Mines

It’s time to address the cubic elephant in the room:

Minecraft. 

I have been playing a lot of Minecraft. 

The rail line I’m building on our shared server is pretty amazing; the giant room I’m carving out at the bottom of my mine is, um, well, giant, and sometimes I just take a day and build a rail station. 

It’s pretty cool. 

The struggle is keeping it at reasonable levels, and I’m not entirely sure I succeed all the time, but I have check lists of things I want to get done every day – x number of work tasks, x number of things for my web pages, for the house – and as long as I keep those in check, I’m not all that worried. 

One of the things is all those meetings. 

When I’m in a meeting that I need to be at but that’s about it, there’s a lot of sitting-there time and minecraft is a good way to help me focus the rest of my mind on what’s being said. 

Doing actual work means I’m distracted, doing writing is nearly impossible. 

When IRL in meetings, I did drawing.  Maps.

At home, it’s minecraft.

It has a sort of positive/negative effect in that it feels productive. So I feel like I’m getting something done, which is a great feeling, and sometimes with this treading-water feeling work is giving me, is a great thing.  

On the other hand, if I feel like I’m getting something done on the computer when the dishes still need to be done…

(The dishes are done.  The floor has been vacuumed.  Today’s task is cleaning the area around the fridge and the entry way to the house and then cleaning it some more.  And then a little more)

We get a new fridge tomorrow!!!

Lipstick

 If you know me in person – which few people reading this do – you know that I rarely wear make-up.  In the last decade, I think I’ve had my makeup done for two weddings and once done something for a LARP.

It’s not that I don’t like the idea of it, it’s that I learned only basic makeup back in the late 80s, early 90s and back then, having ‘cheap skin’ as I do (sensitive skin) everything itched and a bunch of it made me break out.  Not a good look, especially not in your early teens. 

Top that with the fact that I tend to shower, get dressed, leave for work. (Shower, get dressed, log in), and there’s not a lot of makeup going on. 

But I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but we all look sort of weird on camera. 

Mr. Thorn has been suggesting that I try lipstick for a while, because it’s an “easy” (easy for him to say; I NEVER got the hang of lipstick) way to look more professional.  And I’ve been going, “yeah, yeah, sure, some time.”

This time, well.  I really need to get some back lighting for the camera.  I may need to get less Oli-butt on my camera too. But I’d love to look less flat-faced and washed out and, short of losing 80 pounds (working on it) and getting a tan (ha. ha, ha ha.  Ha.), I’m going to need some tricks. 

So I guess I’m going to be learning how to put on lipstick.  At least I have lots and lots and lots of time with nobody but Mr. T, who’s already seen me at best and worst, to see me.   

Anyone have any favorite video tutorials on this? Or tips?

I’m also considering how to hide the consistent, I mean like part of my face consistent, bags under my eyes.  And wishing I’d gotten my eyebrows waxed and a haircut before this whole thing started, instead of putting it off because I didn’t really feel like leaving the house, but at least with that, we’re all in about the same boat. 

(I think I have a box of hair dye somewhere…)

What’re your pet peeves about being on camera?

Is anyone still reading these? Am I talking to myself? I mean, this started as a “live journal” back in the dark ages when livejournal was still invite-only and ad-free, so I suppose that’s not a bad idea, since I’m writing them in part to keep me sane. 😀

Anyone know what makeup looks best on camera?

Or how to deal with looking quite as pallid as I actually am?

 What I noticed most this morning was “how is this the beginning of my 4th week of work from home?  Seriously? I’ve been doing this for nearly a month?”

Well, okay, 3 weeks minus a day down does not make for a whole month, but you get the point.  It all sort of blurs together. 

I mean, I’m not known for having a sense of time – a good one or any sense, really – and this is exacerbated by not having different things at work.  Like, I’m not taking Soylent to work 2 days a week and having tacos on Thursday because that’s fish taco day…  

(I miss the lunch people!)

And the differentiation of the weekends is, as mentioned before, not all that strong. 

But there’s also nothing URGENT going on in work stuff, there’s nothing pressing at me other than a whole lot of meetings and webinars and then meetings. 

So “and then we had to start moving ice packs into the fridge” is a lot more notable than “and then there was more meetings and I did some more basic work.”

Speaking of, we’re getting a new fridge on the 9th,which ought to mark time a little.  I consulted with friends who had bought a new fridge, decided “more than the stimulus check for both of us” was too much for a fridge in our situation, but took some advice, looked for a dual compresser, ’cause we’ve had trouble keeping the fridge and freezer in balance, and ended up with a Samsung “entry level” (if these are entry level, what the heck is the $400 fridge we bought the first time?) stainless steel (!) fridge. I’ll let you know how we like it on Friday. 

