably neither of those things will go on the blog. But, I made a blog, put a link to it up on the web page, put links to Murderboarding and the web page up on the blog, and did a first entry. We'll see what happens there. Also did manage to code a link page and toss that up, and now I guess it's time for coding the Arcana page? So tonight's statement of intent will be line edits, doing the Arcana, and working on putting things into coherent form on the Grey Gull until the boy goes to work at which point I'll switch to doing follow-up on Person of Interest, because I suspect there will be Game of Thrones this evening on the TV. Which, you know, is fine, I don't have to use the TV or ignore distractions to write up the Arcana page. Dinner will be fucking takeout because I didn't expect to have to cook for anyone other than me (read, scrounge in the kitchen hey that looks edible) tonight, but game got cancelled. So, fuckit, I was craving crab rangoon anyway.

Tired. And chilled. And tired. Did acquire Fimo for decorating dreamcatchers. It remains to be seen whether Fimo works as well as I remember sculpey working previously. Although now that I think about it, having a small piece of Fimo in my hands while I think at the computer or the netbook could be incredibly beneficial. Must investigate further.

No, all right, self, come on. Get some work done this last hour, and then you can go home and order food and curl up on a warm couch with a warm boyfriend and a warm cat or two and fuck around with words while watching Game of Thrones. Which, I may hate the novel series, and there may be aspects of the story in general that I find deeply troubling, but damned if I don't enjoy the television. (Hating the novel series has more to do with the fact that apparently while I love George R.R. Martin as an editor I cannot stand him as a writer. I barely got through the first third of ... whatever the first Game of Thrones book is. The boy, however, is slowly munching through them. Go figure.)

( Deutsch )

Not quite the rousing victory I wanted over my webpage, but the bulk of it is fucking done. The bones of it are done. I have ten or twelve other things I want to do, and getting the Black Ice page up is going to be a bitch and a half, but at least I have a damn web page now! Which of course means it's open season for the brainweasels on it's not pretty enough/it's not cool enough/it doesn't have enough neat stuff, etc etc etc. Fuck off, weasels. I have work to do. Like, tonight, Haven 1x01 and reading over the Stephen King post. And line edits. And cooking. And, you know. Actual work instead of curling up in a ball and crying about how I'm not cool like the other kids.

Possibly it could use some morebetter graphics, but I can fuck around with those later.

I'm cold. I dislike this. I also dislike the fact that I'm warmer at home than I ever am at work, despite the fact that the thermostat is supposedly kept several degrees warmer. I know it's supposed to get warmer and it does look like it's staying more in the fifties and heading up over the next week or so but arrgh. Do not want to be cold. Am tired of winter. Ready for spring now plskthnx.

Still got nothing more substantive. I got a wossis dragon? Legendary, that there thing. On DragCave. Yes, my substance for the day is pixelpets.

( Deutsch )

Doing German before I get distracted with anything else, because apparently today is another day of skyrocketing high followed by as big an unassisted crash as I can get. Yesterday it was people complimenting the first original fiction I'd put out in public in a while. Today it was getting attention from one of the writers of Angel. And Rome, and Burn Notice, and other things, but Angel is what came to mind. Insert obligatory my life the fuck how is this here.

I did a thing! Sort of based on the giant character-building questionnaire of doom, but so far just those questions. Go, break it! Tell me what other questions you want on a form to fill in that I can then make into a chart or something. Have fun. I'm having fun.

I seriously need a nap, but I'm having fun.

Tonight is apparently macaroni and cheese with tuna and then all the Person of Interest ever. At least till around 10, when it's all the line edits or coding, whatever I'm in the mood for. Probably coding, at this point. I think part of the reason I'm so enthused by the idea is because it's almost over. I'm almost out of pages to code. Shock of shocks.

And in the meantime, I really really need to finish that Haven post so I can get that out there, do Person of Interest tonight, and then do Haven 1x01 or the When You're At Home series or both, tomorrow evening. get started on *gasp, shock* a backlog! No, surely not. That never happens.

Oh, and if anyone needs a Valentine's Day dragon from a previous year, let me know?

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Well, a while back I ordered a few shirts from this one place that had some cheap shirts that I hoped were inexpensive rather than cheap. No, they actually are cheap, they're fairly thin and I'll be surprised if they wear well, and probably they're meant to be worn maybe once a month because other people rotate out their clothes/closets more than I do and therefore don't put their clothes through the washer as much as I do. But it's even more irritating because these were pretty much the kinds of shirts I wanted. Simple long-sleeve scoop-neck and cowl-neck shirts. Because somehow I've gotten used to being cleavagy.

