Being Kind

At work, we’re in the run-up to a phase II kick-off on one of our projects, so my week was a series of much longer days than normal. While I caught some news coverage about Congress introducing a bill to abolish the EPA, a heartbreaking Tweet-storm about the reality of being a refugee, and facts about minimum wage, I mostly came home too tired to do much more than eat and sleep. Today I found an interesting aggregation site that caught me up on more of the week’s disastrous headlines. Minus the even worse headlines about Fukushima, where radiation from the 2011 disaster has apparently already had health impacts on babies born on the western coast of the US.

All of which adds up to the fact that we’re living the epitome of the curse: “May you live in interesting times.”

And reminds me that in my life, I can really only control my own actions. So when the image I’m including in this week’s post scrolled by, it resonated. I do my best to be kind and supportive, even when I’m frazzled. And especially when I know how much is going on in my friends’ lives. The first one to face surgery is now recovering nicely, though they still face the standard course of chemo. The second friend’s surgery comes this Friday, and we had them over for some preparatory acupuncture in hopes that we’re setting the stage for success there, too.

As for making art, I managed 1,742 words this week. There’s no way I’ll make Friday’s deadline, but I’ll keep chipping away at my story. If I can manage even just 500 words a day, I’m only a month away from finishing. But… we still have to finish our phase II kick-off prep, and then travel to Florida to participate in the meetings for that, so the days required to make up that month seem likely to stretch out longer than that. Unfortunately. Especially since I recently realized that April 21 will be the five-year anniversary of the release of the first in the Red Slaves series. I hate it when I have to wait forever for an author to finish writing a series I love, so now I’m vicariously hating myself for making my readers wait that long to finish mine.

😛

Naturally, that means I took a night off and read another Hotel Paranormal book. The Fox’s Wager is by Tawdra Kandle and features a kitsune and psi-gifted human as its protagonists. It was a lot of fun and a perfect snack of fiction when my brain was too tired to focus on my own world-building. Oddly, this means I have somehow gotten ahead of myself on this year’s Goodreads Reading Challenge. It’s something I came to late last year for the first time, and I’m still on the fence about whether it’s a good thing to encourage my inner competitor about something that makes it so easy for me to lose days and days when I’m on a real book binge.

Another night off was to keep up with the date night promise to hubs. There wasn’t anything to laugh about in the season opener of The Expanse, but it’s such a compelling show we’ve been talking about it ever since.

We’ve also managed to keep pace with our .75-mile-a-day walks. Tashie had a follow-up visit with the vet specialist this week, and it seems there are multiple reasons for her limp. On top of the Lyme, she also has a partially torn MCL, and it’s likely she ruptured a disc in her mid-back about a year ago. She’s such a trooper to have dealt with the pain that long without showing any signs that I’m doing everything I can to make sure it doesn’t go on any longer than necessary. She’s so happy to be out on family walks, though, it’s hard to hold her back from what she really wants to be doing. At least now we have analgesics for her and she’s happy to be able to hop up on the futon in my office (i.e. closer to our bedroom) to sleep at night.

I’m not sure how much progress I’ll make with my writing, but I’ll keep trying, inching closer to done as work and life obligations allow, while taking the breathers necessary to re-acclimate to something like a normal life. We have our 19th wedding anniversary to celebrate this week, too. In the meantime, I’m keeping up with my ROW80 buddies, and encourage you to do so, too. We’ll see whether I manage a post next week from the road, but I will always return to my blog eventually.