Despite the blissful respite from gloom afforded by the visiting girlfriend this last weekend, I face reality – November is here. I seem to whine about this every year. I don’t think it’s seasonal affective disorder; I just hate the shift from daylight saving time back to normal time, and suddenly finding myself having to trudge home in the cold wet darkness after work. Am I turning into a sun worshipper?
Earlier in the month I had a small hernia scare – almost couldn’t sit down for a good hour and then dull pain in the upper thigh which lasted through a weekend. Saw a GP about it; first time in years I’d been to one. She referred me to a specialist, who told me in all likelihood it wasn’t a hernia, more likely some mysterious muscle tear and that it’d go away in a month. So far it hasn’t completely gone, but it’s better.
That was followed up by the plumbing emergency. After the heaviest recorded rainfall in Seattle history, my sewer line backed up due to tree roots, causing seepage in my basement. Fortunately it wasn’t a catastrophe, and was solved with a quick call to Roto Rooter, a root cutting machine, and some magical powder flushed down the pipe; but water did crawl through my basement, ruining around twenty of the tiles in the piano room, and leaving a foul-smelling mess of soaked insulation behind that I have yet to fully clean up. As this seems to be a recurring problem, I may eventually have to kill some trees on the property, or worse yet dig up the sewer pipe (which is of course underneath the wall of ornamental rock in the front). And of course there is now some mysterious leak in the bathroom which I suspect is due to cracks in the wall of tile which will ultimately need to be replaced.
Housing is sometimes overrated.
We moved offices to Smith Tower. I was grumpy about the move at first (I pushed for suites with individual offices – sometimes I really just want to close a door and geek out uninterrupted, heavy metal in the background), but I’ve adjusted to it now – I’m in the corner farthest away from everybody else, away from the windows, and I get work done same as ever. It’s very nice to have daily cleaning service as opposed to, well, no cleaning service whatsoever – no more dust bunnies on the verge of intelligence! Unfortunately we’ve traded hardwood floors for carpets with a dizzying pattern, and the neighbourhood isn’t great; we’re a few blocks away from the scarier denizens of Pioneer Square.
For some reason, I have accumulated a todo list a mile long, work and personal and otherwise, and I find myself paralyzed trying to figure out what I should be doing next. House maintenance of all sorts. Thinking about getting that driver’s license. Reading I should be doing. Volunteering I keep putting off. Recreation and exercise. Blogging more often. Argh! At least I did buy a lot of candy tonight to hand out tomorrow. First time I’ve been able to do that in more than a decade – the last Hallowe’en was tragically cut short by the explosion of stink bombs at the grocery store.
Despite being a procrastinator in everything else though, I did manage to add a RSS feed to this blog tonight – proving once again that I’d rather be a geek than be productive.
