Fri. May 12, 2023: When The Idea Bulb Lights Up

image courtesy of Colin Behrens via pixabay.com

Friday, May 12, 2023

Waning Moon

Mercury and Pluto Retrograde

Early showers, then sunny and pleasant

Somehow, yesterday seems like a very long time ago.

Today’s serial episode is from Angel Hunt:

Episode 32: Beliefs & Hypocrisy

Drogo confronts Lianna regarding her beliefs in being a witch.

Angel Hunt Serial Link.

Meditation was great, and I felt much better and more focused after (which is kind of the point).

I worked on July’s poem, and made some preliminary scribblings for the one I need next weekend. A little ass-backward, but that’s the way it worked out.

Sent off an email to one of the actors in Monday’s reading who had a reading of his own play  yesterday, wishing him well.

Wrote a Process Muse post, which wound up being longer than I expected, revised, edited, polished, uploaded, scheduled. It’s for a few weeks down the road, so I can take another look at in in a couple of days, just in case I want to make cuts.

Went to the post office to mail the insurance materials via Certified mail, bought stamps, caught up with what’s going on around in town (since the Post Office is the happening place here).

Swung by a store to pick up some of the WordSeek puzzle books my mother likes.

Grocery shop. Bought more than I planned (gee, what a surprise). But actually doing some meal planning again.

Uploaded and scheduled next Tuesday’s Legerdemain post. I’ll do the rest of next week’s and the following week’s today.

Did client work in the afternoon. Completed one project; answered follow-up questions on another. Did the social media rounds for Legerdemain, and the blogs.

Started reading MURDER IN POSTSCRIPT by Mary Winters, which I’m really enjoying.

Sat on the porch, reading, and noodling on the May poem. I know what I want to say, but I’m bloviating too much, and need to distill it down into specific, clear imagery.

Because I hope to get to the Clark today, working on the big project there even though I’m still waiting for the grant money to show up, my mind turned toward the Clark, and the exhibit I saw around my birthday (which has since closed). I’m still fascinated by the sketch of a private rail car that was turned into a theatre. I started playing with some characters and an idea that blossomed into a somewhat comic-horror-mystery idea that I hope will be novella length (maybe around 200 pages). I wrote up some notes. I have to do some worldbuilding. It’s going to have more psychological terror in it than physical, although that will also play a part. It melds that sketch with the reading I did about Katharine Cornell’s touring company and mind games played by toxic bosses. Horror is not my natural wheelhouse, but that’s what best serves this piece, so I’ll take on the challenge.

We’ll see where that goes. And when I have time to work on it, although I made some more notes for it this morning.

Today’s plan is to write an episode of Legerdemain, then polish, upload, and schedule the rest of next week’s and the following week’s episodes. Then, I’ll head to the Clark for a couple of hours, then to Wild Oats to pick up a few things. I hope, this afternoon, to get in some work on both REP and ANGEL HUNT.

I dread tomorrow because we’re supposed to do another storage run to the Cape. The traffic chaos will be awful, but if we don’t do it this weekend, it would have to be next Saturday (since my reading is on Sunday), and that’s too much. Anything beyond that, and we’ll be stuck on the bridge with seasonal traffic for several hours in each direction, instead of just one hour and change, which is what tomorrow is bound to be.

Sunday is Mother’s Day; we plan to have a quiet, pleasant one, and enjoy our porch and balcony. Maybe I’ll finally finish touching up the paint on the wind chimes and get that back up. And maybe it will be warm enough to put out some plants. And plant more seeds.

I will get some writing done in there, although I’m not yet sure which projects.

Have a good weekend, my friends, and I’ll catch you on the other side.

Tues. Oct. 1, 2019: It’s The Frustrating Things

Tuesday, October 1, 2019
Waxing Moon
Pluto Retrograde
Neptune Retrograde
Uranus Retrograde

Busy, but then, we’re in autumn, and autumn is always busy! It’s unseasonably warm.

Friday, I ran some errands. I had to put gas into the car — I was all the way down to the bottom of the tank. Unusual for me — I usually refill it when I hit half. Of course, because I was so low, they were working on the street and had a detour so I couldn’t get to my usual gas station. I made it to another one, but I was not a happy camper.

