C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 71

How To Create An Exhaustive To-Do List

I’ve had several people ask me in the past few days, half-jokingly and perhaps half-not, if I could make them a major To Do list, or if I could come to their house and purge (I totally will, too. It’s way more fun to throw away other people’s stuff. The thing is, you have to let me…), or if I could give an example of my lists to draw from.

I can do that, sure. :) Let’s say you need to Do Something About Your Books. (I reckon this is a fairly understandable topic for those who read my blog. :)...

it’s the moving countdown

I’ve just spoken with the estate agent. The good news is that although the lease is up at the end of May, they do not expect us to be out of the house at the end of May.

Indeed, it appears we could continue to live here indefinitely until the house sells, with people coming in to look at it while we were living here. Which is not what we want to do, but it’s somewhat nice to know that if for some reason we can’t be out until August they’re not going to throw us onto the street (because even...

moving house as project management

Yesterday a friend was over and she saw my 20-point Thinks To Do list for the living room and wondered what it was. I explained it was the pre-move to-do list. Not the moving list, just the preparing-to-move list.

“…have you ever considered project management?” she wondered. :) (Later she said, “Seriously. All it lacked was timelines and assigned roles & responsibilities, and I could have put it in Microsoft Project.”)

Anyway, despite the project management levels of lists lying around I’m fe...

The Great Digital Move

I have just about completed ripping our CDs. This is a task that has been done in the past, but I’ve been unable to find the damn drive upon which the old rips were saved, and probably a new rip (10+ years later) is better quality anyway (it’s certainly faster), and because I have little need to own physical CDs, it will reduce our physical possessions by some percentage when I’m done. I’m trying hard to buy music digitally now, although mostly that means I just forget to buy it at all.

In ri...

So we have to move. Again.

So we have to move. Again.

Our landlord died and the people who inherited the house have decided to sell it. (Precisely the same thing is happening to my sister right now.)1qq We don’t know when exactly we have to be out, but we have to be out. We also don’t know where exactly we’re going to end up, because the median rent in Dublin is more than we’re currently paying, which is more than we can actually afford, which means: not Dublin. Ted’s job is north of Dublin, so unless circumstances cha...

Picoreview: Woman in Gold

Picoreview: Woman in Gold: well worth watching.

Woman in Gold is based on the true story of an Austrian Jew whose family artwork was stolen by the Nazi occupation, and her international legal battle, sixty years later, to get it back. Helen Mirren plays Maria Altmann and Ryan Reynolds plays her lawyer, Randol Schoenberg, who comes from a long line of highly distinguished Schoenbergs and who has thus far totally failed to make his mark.

And good god, Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black plays the...

purging boxes

I’ve spent this afternoon Getting Rid Of Stuff. Some of this was of the prosaic “empty the trashes” nature, but the bulk of it was involved in going through boxes that have been sitting around with the intent to be gone through. The big thing to tackle was a large box of received correspondence from roughly 1990-1998. A few months ago in another one of these Getting Rid Of Stuff binges I almost threw it out wholesale, but held off, and days later realized with a shock that I was really glad I...

the actor’s nightmare. ish.

I had dreams between 5:30 and 7:30 in which I could not tell if I was sleeping or awake, even though several times I recognized I had to be sleeping.

The point at which I was doing a stage play with Christopher Lloyd (Doc in the Back to the Future movies) was not enough to make me realize I was sleeping, although my absolute failure to remember any of my lines or even the gist of them after a week without rehearsal was.

The point at which my phone melted and morphed into something that didn’t...

Recent Reads: Shaman

I’ve owned Kim Stanley Robinson’s SHAMAN since it came out, but hadn’t read it because I was still writing the Walker Papers, and regardless of how different his shaman and mine were likely to be (which was very, given that his book is set 40,000 years ago), I didn’t want to be reading about somebody else’s shaman while writing mine. :)

SHAMAN is one of those books that’s either going to work for you or it isn’t, I think, although a lot of KSR’s work can be summarized that way. I mean, I’m a...

Picoreview: The DUFF

Picoreview: The DUFF: conflicting.

The DUFF is sort of this weird mashup of a high school makeover movie and, like, Juno, or something. DUFF stands for Designated Ugly Fat Friend, which the main character, played by Mae Whitman (who, at age 26, is a moderately convincing 18 year old), discovers she is one of. Except it appears the only person in her school who actually knows the term is the one who first uses it to describe her, the boy-next-door/jerkface/love interest, played by Robbie Amell...