Either I’ve gotten too lazy or to old to go out and enjoy playing in the snow. We’re getting about 18″ already here and it’s still coming down. I was originally planning to go and do early Christmas with the fam today but that was wisely cancelled. I’m not about to get all bundled up and take a walk around the block with this much height of snow, even if the sidewalk snow is packed down, which I really doubt it is.

This storm, along with Tiger Woods, is why people shouldn’t start doing “Best of…” lists until the year is actually finished. Go December!

Funny trending topics on Twitter today are #snowpocalypse, #snowmageddon and @snOwMG.

Here are some pix, including the buried red Zipcar that I originally scheduled today.

One year and six days ago I spent my “birthday work lunch” making and serving grilled cheese sandwiches for the homeless families at Carpenter’s Shelter. I’d estimate I made about 30 of them. Me and other coworkers were volunteering for the lunch shift. It was a good thing to do, the staff and temporary residents all seemed pretty thankful and it felt really good to do it too. And it was fun. I had also taken the following two days off of work, a Thursday and Friday, to have a long extended birthday weekend. I had days to use up before the end of the year anyway. So my birthday last year was technically the last day I was in the studio as an employee.

One year and five days ago I caught a flu bug and was pretty much laid up in bed for those two days I had taken off work and the weekend, too.

One year and one day ago was Monday and I was scheduled to be back at work but since I was still not feeling 100% and we were dreadfully slow I decided to take a sick day and have another day of recovering.

One year ago I walked into work and, before my strict 8:30 morning meeting, was ambushed in my office and told that I had been laid off along with five other employees.

So it’s been 365 days of unemployment. Which means filing a lot of actual paperwork and digital paperwork. My food stamps will expire this month so that’s $200 less money from my unemployment checks, in a sense, that I’ll be getting.

Have you ever tried to find a 2nd-tier creative job in an uncreative town? It’s not easy. Most of the local ads I’m finding are skimming the bottom of the barrel: “do this logo for $50 and there’s no way it should take you more than two hours”… or freelance jobs that are paying $15 an hour. When I moved here fourteen years ago I was making $30/hour on freelance jobs.

So now what? Reinvention? Easier than it sounds. Relocate? Most employers aren’t going to hire someone who is not local. Go and work at somewhere that’s three levels beneath my education & experience? That seems the only option now. Suggestions?

I’m sitting here, looking at this. And at that. And it’s nothing that I haven’t seen before. I’m sure you’ve seen it too, one of those days where you just look around at things and sit there.

Don’t deny it, you’ve had those days.

There’s no reason to go anywhere, really. There’s no where to go for any reason. And so you don’t. You don’t do anything. You don’t go anywhere. You sit down at the computer and there’s no reason to go anywhere through that box either. And yet you go there.

All day.

You think of what the rest of the world is doing, and you let that happen around you. There’s so much this and that, and yet you do this… and that… meaning you go there in the next room and look around… and then you go into the next room, and look at it, and move…

Mr. Coup said that we, as humans, are not meant for idle time and I’m starting to believe that.

National Novel Writing Month official ended five days ago, but I’m just now uploading the content that I have written. The goal was a 50,000 word piece, and I knew I wouldn’t make it to that goal. I originally thought I could hit the 20,000 mark but I failed miserably in achieving that almost halfway goal. I wrote a little over 10% of the stated goal of 50K, ending with 5738 words.

In hindsight I should have set off an hour a day (or even 1/2 hour) just to sit down and write. The premise of NaNoWriMo is to just continue writing, to keep going at it without thinking about it too much. Sort of a stream of consciousness. I got lost in the trance of writing a couple of times and that was really fun but that didn’t happen too often and starting up the next time seemed a little daunting. And maybe I thought about it too much, where the characters were going and how they were interacting to get into the flow of it.

For example, I never really got to explore Mark’s numerology, the relationship between he and Aleah, Daniel’s larger part in Mark’s life and Mark never got another review with his boss, Helena, and I was really waiting for that. I wanted Georgie’s chapter(s) to be more in depth but had to squeeze in the first one in order to hit the writing deadline.

You can read my 5738 words below.

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