Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 81

Happiness is Sleeping Late

I taught in public schools for the first fifteen years of my career, and I had to be at work at 7:30 AM and I hated it. Today I slept until 1PM. I’m a sleep slut, but I am fully rested and very happy. Sleep. It’s a good thing.

How did you wake up to happiness this week?

This is a Good Book Thursday, March 17, 2022

This week I ordered another book on cleaning and reread the first two Rivers of London books because the new one (the ninth?) is out in a month. It’s about an impossible murder. Also Beverly Brook is having twins. But it’s going to be all right because Peter Grant can do magic. Cannot wait.

What did you read this week?

Working Wednesday, March 16, 2022

Last night I put up bathroom shelving and a towel rod. Today, I am going out for a booster shot and mulch. Still working on taxes. One damn thing after another. Nothing but good times.

Your turn to brag: what did you do this week. Or any week, really.

Happiness is the Last Snowstorm of Winter

We’re getting slammed with snow this weekend (okay, not slammed, four inches is not slammed) and it’s beautiful. This is, in part, because it’s the middle of March and next week it’s going to be in the fifties all week so we just have to shovel out the weekend, and in part because it’s probably, I hope, the last snow of the season, but mostly because it’s just beautiful watching it fall. And then melt on Monday. Also I bought a giant Lemon Gnome to encourage me to keep going. Happiness is also a Lemon Gnome.

How did happiness fall into your life this week, lemony or otherwise?

Random Tense Week

This is my life right now:

If you pull the string, it plays “Beyond the Sea” as the fish goes up to swallow the oblivious swimmer.

My previous this-is-my-life image was this:

So you can see that life has gotten tenser. Or I’ve gotten more clueless. Hard to tell.

I told my therapist that I have really good taste, and she said, “I know, I’ve seen your clothes,” and I laughed because we were on computers and she couldn’t see what I was wearing: a baseball shirt with the words “What does not kill you makes you stronger. Unless it’s bears. Bears will kill you.” I’m sure Vogue will calling at any minute to get a picture of that.

I still kinda want that “There are two kinds of people in the world, the kind that can extrapolate from incomplete data . . .” tee.

I’m watching my dogs eat Chicken McNuggets and feeling sorry for them because they have no thumbs. God knows what the world would be like if dogs had thumbs. (I don’t even want to think about the world if cats had thumbs.) On the other hand, they’re dogs eating chicken nuggets, so they’re not suffering. But still, their lives would be so much easer with thumbs.

Krissie and I have been discussing the plotting of sex scenes, specifically when to have them happen in the plot, and for me it always hinges on the character. I mean I like to see the relationship progress first, but I also like Anna picking up Nate in the first chapter, so it really depends. I told her I was not good at writing sex scenes, at least in the context of the New Age romance scenes that are explicit (that’s not a criticism, some of them are good and crucial to the plot, see Kennedy’s The Deal), but that’s not something I’m good at writing. Krissie pointed out that one of my sex scenes was good enough that somebody plagiarized it, and that was a little comforting. But still there’s a reason I’m better at bad sex scenes than good.

How’s my week going? A raccoon ate my croissants.

And I had to buy a new computer. I always end up buying a computer because my last one died (one before this one had a huge crack in the screen, this one had a fried motherboard thanks to liquid under the keyboard which I do not remember spilling, but the computer was definitely dead and I trust the Genius Bar), which means I don’t get the thrill of buying something for pleasure (see car). It cost the earth because I need a big screen, plus it’s in this dull gray that looks like a laptop on the Death Star. OTOH, the screen is huge (16″) and aside from the hassle of getting everything back in place, it’s a joy to work on. For one thing, when I type an “a,” I only get one “a” instead of the three my last keyboard was giving me. I am still looking for my desktop, and Microsoft Word is ghosting me even though I’ve owned their damn software for decades, which come to think of it is probably why they want me to buy it again, but in general, the transition was pretty seamless. I can’t blame Jobs for Gates’ greed.

It’s snowing here. Coming down like a mother. Tomorrow it will be fifty, and much will melt but I have to drag the trash out today. It’s been in the forties and fifties so far this month, but on the day I have to drag the trash to the street (not that far), it snows, probably for the last time (I hope). I’m starting to think the universe hates me.

Next Day Update: I finally got Dropbox back, but Microsoft definitely hates me. It won’t let me into my Word files and I’ve spent hours trying to get help from them only to find out they’d overwritten my old paid-for program with the new on which is why they keep telling me I have to buy it. So I just put Word in the trash. Screw you, Microsoft. Hello, Pages.

And I didn’t get the trash out to the street. I took Mona to the vet on the wrong day. I tried to cut back this monster thorn bush and now I’m covered in scratches and welts. I still don’t have the taxes done.

