liralen: Finch Painting (Gromit_Knit)
Liralen Li ([personal profile] liralen) wrote2007-11-10 10:29 pm
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Busy...

Left for Denver at 9:40 for dim sum at 10:45, which seems pretty early. Very light breakfast followed by the extremely heavy lunch and then shopping at the Pacific Ocean, so we were pretty reasonable with what we got.

Dim sum was at a new place that was okay, but most of the stuff I liked best wasn't done that well, and the teenage boy next to me ate ALL the egg custard tarts so I didn't get one. But I did make off with two of the sesame balls afterwards, as no one else seemed to want them. So I have my treat. Jet helped me decide to get a vanilla cream cake roll, too, so I am not bereft of caloric goodies.

We spent the afternoon making Granny Squares, playing Kingdom Hearts, and dyeing wool, as Jet really wanted to dye wool. I now have another four ounces of BFL sitting in my bucket, awaiting coloring decisions and I just can't deal with it. Jet and I each did two ounces, enough for socks or mittens for him, but little enough for anything else. I probably should have just spread the other two ounces out, but it was plenty for a single sheet of plastic to handle. I really wanted autumn colors anyway...

Then we had dinner, Okinawan style noodle soup from Hawaii, frozen and shipped to the high desert, and Jet and I ate those while John had green chile stew. Then the last three week's worth of Avatar while I spun.



Between the spinning deadline (which was near the beginning of the month), the writing deadline each day (normally not urgent, but I'm realizing it's very important to me), my homework deadline, my scheduled times at the OUR center and Jet's classroom, and my mental deadline of having the Phoenix done before December in order to try and figure out a knitting show then I'm really starting to stress.

What kind of makes it worse is knowing that most of those deadlines are self-imposed. Crown Mountain has been very, very forgiving about how long this is taking me. The writing doesn't *HAVE* to be done, at all, much less every day. The homework has been something that doesn't HAVE to get done, as they're very forgiving as well. The OUR center is just grateful I show up at all, much less that I actually get something done at a particular time. The beds can wait for winter under a bunch of crap as easily as it can under a nice carpet of crushed leaves. The knitting stuff is all self-imposed as well. The only thing I have that has an outside requirement is Jet's classroom as his teacher expects me to be there to help her out with what she wants to get done, and she makes her plans with me in mind. It's good to be needed in at least one thing.

But all the rest is just self-imposed, and part of my brain is going, "This is so STUPID..."

I've let go of the garden, in a sense. I'm hanging onto the writing like I'm digging fingernails into a cliff. I'm finishing the camel down as quickly as is feasible given the dimensions I actually do need to hit. The knitting is partially for my sanity, but it's killing my hands between it, the spinning, AND the writing.

Okay, AND the hour to hour and a half of Kingdom Hearts Jet and I are playing pretty much every day. It's time we get together and it's really something we're both enjoying a lot. It's important to my sanity in a different way. Though, admittedly, all my dreams, now are in the format of Kingdom Hearts, along with the big, green triangle "PUSH" button for critical hit time.

My hands may be my limiting factor in the end. We'll see if they survive the month. I thought about telling my massage therapist, "And here you thought I wouldn't need you if I stopped working..." My upper body had been a real mess.

Luckily, I'm down to my last two ounces out of sixteen, of the camel down, so I should be done with that, at least, at the beginning of the week, next week. Then I'm down at least one major hand wrecking thing. We'll see if I'm even offered another job, if this one took too long for them. If it didn't, then I really do know the pressure isn't on with them, and I can just pace myself better next time.

[identity profile] grey-lady.livejournal.com 2007-11-11 08:03 am (UTC)(link)
I think that, in many ways, the self-imposed deadlines are harder for us to let go than those imposed externally.

My sympathies - I understand all too well at the moment, as we'll be leaving for the US for Thanksgiving in less than a week, and I'm in a barely-suppressed state of panic over everything that needs to be done in the next 6 days. (In addition to trip preparation, I've a major project deadline at work, and the house sale closes/completes on Friday.)

I hope your hands cope with the tasks you're asking of them.

[identity profile] liralen.livejournal.com 2007-11-12 03:04 am (UTC)(link)
You have my sympathies as well. Good luck with the trip and all the prep involved!!

I hope my hands hold up, too, but it's only a couple more days of spinning, and I'm thinking of letting the knitting go until the end of the month. We'll see how well I hold up under that. *laughter*

[identity profile] rephetibel.livejournal.com 2007-11-11 03:16 pm (UTC)(link)
Your dreams seem to involve a lot of saving the planet kind of themes. Maybe you're feeling guilty about not working so you're filling your dreams (and days) with other kinds of hard work.

[identity profile] liralen.livejournal.com 2007-11-12 03:12 am (UTC)(link)
*grin*

Hm. I think I've always had those types of dreams. I put the date of the dreams on them, so you can get a feeling for what was this year and what was not. So about half of those were this year, and half were before. Looks like a lot of them in 2000, actually, which was the first year we lived here in Colorado... which was actually very busy.

It's interesting, all in all.

I know that the fade dream was likely because my sister's condo was being threatened by the San Diego fires, a close friend was having a medical emergency, two other friends suddenly had relatives of theirs die, and one other friend found out she had cancer. All in two days.

I'd had the temple series just a few days before, which, as you'll find out, was all about beautiful, spiritual places springing into existence, embedded in rock and placed with wisdom and learning from all kinds of things. Between all the creation I'd been doing it was appropriate for that.

The fade came, probably, from realizing that everything can come crashing down with very little warning. That it can all just get swept away...

Someone noted, though, in the analysis of that dream is that even though the world was literally going away and there seemed to be no hope for it, I was STILL TRYING to save it. I wasn't cowering somewhere or just dying or even *being* the guy behind the wrap... I was still trying to save it.

But it's been an axiom of mine, since I was a child that it's important to save the world, even when it costs me. So, perhaps that entwines everything I feel and do, and it comes out more strongly in the subconscious when my reality doesn't really let me save the WHOLE world at once. *laughter*.

I do note that I have a lot of corporate distrust in my dreams.
Edited 2007-11-12 03:14 (UTC)

[identity profile] aelfsciene.livejournal.com 2007-11-12 07:05 pm (UTC)(link)
What do you guys think of this season of Avatar? I'm still gobsmacked over Friday's ep ("The Puppetmaster"), which gave me goosebumps and made me cry, variously; so intense, and the best scary episode I've seen of a show in a long time. Two to go until the break, and I already know waiting through that will kill me dead. So much I'm looking forward to, from the Comic-Con preview, but I don't want it to end!

[identity profile] liralen.livejournal.com 2007-11-12 08:03 pm (UTC)(link)
Jet found it kind of scary. But then, at the end, when Katara stood up for herself, he was entirely okay with the whole thing after that. Of course, that was when *I* got creeped out.

And Jet was really puzzled when he asked, "Why is she crying?"

And I had a really hard time trying to explain it to him. Wow. It was good.

I didn't like the beach episode much. Jet wasn't impressed with the great grandfathers' episode, but I liked it. He was like, "Is this whole thing a dream?" I said, no, it actually happened, but in the past. And he was okay with it after that.

But, yeah, the break is going to be hard and long... sniff.

Still, it's fun to actually watch it while it's being shown this time.