Holding together remarkably well...

So, my average day this week has gone like this: wake up too early fretting about one or more deadlines at work this week, exercise, go to work and work like a dog, come home, make dinner, pack a couple of boxes of books, read a bit about the Wars of the Roses*, sleep. Had a brief break in routine on Tuesday, where in honor of Daniel's birthday, we went out to dinner and went to a bookstore to buy him the new C.J. Cherryh novel.

I honestly expected by this point to be ready to say, "If I ever again contemplate moving house during a major documentation milestone at work again, please shoot me." But actually, it's not too bad. I'm a bit tired, but everything's getting done and there haven't been any disasters. And having a nice big supply of podcasts and audiobooks makes packing a lot more fun than it would be otherwise.

I've also successfully arranged for electricity and water service at the new place. Which puts a real lower bound on how bad things can be. If I can guarantee the ability to power the laptop and make a cup of tea, everything else will follow.

*I sometimes think my life is crazy, but at least I'm not Henry VI.

Inside my mind, aged 12

While packing up books, I came across years' worth of old diaries. The gem of the lot has got to be one that I started the summer before I entered 7th grade, and wrote in fairly regularly for a year. It's pretty funny - I should post some excerpts, if I can resist the temptation to edit them to make them sound less inane. I'm a better writer now than I was then, for sure.

Reading the diary is an amusing foray into pre-teen lack-of-perspective: I'm amused that my deep disappointment over The Police officially breaking up gets slightly more wordage devoted to it than my doubts about the existence of God. In general, the amount of space devoted to rambling about science fiction novels, pop music, movies, and occasionally excruciatingly detailed plot summaries of Star Trek and Doctor Who episodes is breathtaking. Clearly, I was trying to talk about stuff that was important to me without quite having the vocabulary to do so. Especially in the early part of the diary, my critical vocabulary consists largely of "ok", "good", "great", and "the best in the world". (As far as I can tell, if I read or watched anything that I thought was total crap that year, I didn't write about it.)