OTOH, it’s a beautiful day and I don’t live in Ukraine. It’s one of those two-sides things. Ukraine is suffering terribly, but nothing is going right for Putin, and the rest of the democracies in the world appear to be getting their heads out of their butts, and there’s some hope for a better future. And I’m not suffering terribly but it’s tense here and I’m doing some silent screaming, but it’s also a beautiful day, and the thorn bush is trimmed back and I can probably get the rust out of my new dress, and the dogs are happily chewing on chew sticks, and Emily has climbed on top of a pile of clothes and is snoozing like a house cat instead of a stray, and my future looks brighter (she said softly so fate wouldn’t drop kick her). There are always setbacks (I’m not talking about Ukraine, that’s an obscene ongoing tragedy) but life goes on and so do we. There’s beauty everywhere,I just have to pull up my socks and get to work.

(Another good thing: I have great socks.)

XIR3675 Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1555 (oil on canvas) by Bruegel, Pieter the Elder (c.1525-69); 73.5×112 cm; Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium; Giraudon; Flemish, out of copyright

Which brings me to W.H.Auden and this wonderful essay in the NYT by Elisa Gabbert that’s the best thing I read all week. At quarter to six this morning, still having not gotten to sleep, Gabbert and Auden and Brueghel stunned me with the beauty in the world all over again. I’ve read the poem a dozen times before, seen. reproductions of the painting even more, but early this morning, this essay made them both new again and made me think about something besides my tense but incredibly fortunate self.

So now I’m snuggled up in bed with a new laptop, a dachshund, a poodle, a Maine Coon, a Diet Coke, a Hot Pocket, new gorgeous yarn (just came in the mail), a new word processor, and my taxes.

Nothing but good times ahead.

How’s by you?

This is a Good Book Thursday, March 10, 2022

I needed something safe after a traumatic week, so I reread Connie Willis’s “Take a Look At the Five and Dime” and felt good again, all squishy inside, because it’s a story about joy that really captures the exultation of the emotion. And because it has wonderful characters (some of them horrible people but still great characters) and very nice people getting a happy ending along with a life-changing epiphany. Plus Willis’s wonderful, gentle sense of humor. Big Willis fan here. It’s just a lovely story.

What did you read this week?

Working Wednesday, March 9, 2022

What’s working: My new 16″ laptop which is a beast. Also me, trying to set it up, which is pretty easy considering this one magically has all my passwords in it. I think the magic in this case is the Cloud, but damn did that make getting back up to speed easier. I have no idea what my WordPress password is, I haven’t used it since 2006. But here we are.

What’s not working: My old computer which has a dead motherboard and is now being recycled at the Apple Store, along with all its data. Most of my stuff was in Dropbox, and I’m praying my desktop is in the Cloud because that’s where the last year plus of Nita rewrites was. Along with many, many post-it notes and downloaded files. Yes, I will remember not to do that in the future. Also not working: Word, which I have been using since forever. I may just change to Pages since it’s free on the computer and will import from Word, and I don’t use 90% of the Word bells and whistles anyway. Still haven’t gotten the Dropbox logo in the menu bar. Still haven’t found my desktop stuff. Still feeling like a deer in headlights after this past couple Weeks From Hell.

Sigh. What did you work on this week?

This is a Good Book Thurday, March 3, 2022

The best thing I read this week was an Atlantic essay on “The Nocturnals,” people who prefer to sleep in the day and work all night. It made me feel less of a freak for being such a human bat. Also the manuals for the car because it does a lot of things that I don’t know about, although now that I have bumper stickers so I can find it and know how to roll down the windows and play my iPhone through it, do I really need to know anything else? (Yes.)

What did you read this week?

Working Wednesday, March 2, 2022

Please note: This was published a day early by accident. This will have absolutely no impact on anyone anywhere, so I’m leaving it up. Simpler that way.

I’m getting things done. I mean, I have so much to do that even working all day wouldn’t make much of a dent, but there’s progress here. Also, February is over, and in a couple of days, we’ll have a week of high forties to low sixties temps which will make me so happy. I can see the light at the end of the frozen tunnel. Also working on a new collage for Alice because that’s what the Girls sent up. And the eyes arrived for my Cthulhu. Nothing but good crafts ahead and possibly a less cluttered house. Onward! Also good work being done: the EU, UK, and USA kicking Putin right in the money belt. I usually don’t cheer for oil companies but go BP and Shell. Fingers crossed that works.

What did you work on this week?

Happiness is a Silver Lining

I’m not going to lie, February has really sucked for me. (Not as bad as it has for Ukraine, I’m fully aware, but this is me we’re talking about.). The thing is, a lot of the suckage has turned out to have benefits. My sixteen-year-old car died, and I loved that car, but it snowed here and I took the new, heavier, all-wheel-drive Nita out onto the roads and had no troubles at all. My computer and iPad went down with Wifi and exploding power cords and I was without my usual electronics for two days, but that forced me to finally get to know my iPhone; there’s a lot of stuff on that iPhone. And my septic tank . . . actually, there’s no silver lining yet for the septic tank, we’re still in crisis mode on that one, but I’ve been putting off replacing it for years, so that’ll be a worry gone, replaced with a new enormous-debt worry, but still not a plumbing worry. Plus I’ve watched the Tom Holland “Umbrella” lip sync about twenty times, so February hasn’t been aa complete loss. That and “Shut Up and Dance” is what’s going to get me through the end of this month.

Fingers crossed Ukraine gets a silver lining, too.

What was your silver lining (or non-lining) this week?