I decided to restart this journal at the beginning of this calendar year because I was feeling an acute need for, let's say, documentation. It's a long story, but suffice to say that my memory, while excellent, tends to store the wrong things.

Witness the conversation we had tonight, spurred by a Jeopardy! question that showed someone standing on the prime meridian at the Greenwich observatory.

Her: We did that!
Me: We did?
Her: Yes, we did! When we went to the observatory.
Me: I have no memory of going to the observatory. Are you sure you didn't go without me?
Her: We both went! We took the skyway!
Me: I remember the skyway. You were a wreck. [That's the kind of thing that makes her very nervous, and I was amazed she was actually willing to do it.]
Her: I sure was.

I remember that we were staying directly across the river from Greenwich, because the convention we were attending was in the Excel. I remember the walk we made from our hotel to the Excel, I remember the coffee place along the way where I could get a flat white and a croissant, I remember the interior of the convention center. I don't remember any actual events at the convention (mind you, it was a Worldcon and when I go to Worldcons I always attend very little of the actual con, because I find that nerds are far less tolerable in packs, and they exercise some of their least tolerable behaviors at these things, e.g. not knowing when to shower and not knowing when to keep their mouths shut). I don't remember what year it was, and while I could go look up when Worldcon was most recently in London ... ah, what the hell, I will. 2014. OK. Might as well have been 1914. Might as well have been the surface of the moon.

I get tired of that. I get tired of my brain storing the wrong names and the wrong faces and the wrong places and the wrong facts all the time.

But what I didn't realize was that I was picking exactly the wrong moment to restart this journal, for two reasons:

1. I'm in an extended period of my life, which might very well last for the rest of my life, where I don't really do much of anything.

2. We are all currently in a period of time where the universe around us is just too fucking grim in every way to contemplate, much less write pithy commentary about.

Anyway. You last heard from me on Monday, when I took the day off and it was good for me. I'd felt like crap on Sunday night and the day off made me feel better. So much better that on Tuesday and Wednesday I barrelled through the usual routine, which on Wednesdays involves leaving the house for an extended period of time, running errands, and having lunch out. On Wednesday night I suddenly and mysteriously felt horrible, and I went to bed hoping it was something temporary, which it apparently was, because on Thursday I was fine and tried to catch up. Today was Friday, which is also a Scheduled Day Out.

(I try to keep to my leave-the-house-on-Wed-and-Fri schedule because the long walks I take on those days -- on Fridays I walk between three and four miles, depending on the weather and my energy -- are the only exercise I get. Almost all the rest of the time, I am either in bed or my butt is right here in this fucking office chair.)

There is just not a lot to report, which is why most of the entries so far have been about story work. Story work is the big thing. What have I done the last three or so nights? I've been doing story renders on the render machine while doing logic puzzles on the other machine. This is typical.

On Thursdays and Sundays we watch The Expanse. We're doing a complete watchthrough (I've never seen it, she has). We're about to be finished with series three. It's very good. That counts as excitement around here. On Saturday we're going out for dinner!

This story, which is a Quitclaim, is going to be pretty meh. I know it's going to be. It's not going to be bad, but it's kind of a nothingburger of a story, it could use more punch, and I'm not going to try to give it more punch because I need this one to be kind of quick so I can grab as much extra time as I can to work on Sleeper Squad 59, which is going to be massive (it will probably break the record for the comic-style stories of thirty-one pages. I wouldn't be surprised if the fucker needed forty) that it will require all the time I can give it.

I have some bigger better Quitclaim stories to tell, but all of the best ones in the queue are what I call Randa's Tragic Backstory stories (it's not all that tragic, that's just the trope), and I've been reluctant to do them because I am kind of reluctant to tell you more about Randa. Randa is supposed to be kind of a cipher. She is a direct descendant of a couple of my characters whom, I admit, were too much ciphers and the reader couldn't necessarily connect to them very well. (One of them I can't mention here because We Don't Cross The Streams -- one day I'm going to just give up and cancel that rule and damn the torpedoes -- The other is this problematic lady.)

Randa's not a cipher because she's supposed to be a placeholder for the reader. Randa is not a placeholder for the reader. You wish you were as cool as Randa. Randa is a cipher because that's her personality; she is not one for personal disclosure. In fact, I get the impression sometimes that even dragging these stories out of her at all is a struggle. She doesn't want to tell them. She doesn't understand why you'd want to hear them.

Actually, that's kind of how I feel about this journal, but I shall persevere nonetheless. Just ... don't get too mad at these lapses, OK? If I'm not saying anything, it probably just means there's nothing to say.

Or that I don't want to say the things I do have to say, because they'll just depress us all even more.