Monday, September 9, 2013

A Wee Holiday

I don't dare to look at the date on the last published post on this blog: I gave myself a wee holiday from the Internet, and forgot to come back. So, here I am, in the cyber flesh, somewhat overworked as the change-over in work continues to baffle me with builders and deliveries and my transfiguration from man to newspaper ink as we put the little pieces of the Sunday Times together.

Evidently, I don't holiday well. Holidaying should imply rest, or at least doing something that isn't work, for a period of time. Instead, I was just away from my laptop, barely tweeting, not telling Facebook the ins-and-outs of my life, not blogging or vlogging or Google Plussing. I haven't done much by way of social media interaction since sometime in August, and I suppose I should apologise for that. Except apologies are over-rated when they don't have an explanation behind them, so here's how things happened.

The week following my last blog post - if I'm remembering when that was, exactly - was all a massive setting-up process for a weekend of Shenanigans and Buffoonery at my house. We had a Family Thing. That's about as much detail as you'll get on that. Needless to say, though, that the prep-work and everything else involved and the fact that I had all of this going on and a complete lack of willingness to talk about it online pretty much left me with nothing to blog about without pulling a random topic out of my...notebook. Let's say notebook. It's more family friendly.

Following the Weekend of Madness, which included some time off work, I ended up with a lot of hours in the bookshop as we went through with a major aspect of our change-over. I was also walking to and from work every day, which meant that from around eight until seven I was out of the house or getting in/out of my uniform. Somehow, I managed to maintain a weak semblance of a social life while doing all of this, going to the cinema a couple of times and having dinner out (the joys of KFC...which I can't see myself wanting to eat for a long, long time now) and actually talking to people.

At one point, I had some fun putting together a list of things I'm actually good at. I have a little portfolio in my room, now, which I want to keep adding to. It felt good to put it together, to make things seem a little bit less crap and a little bit more...possible? I suppose that's how it feels. Like things are possible. The big bad scary world of post-college life is a little less terrifying with a good idea of what I'm actually capable of now sitting in my bedroom.

During my time away from the Internet, I also managed to get myself back reading. I've even made the executive decision to make videos about the books I'm reading, since I don't make videos often enough.

And, of course, I've picked up The Sims 3 again. Something about living vicariously through digital minions is oddly fulfilling. At the moment, I'm playing using a married couple of a fairy and a wizard, just for the fun of it. It does mean that they share different beds (she sleeps in a fairy house outside...) but they're also capable of running a house rather efficiently. She can use her fairy magic to repair broken objects without fear of death, and he can magically upgrade objects without...well, fear of death, again. I lost a Sim in an earlier game to an electric shock. Thankfully, it's just a game...

While I've been contemplating many ideas for stories in my time away from the Internet, I've been keeping the writing to a minimum. It hasn't exactly been fun, not writing, but from this blog post on I'm getting things going again. I'm back from my wee little holiday, and it's time to get to business.

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