{"id":3445,"date":"2010-02-10T00:07:12","date_gmt":"2010-02-10T05:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/?p=3445"},"modified":"2010-02-10T00:09:43","modified_gmt":"2010-02-10T05:09:43","slug":"reports-of-my-demise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/10\/reports-of-my-demise\/","title":{"rendered":"Reports of my demise…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yeah, still alive.<\/p>\n

I kind of fell off the Internet there for a couple of weeks. Not blogging, barely making use of any other communications tech. Still reading a lot of stuff, but all input, no output.<\/p>\n

This was not a planned thing, I just found that my real life was taking up too much time for me to support a vibrant virtual life at the same time: getting up to speed on the new jobFor the last two days in particular, I have been absolutely loving the new job<\/a>–both on its own merits, and because it is illustrating to me how dysfunctional my concept of “normal” and “expected” in the workplace had creepingly become at the previous one.<\/footnote>, still trying to get a household establishedSeveral rooms still unfurnished–some furniture coming this week, some hopefully next week, stacks of framed art<\/a> waiting to be hung, and, of course, the book issue. On top of that, I really need to get a plumber to sort out the guest bathroom, and we should get a painter in to do the soon-to-be-library before I start putting up shelves in there.<\/footnote>, trying to be a good husbandDr. Wife’s birthday was in there–among other things, got her tickets to see the Little House On The Prairie<\/a> musical, which she saw with Sarah on the weekend, while I savaged Toronto’s specialty<\/a> book<\/a> shops<\/a>.<\/footnote> and dadI think the best thing Sarah and I did during my Internet break was go the Our Body<\/a> exhibit at the Children’s Museum<\/a>. That’s probably a post of its own.<\/footnote>, seeing family that are now within “drop in” distance, trying to do some cultural stuffThe best of these was going to see Karl Schroeder<\/a> talk in his Writer-In-Residence <\/a>role at the Toronto Public Library. Got to hear some of the not-even-done-yet fifth Virga<\/a> book, and then got to hear some really bleak–but interesting and insightful<\/a>–forecasting about the future for novelists, as well slightly less bleak, but no less insightful, meditations on the notion of identity.<\/footnote>, socializingI had a real blast this past Saturday at an old school drink-up Chris Butcher<\/a> organized in Toronto. Nothing like going out to drink and talk with people you’ve never met (but some of whom have been peripherally in your virtual social sphere for nearly a decade), and having it work.<\/footnote>, finishing some mind-bendingly-tedious cleanup of virtual thingsI have finished the project of cleaning the tags of all the CDs I finished ripping before the move<\/a>. I now have all the mp3s representing rips of my physical CDs fully tagged and sorted. 2939 “albums”, 37683 tracks, representing 2610 hours, 1 minute, and 23 seconds of music–that’s about 109 solid days to get through. I am still enjoying the “oh I forgot about this” game. The prospect of trying to apply the same degree of order to my “downloads” folder daunts me.<\/footnote>, and starting some tedious-but-weirdly fun cleanup of physical thingsThis, of course, refers primarily to the process of unpacking, sorting, and shelving my books. I have decided while doing this to actually also make a catalogue of the books–ostensibly for insurance reasons, but in reality because I am an OCD collector type, and the idea appeals to me. Trish bought me the software to manage the collection a while back, and I set myself up with a barcode scanner that really speeds entering ISBNs. So far I’ve only built a few shelves, enough for my mass-market paperback fiction. Just tonight I finished unpacking, sorting, cataloguing, and shelving those books. I started with the MMPBs because they’re the smallest part of the collection, so it was a less daunting task, but also because I never did unpack the paperbacks I moved to Halifax, so I’m seeing some of these books again for the first time in a decade. That added a lot of the fun of the whole thing. I have just over 1300 of them–pictures later.<\/footnote><\/p>\n

I think I’m starting to get my stride hereThis may be a case of “famous last words”.<\/footnote>, and so I believe you can expect a return to our normal service nowUnless I actually give in to the urge to go tinker with the footnotes plugin so that it will support footnotes in footnotes…because that would make this kind of thing funnier.<\/footnote>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yeah, still alive. I kind of fell off the Internet there for a couple of weeks. Not blogging, barely making use of any other communications tech. Still reading a lot of stuff, but all input, no output. This was not a planned thing, I just found that my real life was taking up too much time for me to support… Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,5],"tags":[458,408,255,144,111,171,328],"class_list":["post-3445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meta-blogging","category-storytime","tag-books","tag-dr-wife","tag-like-a-damn-diary","tag-mp3","tag-parenting","tag-sarah","tag-work","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-Tz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3445"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3449,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3445\/revisions\/3449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}