Ah well. Maybe I'll just keep collecting shirts and end up being able to rotate out my shirts that much. Or something. I would like to find other inexpensive clothing sites than Kohl's, though, that have shirts I actually like. Ideeli is good for some things but it's so hit or miss.

Speaking of clothes and things, I need to get my earrings out and actually hanging and things. Not entirely sure where, hell, maybe I do need a jewelry armoire, but I need to get that done anyway. There was a vague sort of a gesture involving picture frames and backing. And I just now realized. I could do a dreamcatcher and hang my earrings on that. See, Jag, you can be smart.

Now let's see if I can also be productive today.

( Deutsch )

Well, that was half an hour out of my day due to incredibly moronic mistakes. Namely, mine. Oops. Now my password hint to myself is hopefully moreclearer, though, and I won't embarrass myself in front of tech support again.

Dammit, Jag.

Right. Somehow, I have no idea how but I suspect it has to do with no headache today, I have actually managed to get through all of my notes on the Cape Rouge for the upcoming post. Which means that tonight might actually go quicker than I thought, reviewing the last handful of scenes in that episode, going through further episodes (only one of which should have any substantive information because I am sadly lacking in knowledge about boats) and then pulling caps and that might even get posted today! We'll see, but the wargs of Imposter Syndrome, Muddled Thinking, and PMS seem to have stopped nipping at my heels, so it might get out on time after all. If that works out, and if by some miracle I manage to get a good chunk of cleaning done today, I'll sit down and pull times for the next WYAH essay for the weekend. Friday's day job work can be coding the website and working on the Nathan-Duke essay.

Hey, speaking of surprising things, what the hell is this shit where I'm actually getting traffic on my website? This is not helping the whole shit I need to get my website up and working thing. Well, it kind of is, because then I don't have the excuse of "people aren't going to see it" not to do it. On the other hand, eek. It's been kind of half-assedly there for a while. Still, the actual tasks to do aren't complicated or even necessarily that time consuming. Well, maybe a bit time consuming. But they're not complicated or numerous, so that shouldn't take too too long in the grand scheme of things.

I've come up with two different approaches (and realized that it's a marathon, Jag, not a sprint) to getting interpreter-fluent in Russian: the first, which I think I've mentioned before, involves translating the Leviathan into Russian along with various other parts of my website. The second involves translating useful/everyday emergency services dialogue into, well, every language I can think of that I can manage, starting with the dialogues I often had at the clinic where I did Spanish interpretation. This brought to you mostly by my contemplating interpretation and going over those memories. Debating whether or not to post them here, but while posting them here would keep me honest about doing it, you might not want to see random bits of dialogue in Spanish, French, Russian, or German. You might! Speak now if you care.

...I seem to have guitar picks in my pocket. I didn't mean to put them there, they just sort of happened.

So, yeah, all in all, doing much better today without the headache. There are a lot of things where I need to remind myself that it's a marathon not a sprint, not the least of which are putting together the anthology and getting interpreter-fluent in Russian (Spanish [again], French, German). Website building and House unpacking are a bit of a sprint, for a given value of sprint that most likely will take a month or two. Another month or two. But the rest of it is a will-take-multiple-months-to-years marathon. And the blog is just a thing that happens regularly, because apparently if I can't chew on TV shows I will chew on actors, serial killers, friends and neighbors, or whatever else is lying around. I am not kidding. I have gotten into a discussion of whether or not the Son of Sam was most likely the Son of Sam and only him or whether there was additional bastardry involved.

So, that's happening. Now I also just need to figure out what I'm doing for Valentine's Day if anything and I'll be golden. I'm usually incredibly lackadaisical about Valentine's Day, never having made much of it in the past. But I'd like to know if something's going to happen so I can plan not to get any of the aforementioned projects done that night. ... Oh god, I've become that uberorganized scheduled person. When the hell did that happen?

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Holy shit, I can string together sentences in German. I think. I'm still really shaky on clauses and whether or not they require infinite commas or not. But on the plus side, this is helping me figure out what I need to review. And restoring my confidence in my ability to speak any damn thing. And my ability to translate my author bio into German! Spanish and French, sure, German, not so much.

And yet, I just strung some fucking sentences together. Fuck. Yeah. I might have to go find some German fanfic. Or some German literature so I can write some German fanfic. Well, drabbles. Something. Fuck yeah four fluent languages.

... hey, I just had a brainstorm on Russian.

Ahem. I also have a headache, so that might be the brainstorm. Or that might just be politicians in Arkansas being jackasses again. Or still. Don't ask, you'll just get the same danger of ragestroking that I have. Instead, let's focus on positive things, like this awesome factory building converted to reduced-rent teacher housing specifically intended to make teacher's lives better. I am all for helping out our teachers. They are a much underappreciated bunch.

