Recumbent
Doing Holidailies reminds me of a couple of things. One, that there is a reason I have never been a daily journaler, even when I wasn't all rusty and out of practice and struggling to put together even the dullest of sentences. I really don't have a lot to say most days, I just sit in front of the computer all day long. And when work is extra-busy as it is at the moment, all day long is a very long day, indeed.
I know I should be grateful that there's so much to do right now. And I am grateful, really. I've had a couple of busy spots over the past few months, but for the most part I've never worked as little as I have this year. (Did I use all that extra free time to do anything productive, enlightening, exciting, or enriching? Of course not.) In three months' time, when the money from the translations I'm doing at the moment starts to trickle in, I'm sure I'll be more than pleased not to be sweating over the rent, or wondering whether we should wait until next week to go grocery shopping. Right now, though, it is boring and exhausting and mostly making me wish (not for the first time) that I were independently wealthy. Or at least doing something that involved less research about the finer points of machine tools.
So coming up with some actual subject matter is a challenge. I could write pretty much the same entry day after day: "Got up, drank coffee, read e-mail/forums, translated, ate everything in the house, translated some more, read more e-mail/forums, translated until my eyes dissolved, went to sleep." There are occasional moments of excitement, like when Dario forgot to put the pot in the machine when making coffee, and flooded the office (that was yesterday), but for the most part the days tend to be the same. The main difference between weekends and weekdays is that there are fewer phone calls on the latter.
The whole point of the journal exercise is to find something of interest even in the most mundane existence, right? Well, you know, I can do that. I just can't do it every day.
Tomorrow, assuming I survive this horrible translation about pumps that is
going to keep me up until the wee hours tonight, I'll finish the story of
my trip. That, see, was an adventure, but it takes energy to write energetically,
and an adventure deserves vibrant writing, doesn't it? I want to do it justice,
but my brain cells are not cooperating at the moment.