One of the annoying things about Cape life is that you’re stuck in ridiculous traffic all summer on roads that can’t handle it. Then, during “shoulder season” — spring and summer — you’re stuck in one-lane only traffic because that’s when they work on the roads.

Only this year, they did roadwork all summer, too, so the summer traffic was even worse than usual, and now it’s no better. Plus, the damn tourists just aren’t going home. It’s gotten to the point where there’s about a week in mid-March where you can get where you need to go on time, where it’s not blocked by snow and too early for roadwork.

The very idea that they want to replace the Bourne and Sagamore Bridges with bridges doubling the current spans is not the solution. There’s no way for that traffic to feed into the current roads and no way to widen those roads. Just have one bridge for on-Cape traffic and one for off-Cape. It will still be a mess. The Cape is beyond capacity.

If you live on Cape, it’s harder and harder to get anywhere OFF Cape and get back to get anything done. And it’s getting harder and harder to get around on Cape. Not to mention that the mass transportation system is awful on Cape, and limited to get on and off. You can get to Boston, but not a whole lot of other places.

On top of that, all the tree-cutting is out of control. It has nothing to do with the health of trees, and everything to do with clear-cutting and leaving the Cape looking like a cross between a sandbar and a prairie. Personally? I like the oxygen trees provide. Breathing matters.

So Friday was annoying. I went to the library to do some work, but it was chaotic and noisy (not in a good way), so I wasn’t there very long.

I couldn’t get all my errands done on Friday because of the traffic. Plus, I hadn’t slept much — insomnia most of the night.

Crashed early on Friday because of Thursday night’s insomnia and slept for 10 hours, which is unusual for me.

So, Saturday, I had to finish what I couldn’t get done on Friday, which included taking the garbage to the dump, coming back and taking the recycling to the dump, and washing out the garbage bins. Also got some raking done, our first raking of the seasons.

In the afternoon, I switched out the lace panels on the first floor for the spiderweb curtains. Even though today is the first of October, and I don’t usually do it until now, I had the time on Saturday, so that’s when I did it. I put up most of the interior decorations. I’ll put up the exterior ones this week.

Roasted a chicken on Saturday night (served with sweet potatoes and spinach). We’ll have some good leftovers this week. I’ll do a curried chicken salad, and maybe a chicken potpie.

Made cinnamon buns on Sunday morning for breakfast. Wrote on Sunday, had a good writing day. Didn’t get everything I’d hope to finish done, but it was still a good writing day.

Tessa hates being an only cat, even though we’re giving her lots of extra attention. We went to the shelter down the street to meet some new arrivals. There are some sweethearts, but we had more questions before we can try to adopt. Let’s hope they can answer. It’s the same place where I adopted Tessa, but they’re made the adoption process more complicated since I adopted her.

Sunday night, made turkey meatloaf in mushroom gravy, served with mashed potatoes and steamed peas.

Read a mystery where the premise was good, but the execution poor. The protagonist annoyed me. She wasn’t cute and relatingly human –she was whiny and annoying. Read two more Travis McGree novels. Again, the female characters were awful. The way Travis tries to romanticize his promiscuity gets annoying. Just admit you’re a dog and be done with it. Stop trying to make us believe you’re different and somehow noble, because you’re not. He’s as damaged as the hot messes he’s always bedding.

Finished reading a couple of memoirs, one by someone with whom I’d worked in New York, another by someone involved in some of the same productions. It amazed me how differently the anecdotes were printed on the page than what was said backstage.

A few major things are up in the air right now, which is something I don’t do well with. But I have to be flexible and keep my ability to think on my feet. This will be a stressful month. And then we go back into Mercury Retrograde, which I dread on so many levels I can’t even start talking about it. There’s too much going on at the same time as not enough. It’s a weird kind of friction.

More insomnia Sunday night into Monday, which means I woke up cranky and out of sorts. Decent early morning writing sessions, time with a client. The necessity of yet more errands that I couldn’t finish over the weekend, piled on with end-of-month errands, meant I missed meditation.

Onsite with a client, and then some other appointments. Too much tension in my life right now.

But as long as I keep showing up at the page every day, at least there’s progress somewhere.