Feeling much more like a competent adult today, which might have something to do with the sleep I got. Still a bit tired, which might have something to do with the headache, which definitely has something to do with PMS, but at least ... well, if all I get is a headache and some bloaty soreness after having an extremely irregular cycle due to starting hormonal crap again, I will take it. And hope that that does go through to having almost no PMS symptoms at all. Because that would be so nice. I mean, I know I pretty much won the lottery as far as PMS symptoms go, but it would still be nice to reduce "very little" to "none."

Right. Sadly, I have too much shit to do to sit here yammering. So let's get to it. Not quite shut up and soldier, soldier, but maybe more like... I don't know, what's a good get up and go to work song? One of those.

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Spirit still willing. Brain only slightly less spoo. Network provides lifesaving help. Particularly when pointing out typos that make sentences into brickbat lingerie. At some point that might get a more direct less semantic translation, but there it is. I really need to figure out how the hell to get a decent night's sleep.

... I also need to stop going off on wild tangents like translating everything in my "wall o' [language]" tags into Spanish or French. Self, that is not the way to either relax (unless it's a for-pleasure free time activity) or knock down your list of things to do, quit it. Besides, Spanish doesn't have a more useful phrase for any of those phrases either. That I know of.

... I also need to stop thinking that just because someone came and corrected several mistakes in my German, that means I fail at German and should go crawl into a hole somewhere. Oi, these aren't brainweasels, these are wargs on the horizon. Thorin, we have wargsign the likes of which even Mahal has never seen.

Anyway. That's done, and per the suggestions of my sister courtesans, putting this here so I don't digress too far off track. Today's tasks are blogwork (specifically the Wesen biology) and line edits on the Brownie Mafia story. If my brain shuts down and I need to be productive (and it's not a warg) I might do coding. If not, knitting and TV watching it is. Tomorrow will be a new pair of tasks to alternate between, and so on. And typing this out, keeping it logged ought to keep me honest and on track for the day. Hopefully. At least tonight is a music night, which should help me reset my brain in between bouts of writing/editing. Still not entirely sure when I became this organized person who could do all this but, hey, whatever. Now it's of to make sub-lists of all the lists of all the projects I'm working on over the year. And hopefully that doesn't trigger a hypergraphic fit because as stressed and tired as I am, that's something to watch out for.

... and balloons. I need long, skinny balloons. Though damned if I know where to get those.

( Deutsch )

Oh god I'm going to have to keep coming back to translate this, aren't I. God yes.

On the plus side, I did get my author bio finished and coded somewhat quicker than I expected. I'm further along in the world building Leviathan (almost done!) than I thought. Which, for those of you who weren't there the last time I tackled this, is a 52-question year-long (or intended to be) worksheet geared towards building an original or semi-original world for a novel. That's the important part, one of the steps in this stupidly large questionnaire is actually to outline your novel, or novella or whatever. So there's that! This means I should actually be able to get the damn thing up tonight. I hope I hope.

Reading over our recaplyses gives me a happy. The method by which I got sucked back into our blog is wacky and tangential, but now I need to pull my head out of it and get back to work. But reading over our blog still gives me a happy, which means we're probably at least doing something right.

Succeeding at doing coding for the website means I get to feel like an actual author, or at least a person who is doing something serious towards being something she wants to be. Steps are being taken! I do need to sit my dumb ass down and stop fucking around with the site design, though; apart from a color change it's probably just damn fine the way it is, and stop freaking out, self. There is one design thing I want to experiment with, but other than that, chill. And keep writing copy and coding. But, you know, god forbid I actually be competent at site design because then I would be able to code my own site and have to actually, gasp, do something. The only thing I can't do is put up graphics, mostly because I can't pay for graphics and I'm not sure what sites to pull from/what the protocol is.

That's a tomorrow problem, self. Worry about that later. Along with finding that PDF layout creator editor thing so I can put word documents into some pretty format in a pdf. And then worry about ebooks and CreateSpace after that. And. Something. No, my brain is shutting down, time to get back to day job work, i.e. packing things and doing physical labor.

( Deutsch )

Well. That happened.

The upshot of the that is that I really, really, over the course of this year, need to get my Russian up to at least passable fluency. Like, stat. The next week and a half is booked pretty solid, but after that I need to start setting out chunks of time to work on translating from Russian to English and listening from English to Russian, although at least if I'm talking to someone I can ask them to slow down. Assuming I'm not dealing with emergency services. Aheh. Aheheheh.

No, it's nothing I want to talk about just yet, and no, it's not an emergency anything, but it'd be really nice if I could start self-pub at the end of this year. Or even the middle. Middle of this year would be good.

To which end, of course, time to get my ass in gear on the line edits and so on. But dear god I'm exhausted already, and the deathmarch hasn't even begun yet.