Yesterday I moved furniture (gently!) so I can install the portable air conditioner in the office. Seamus, my new feline companion who arrived in March after Zigzag left me in February, is absolutely livid that the room layout has changed. He has spent most of the afternoon running around the house at full speed meowing about how wrong it is. I have no idea if it’s making him feel better, but can’t say I’ve not considered doing the same thing around all the wrongness in the larger world right now.

Today I managed an early breakfast meeting followed by a day full of appointments and catching up on work. I’m hopeful it can continue in this direction though I’m also trying not to get ahead of myself. It can be easy to work hard when I feel well and then get discouraged if I don’t feel well enough to keep that pace the next day. Grateful for the things that go right so I’m not also just running around screaming.

Small bit of exploratory surgery on the 20th. Nothing was found. This is both good news (who needs more problems?) but frustrating news because it means I still have no answers for some health issues we’ve been checking into for a while now that I mentioned in my previous post. Mixed Feelings in general about this and so many other things going on in the world right now. Worrying about family who are ill as well.

Since I am having trouble keeping up with my blog I think I’m going back to the “micro blog” plan from the beginning. Maybe only a paragraph will appear, maybe some days I’ll have more to say. But it is good to try to keep some sort of record of what a day was like, somehow. Perhaps this is more important when all the days bleed into each other. Or it’ll prove to be too boring and I’ll have to give myself topics. Time will tell.

I’ve not posted here in an age, although thanks to the extraordinary time bend which has been the Years of Our Pandemic it simultaneously feels like yesterday when I was angsting about my manuscript. I did not make that deadline, in fact, nor did I make the one afterward. 100 Gods of Egypt finally made it to the editors in October, not June. It is even now still in edits, though now it’s in edits. We have 20 pages of bullet point lists of things to add, subtract, change, and make better. We have lists of illustrations that are being pared so we can hire someone to draw them. Color photographs are being chosen. Maps are being plotted. The book is getting done, slowly but surely.

This afternoon I recorded a podcast interview for a university professor who’s teaching a religion course, and I got to talk at length about Hathor and Sekhmet. We got so into what we were talking about that 2.5 hours flew by without even noticing. Time continues to bend: ever so short for the enjoyable things, stuck or stopped or even seeming to be sliding backwards in the not so enjoyable ones. I’ve been doing medical tests, yet again, since February to try to track down what’s going on now. It isn’t cancer this time, for which I’m grateful, but workable answers with a plan to solve them elude for now. Hopeful that bit of time bending might bend a little less a little sooner.

So much is happening and yet it feels like nothing is moving, or that I am suspended in a glass box moving at a different rate than everything outside it - and both rates of movement keep changing. Doing my best to continue to move, as that seems prudent, but also to find a way to synchronize movements. Existential motion sickness is not much fun.

50 days to go until the 100 Gods of Egypt manuscript is due. Not at all pleased with my pace or what I’ve been working on, but I’m also in the “get it written then get it right” camp. So writing happens even if I end up redlining most of it at some point. It is gratifying, and even fun, to revisit these topics after years not being able to spend as much time with them because my work carried me in other directions that were needed. It’s also hard sometimes to find that balance between loving everything about one’s work and loving nothing about it. If I could just sit at the desk and write for the rest of my life that would be amazing, but my life is not currently in such a place where that could even happen.

I’ve gotten my two vaccines as of last week. Side effects were significant, but not impossible, and I am grateful to be in the “done for now” space, though I expect we’ll be back for boosters soon enough. The pandemic continues to be terrifying, though, and as my state just entered lockdown again to try to control the variants on the rampage, I’m still home alone for now. At this point I can say I am thoroughly sick of my own company, and that’s coming from someone who enjoys being alone.

September must have gone to keep August company. At least here in Oregon, it pretty much went up in smoke.

where did August go?