Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Whining Over, Back to Work

Okay, enough whining. Time for some good stuff.

TV Guide and the Sci Fi Channel are doing a "big screen tour," showing the mid-season finale of Battlestar Galactica on the big screen Thursday night in a few select cities. One of those cities is Dallas. And guess who managed to get a pass for the screening. :-) I chose the right day to get up relatively early and check my e-mail so I could respond in time to get the pass (though I don't know if this is like the Serenity screenings where it was sold out within a minute or two).

That theater has DLP projection, so I'm hoping it will be a digital screening. And with digital and the big screen, well, let's just say there'd best be at least one shirtless scene involving Jamie Bamber, and several nice close-ups of the pretty blue eyes.

I guess this means I have to get the essay that's due Friday done before the screening. It's fully drafted, so I mostly need to go back through it for a bit of polish to add any thoughts I forgot and make sure it flows well. After the first draft, it's right in the middle of the word count, so I can delete just about anything I don't love and add just about anything I need to add. I should be getting a potentially helpful reference delivered from B&N tomorrow, and I'll wait to check things against that before I turn it in (mostly so I can justify deducting the potentially helpful reference from my taxes as a business expense). The essay is on one of my absolute favorite topics ever, so I had a lot to say (and a lot of saved posts from Television Without Pity from late 2002/early 2003 to draw upon). (And that's a hint for some of you who've been around for a while and have known me from other venues.)

I finally got my Christmas stuff up last night. I kept saying I wanted the living room totally clean (and magazine spread worthy) before I decorated, then realized that isn't going to happen anytime soon and just went for it. I think I may need to shake up my decorating scheme for next year. I've done more or less the same thing ever since I moved into this house eight years ago. I did re-do my Christmas tree decor about five years ago, but I've been decorating the fireplace mantel about the same way ever since I got my first apartment with a fireplace, about fourteen years ago. There's tradition, and then there's "rut" and I think I'm dangerously close to the latter. Some things are obvious. For instance, when you have a loft overlooking the living room, you pretty much have to wrap lighted garland around the railing and on down the staircase railing. I just may want to do something different with the garland, like add bows or ribbons or ornaments, or something. We'll see what mood I'm in next year.

My cleaning/organizing project seems to have slowed somewhat. I've managed to keep the kitchen clean, even with a furious baking frenzy, and the other rooms aren't getting any messier. They're just not getting cleaner. I think that's because the easy stuff is done and what's left is harder stuff involving decisions and finding places to put things, so it feels too overwhelming to deal with when I also have a lot of work to do. I really need to get better at time management so I don't go into this all-or-nothing frame of mind. I should be able to spend half an hour on housework and still work for a few hours out of the day.

I managed to make a good start on a book synopsis yesterday, but now I'm once again feeling like I don't have much of a story. This is going to take work. Ugh. I'm sure I could write the book in such a way that there's fun stuff going on, but it's very hard to just write a synopsis to show that when I haven't written anything at all of the book. I may end up writing a sample chapter, even though I don't have to, just to be sure of things for myself. Maybe someday I can reach the point in my career where they'll give me a contract just to go write a couple of books, with maybe a paragraph or so about what the books will be about, and then I can go and just write them without having to show them in detail what the books will be like (when I know that's not how they're going to turn out, anyway. They never do).

So, that's my to-do list for the day: work on my synopsis, work on my essay, write some radio scripts, watch House (and that counts as work).

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