What am I thinking about? Can you guess? Yes, my friend, I am thinking about laundry. Today I get to do laundry. Glory be. And not only am I thinking about the laundry which I will get to do, but I am thinking about the shower I didn't get to take this morning, as when I woke up (from the sound of our blessedly non-electric doorbell being rung by the deliveryperson who was delivering my patterns which I must give to Chrisber so that he can sew me a dress for Swordspoint -- but I digress) there was no power. And with no power and an electric water heater, there was no shower. Now, I am not altogether sure that the water heater is electric; indeed, it may well be gas. But when I tried to run hot water there was none to be found, so I do believe it to be electric or some other problem to have been occuring, Regardless, I couldn't conjure any hot water, so I lived without a shower. In the way that these things go, the power came back on just as I was about to leave for work. I contemplated taking a shower... and it went off again. I watered the plants and was ready to leave once more -- and look! Electricity! But by this point it was late enough that I had to go straight to work, and I did and here I am.

(And gone, and back again.)

Lunch was nice; we had Thai food and talked about jewelry and jobs and about how the new version of gcc apparently compiles java into machine code, which although completely against the "write once run anywhere" meme does seem like it would improve performance a lot. There was duck, also, and fried sweet potatoes. And mango (not manga) and sticky rice for dessert, which was most excellent and could only have been improved if I had been a little less full.

There's a meeting at 3pm, and the impending-ness of it is keeping me from focusing on anything. I hate things which impend. I want to turn to the meeting and shout "Stop looming!". It will eventually do so, of course, but not until about 3:30.

Okay, I have wasted the appropriate amount of time. Meeting now. I wish I was doing laundry.

Ah hah. I have figured out what I am doing. I am writing journal entries with @doings.

The meeting was brief and not very exciting. I came back to see a teacher friend of mine ranting online about how one of her students came into class beaten up by his mom's boyfriend. There are moments when I just hate the people in the world and feel like all problems are insoluble, and that was one of them. Cycles of violence take so long to end, and there's so much of it... and it can start anywhere. I could go on but it would just be depressing, and I might actually cry here at my keyboard instead of merely feeling vaguely like I might.

What else could I talk about? I'm catching up on old entries in Ceej's journal; right now I'm on last November. It's hard to remember that this is the distant past and not just a few days ago, reading it. After I catch up with Ceej I will go back to the whole Liralen-reading thing that Dave inspired me to do so long ago. And probably flip around, some... having a bunch of online journals to read is like the nice bit where you're just back from the library (or bookstore or whatever) and you sit down on the bed with ten or fifteen or more books spread out around you and ponder all the things you now have to read. Except, the web being what it is, all the reading material is there all the time, constantly growing, until one day it disappears utterly and you wonder what happened. However, this only works with journals if you read them semi-regularly, since getting into the flow of them every time is too much work. And they have to be good, of course. If they're not good then there's no point in reading them semi-regularly, and that is like coming home from the library with a big stack of books only to find out they all suck.

Fortunately, unlike the self I was a few years ago (that's generous; even just a year ago), I no longer make myself read things which suck, whether they're library books or anything else. This, too, is a glory of the library; I take books home at random, just because they look interesting, and if they're not interesting I quit reading them. Just like that. Life is so much simpler now. If only I had clean laundry...