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Catching Up and Moving On…

…in which I talk about how I’m just rutting along, these days.

So, I missed my update last week. I was down to the wire on my Halloween costume and had one bit left to finish, so I opted to do that, rather than write up a post. I had intended to catch up last Thursday or Saturday, but that obviously didn’t happen. I don’t really have a topic for this week, aside from the fact that lately, I’ve felt just a bit like Bilbo Baggins… “like butter scraped over too much bread.”

That’s not to say that thing have been bad, and even more so, I don’t feel like I’m over taxed for time, it just feels like I’m losing track of my down time. I know it’s there, but it’s just not registering in the logs. Even this past weekend, for example. Despite it being Halloween weekend, I had absolutely nothing scheduled. I had no games to attend, my costume was done in time for a Friday night party, there was nothing going on at all. And yet, somehow, I lost track of the whole weekend. I wake up on days like Saturday and think “I should do [blah] today!” Only to realize at 6:00 that I haven’t done anything, and I don’t really remember what I did do.

Related to this, I’ve found recently that I’m much more prone to drifting off into a daydream more often. Is this a symptom of aging? For example, several weeks ago I was riding my bike to work and as I crested one of the steeper hills on my ride, I realized that I hadn’t shifted down at all like I usually do. The more I recollected, the more I realized, I didn’t even remember climbing the hill, I was just there. I’m not sure how I struggled up the steep incline in the higher gear without noticing, but I had done it, apparently blinded from the effort by some other, distracting thought. And even more inexplicable, it took me another couple of blocks to remember what I had been thinking about on the climb. So, in short, I’m losing time.

The funny thing about that is, in this pulp adventure game I’m running, there is a clan of martial artists that have the ability to save up lost time and use it later to act outside of our normal time stream. Apparently, I’ve only mastered the ability to save time, because I sure as hell haven’t figured out how to reapply it at a later date. It’s a trick that I think would be really useful, especially since I have this tendency to take on too many hobbies, or to delve too deeply into the ones that I have. This blog, for instance, only gets updated as regularly as it does because I specifically and intentionally schedule time to work on it. I think of it as a “job” even though I know it’s nothing of the sort. It serves no real purpose, it garners no revenue, but if I didn’t think of it as such, It’d just wither away again as it has in the past.

One thing I would use saved up time for is NaNoWriMo. I have attempted the challenge twice, and completed one novel (back in 1997) for my efforts. I’ve always had the intent to challenge myself again, but it just hasn’t seem feasible. I realize that that’s part of the challenge, but the last time I attempted, I realized that my lifestyle simply was not conducive to spending 2-4 hours a day hammering out streaming literary garbage. The last time I tried was after Ansel was born, but long enough after that he needs less direct attention. Even then, I barely managed to get started before I just got completely overwhelmed and had to admit defeat. I’m not saying that I’m going to wait until such a time that I can guarantee success, but I feel like I need a bit more of a chance to succeed that I would be granted now. Unfortunately, that time may not come until Ansel is in High School or some such absurd distant era. Though, I might find more success if I attempted the challenge in the summer, when I have more vacation time, and less work duties. Maybe I’ll have to make my own NaNoWriMo, just for me.

I do manage to keep my creative mind flexing, though. Gaming is a huge creative outlet, even beyond the role play itself. I’ve gotten into mapping lately and have burned many an hour on that project. I’m never completely happy with the product, and so the map is constantly changing, but it’s not like I have to rebuild a city every time I move a building. I’ve attempted mapping before and found that I was far to critical with it, but this time around I’m taking a bit of a different approach and finding it much more satisfying.

Additionally, for the production of my Halloween costume, I tried my hand at sculpture, to a degree. I played with some Sculpy to fashion an amulet and in all humble honest, I’m very pleased with how it came out. I was confident going into the project because I had two concepts of completely different difficulty, so if the harder one fell apart in my hands, I could always fall back on the simpler. Surprisingly, I dove into the harder project and it just fell into place with almost no effort. I’m not sure how it all came together so well, but I’m extremely pleased with the result. So much so that when I discovered a chip in the amulet on Monday, after Trick-or-Treating, I decided that I needed to fix it, even if I likely would never need it again. I have tonight and tomorrow to fix it if I’m going to do so, because I have my final costume party on Friday. We’ll see what happens.

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