Much-deserved Down Time

I made all my deadlines yesterday, and now I have a couple of things that need to be done today, and then I can relax for a little while. Actually, those things are due tomorrow, but I've decided I'd rather get them done today and then take a long weekend. Considering that I like to give myself my birthday as a holiday, and then I "worked" on my birthday and all weekend, I think I deserve a little comp time. I won't be completely slacking off, as I want to do some development on The New Project, but scribbling ideas in colored pen on notecards while watching movies or reading related books while listening to music that reflects the mood of the project feels more like play than like real work.

I think The New Project may be almost ripe and ready to go, as I actually dreamed about those characters last night. Characters invading dreams is a very good sign. In this case, they were in a scenario I hadn't even considered or imagined, but that I think would really work, so I guess I need to make a note on one of my cards.

Now, for a little more WorldCon wrap-up, including some things I learned:

Bringing a lot of shoes is not frivolous. It is, in fact, very practical.
I guess I'm just a delicate flower because there really is no such thing as comfortable shoes for me, and yet I'm also not comfortable barefoot. Any shoes I wear for any length of time, especially for a lot of walking, will become uncomfortable, even if they previously have never caused discomfort. And that means that I really shouldn't wear the same pair of shoes two days in a row. I need to have enough shoes with me to be able to rotate among very different kinds of shoes, with different heel heights and with designs that hit my feet in different places.

I have more of an internal clock than I realized.
I've always thought of myself as not having a very accurate internal clock. I usually don't jet lag too badly, I have no sense of time passing without seeing a watch or clock, and I don't generally get into schedule habits that aren't dictated by outside influences (I tend to eat meals at the same time, but that's because they coincide with the TV news). However, that seems to have changed for me lately, as I've been getting up without an alarm, yet always at around the same time, for months. I didn't need an alarm clock at all the whole time I was in Denver. I usually woke up at least a half hour before my alarm was to go off every morning. I had suddenly turned into a morning person, mostly by virtue of being one time zone away from home. The annoying thing was, this wasn't a "morning person" event. Things didn't start until 10. At writing conferences, things usually start around 8, or 7:45 if you want an early start at breakfast, so I'm always having to drag myself out of bed.

I've often thought that there tend to be two kinds of writers, the get up at 5 in the morning and write the day's page count before breakfast types and the stay up all night writing types. And it's generally the early birds who do things like volunteering to put on conferences, so the conferences are all geared to people who like to get an early start. In the SF world, though, the cons are generally run by fans, and they're fans who are used to late-night movie marathons or gaming sessions, so events start late and then run into the wee hours. Now, if only I could convince my body that I should be a morning person at writing conferences and a night person at SF cons.

Someone out there didn't want me to be a morning person, though.
The last couple of days of the con, I started to suspect a vast anti-sleep conspiracy. Saturday afternoon, I decided to take a nap before the Hugo ceremony so I could maybe stay up a little later. Of course, that was the day the housekeeper hadn't shown up by the time I got back to my room just before five, and of course she knocked on the door at 5:30 when I'd just managed to get sound asleep (I didn't see any "do not disturb" signs in the hotel, and there certainly wasn't one in my room, so there was no way to indicate that I didn't want a knock on my door). Then that night when I declared pumpkin time shortly after midnight and had fallen into bed, I got attacked by a Bridezilla. There was a bachelorette party staying in my hotel, and about an hour after I fell asleep, I was awakened by a shrieking laugh that sounded like it was right outside my door. I sleep with ear plugs, so that tells you how loud it was. The laughing went on for a while, and I'd been so deeply asleep that I thought it must be morning and almost time to get up, until I looked at the clock and realized that I'd only been asleep for an hour. Eventually, the laughing went away and I finally got back to sleep. Then in the morning when I left my room, there was a telltale tuft of purple feathers right in front of my door, matching the purple feather boa I'd seen on the Bridezilla in the elevator earlier, which was how I knew who the culprit was. Then Sunday night, I had another sleep interruption an hour after getting to bed. I was setting up a flight notification alert to my cell phone (which turned out to be utterly useless), and when nothing happened after I hit the test button on the United site, I decided to e-mail myself a test message. Nothing happened there, either, so I went to my carrier's site to see if I was using the right address, since my carrier has changed hands back and forth a few times since I've been with them. So I then set test messages for another possible address, and nothing happened. Yep, the phone (which I was using as an alarm clock) buzzed with a message alert about an hour after I gave up and went to bed. Then it was like waiting for the other shoe to drop because I knew I was likely to get at least one more message, so I didn't dare just go back to sleep.

So, a nearly two-hour delay on text messages? What's up with that, AT&T? And United, I got your test message, so why didn't you notify me about the gate change? That didn't even show up two hours later.

Other than those things, I had a blast, and my mysterious Bridezilla with the horse laugh and the feather boa gave me a funny story to tell the next day. But all those things are my justification for giving myself a break this weekend (Mom, I'm talking to you. No nagging allowed.).