The Marci Rating System

Time to go have an outdoor adventure!

*Good news! I made it safely there (the car spa) and back again, and now my car has snow tires!

*Less fantastic news! I'm definitely going to need the snow tires, because I'm supposed to go to the office today, and the plowing situation in the parking lot here is currently 'the driving lane was cleared at some point, everything else we'll do later.' Which is fine! It's just that I'm gonna need to drive through that 'everything else' to get to the driving lane. (lol so many memories of the apartment parking lot after a snowstorm...)

*Anyway, work is work. Our team just got moved to a different team (temporarily?!? I guess?!?) for reasons unknown. The reasons we've been given make very little sense, and it's hard to know if that's because they're untruthful or just, you know, corporate.

*We're supposed to be doing our year-end "self-evaluations" immediately, which means I've been sorting all the stuff I planned to catch up on in December into two piles: 'hurry up and do it before the evaluation so I can say it's done,' and 'safe to say it's on track to meet the 2025 goal.'

*Yeah.

*But coffee!

*Yay!

Time to get serious about prepping for November writing!

Haha just kidding, it is never time to get serious. It IS time to re-listen to 'Exit Strategy,' so I have more than just a vague recollection of what happens.

Other things it might be time for today:

*using the office lap blanket

*wearing the hat that keeps my ears warm

*COFFEE (two coffees??? in-office days always have the option of TWO COFFEES, just to keep things exciting)

It's Monday! A work day! How did this happen??? All the things on my 'looking forward to today' list are non-work things, but surely I can fit in my 'I get paid for this so I definitely want to keep doing it enough that they'll keep paying me' work too.

[SPECIAL WEATHER NOTE: We've had enough 'rain is predicted but then doesn't happen' days recently that I genuinely didn't expect it to rain today. But when I stepped outside, it sure does smell like it's going to rain! It hasn't yet, but I might be convinced!]

The time for the autumnal furniture rearrangement has arrived! Late this year, compared to last year, but weather is weird. Last weekend was HOT, and I was wearing shorts, and Tuesday night was so hot I had the fan on with all the windows open, and then Thursday night we had a freeze warning, and I spent a good twenty minutes yesterday looking for my warmer long-sleeved shirts (still haven't found them, but they've got to be here somewhere).

Anyway, last year's post was very accurate about the furniture rearrange motivations. I have five lights in this room (that sounds like a ridiculous amount of lights, I know), and in the summer I only use two of them. One of them isn't even plugged in. (Two of them, maybe? They're decorative.) But in the darker months, it's nice to have more lights.

Also, where is my stuff? Where are my warm clothes? I have NO IDEA. If I'm going to go to all the trouble of looking through my stuff, I might as well also get the fun part of moving it around some.

Perhaps MOST IMPORTANTLY it provides excellent enrichment for the cat! She usually chooses not to participate in the actual moving, but enjoys checking out the new arrangement once I've figured it out. And I have a chance to find at least SOME of the toys she's stashed under/behind things over the last six months or so.

I went searching back through past entries to see if I've talked about pumpkin spice coffee before (answer: sort of), and found that I pretty much have a similar experience every September, and it goes like this:

1. yay it's september!

2. melancholy

3. 50% existential dread, 50% I LOVE AUTUMN LOOK AT THESE COOL LEAVES

Also a lot of posts about cats and coffee. (I had pumpkin spice coffee yesterday! I add a lot of half and half to my coffee, so it mostly tasted like hot milk and cinnamon. The cat was unusually interested in the mug once I was done -- usually she ignores it, but yesterday she wanted to lick it and also stick her paw inside. No idea why. Maybe she likes cinnamon?)

Somehow it is STILL summer and it is STILL way too hot for my taste and my ability to cope with it is now basically zero. This morning I've moved right through despair and into the silliness phase. Everything is funny.

OH! Now that Battleship reveals have happened, I can share this funny story about one and the same. It's 1544 words, and five of those words are 'sorcerer.' And when I wrote it, I spelled 'sorcerer' wrong EVERY SINGLE TIME. In a different way each time! My brain was just like 'idk, there's a bunch of r's, right?' It's not like I questioned it as I was going along, I apparently just started typing the word, got distracted, and just let my fingers guess when I was done. Five times.

And that's how I learned that the spell check feature isn't automatically turned on in ellipsus!

my phone's weather app: Air Quality Alert started at 4:56 am

me, physically startling back from the terrifyingly red sun rising over the trees: YOU THINK?!?!?

me when it is 50F degrees out: I love the outdoors! I'm a person who does things outdoors! I can do multiple things in one day! sometimes I almost feel like I'm handling my life in a semi-reasonable way!

me when it is 70F degrees out: I love the outdoors, as long as I'm in the shade, or maybe just inside with the windows open! I can do ONE(1) thing in ONE(1) day, which is sort of sometimes a semi-sustainable way to manage my life in a place where it's much colder than this for much of the year!

me when it is 90F degrees out: ::lying on the floor, crying::

I've now written 100% more fics in July (aka: 1 fic) than in the entire first half of the year (0 fics). YAY!!! Love that fic exchange energy.

*discord is now on my phone, will I regret this choice?????? NOT YET!!!!!

*trying out ellipsus for writing; so far it's fun! pretty! no offline mode, but that's been fine

*weather looks like it's going to be Extremely Summer this week, which means staying inside as much as possible to write will feel like an even better choice!