How are you keeping the days separate?

And at what point does a fridge stop being entry level, and is it before it costs more than $3000?

Mope

Mope

 Yesterday was pretty much a loss in terms of work, because I took a half-day and then spent a bit too much OF said half-day…

…researching refrigerators. 

Ours is dying slowly, which means everything in the freezer is still frozen but everything in the fridge is… just not quite cold enough.  We’ve loaded it up with ice packs from the chest freezer (hey! a plus to getting all those ice packs – my MS drugs come packed in ice in foam coolers, every 3 months ) so we’re not in immediate danger of losing anything, but it’s time for a new fridge. 

I’ve even picked one out!  Now I just have to make the Lowes system let me buy it. 

Warning, after this, this post gets into the pandemic stuff and gets a little depressed. 

Continue reading →

Skillz

 It seems my most useful skill at work currently is my ability to work from home and my practice dealing with my boss remotely.  

Well, possibly not the most useful; but with a desk set-up and my own office space, I seem to be doing better than a number of my co-workers.  

Kunama asked about skills I use in work, and I’m going to talk first about one I don’t get enough use out of right now – Excel. 

I am pretty darn good at excel, but those skills are sadly not needed nearly as much at this job as they were at the last (Trade-offs.  This job is not driving me insane. You know, plusses and minuses.) One year at my old job, my boss gave me an unwitting birthday present of creating a spreadsheet that literally took me the whole day to make. It was great. 

My wordcount spreadsheet is more complicated than anything I have to make in this job. 

/melodramatic woe

On the other hand: copyediting!  I am seriously listed as copyeditor on a formal journal and that is a reasonably large portion of my job (not enough, the editors move slow and the reviewers move slower).  I am learning LaTeX (slowly) and learning enough statistics to be able to tell if something is a typo or just Written in Stats. I regularly copyedit my boss’s proposals, fancy emails, and the like as well. 

Lately, it seems my most useful skill at work comes from LARPing. 

Specifically, Vampire LARP, playing politics with handfuls of other nerds pretending to be centuries-old vampires. 

There’s a lot of learning how to say what you’re saying without saying it going on in that sort of politicking environment, and there’s a lot of learning to listen to what people aren’t saying in response. 

(It leaked into Fae Apoc more than a little, which is unsurprising considering I was fresh from 10+ years of actively playing the game when I created Fae Apoc.)

The Dean talks. The Vice-President of the Uni talks. The President of the Uni sends e-mails. The Associate Deans talk. 

And I listen between the lines a lot. 

(I think I like the copyediting more.)

How are you doing with your job skills? How are they translating to the current situation?

Inspiration

Sitting through faculty meetings on Zoom, where I don’t have to watch what my face is doing and most of the time they’re not aware I’m there — it’s very, ah, educational. 

Riffing off of something Kunama asked, I’m thinking about ways my jobs make their way into my writing. 

The first thing that comes to mind is the library at Wells College, where I worked for a blessed, awesome, 9 months.  Well, I worked in the Book Arts Center, but half of some of my days were spent doing very little in the library while working for another associate Dean. 

The architect of that place was allergic to right angles and to floors that lined up and, like a split-level that we once tried to rent, it just kept going and going, up, up, up.  You never really knew where you were, but you were definitely somewhere, probably. 

That library had made its way into more than a few stories. 

https://www.wells.edu/library

So’ve the facilities staff at my current university job, who are basically elves.  They are startled when you see them, they do magic when your back is turned — especially the groundskeepers. 

Watching them trim the ivy to exactly the right amount is both amazing and amusing. 

And, while the faculty at the unnamed university in my The Trouble With Chickens stories are, ah, well, they’re a little more bloodthirsty than those at the university of my job, there’s definitely a bit of leakage there. 

Actually, in general, you’ll find that there’s a lot of academia in my writing when I’m working in academia.  It’s more of a trope than when, say, I was an admin for a software company. 

(After these faculty meetings, the professors at several fictional universities might be getting a bit darker…)

Oh! Oh, a story I never finished and only posted one bit of — but some maps, I posted some maps! — Portal Bound, https://www.patreon.com/posts/portal-bound-17977388 — this was inspired both by my experiences working in libraries (First at the SUNY I did my first 2 years of college at, then the Rundel Library/Central LIbrary of Rochester & Monroe County  in, ah, Rochester (NY), https://roccitylibrary.org/location/central/, then the aforementioned Wells LIbrary) and by the architecture of the university I work at now. 

I think I’ve taken the question and run sideways and backwards with it, but hey, I got a post that isn’t about my pajama pants!

Does your work or previous workplaces show up in your art? In your hobbies?

(Like me, have you found yourself staring at a building wondering “how do I do that in Minecraft?”?)