moving swiftly on

My netbook had its final vertical-line meltdown a week ago Friday; not terribly surprising given that it was held together with duct tape and ice-lolly sticks and was wont to make this terrific whining noise when I turned it on, and had almost died in Logan Airport in October and had a few more fakeouts since, none of which I took terribly seriously. So not a surprise, just a massive annoyance not least as I hate buying things, especially complicated things. I finally bought a new one online earlier today; I'm typing this entry on K's chromebook, which she kindly lent me to shop on & generally appropriate until it arrived. The untethered life has its uses; have been reading books, cleaning shit, throwing cards at writing problems, sleeping more than usual. We spent a lot of today fixing the house - I meant to write after I came upstairs to bed but it's not happened, ugh. (I am p sure I'll be able to resurrect my ywriter backups, and I hadn't lost a ton of material anyway, entirely due to the 12 days pre-meltdown being completely useless. By fortunate accident I left most of the non-posted stuff I was doing on a USB stick in London in late October, and there's jack-all else to lose.)

Every Christmas I promise to do Christmas next year because Christmas is nice, but then December rolls around and it's too dark and too much effort. I spent the 21st lying in bed feeling this quiet gladness to be done sliding down again; all one can ask for, and no one celebrates that with me except for my dog. On Christmas, we all went to visit C because his household had piled out of town, and after food and a couple of games of Tragedy Looper we then kidnapped him and brought him back here. He is still here in spite of the fact that we have done nothing except mooch around and clean things around him.

I am happy that we achieved a lot with the house yesterday & today - built things, unpacked things, cleaned things, plus discovered two exciting problems, one of which is urgent and expensive. :) I finished my CPE at work on Wednesday after everyone had left except Tidy, so I'm all set to pick up a second job to help us cover this shit ugh. The fun intrusion here is that I'm getting paid to go to California a week on Friday, a fact so baffling it keeps slipping out of mind. I have never hitherto been west of Hunstville, Alabama, and no one has ever paid me to go anywhere further than Framingham. I gave myself 4 free days at the end of the trip, which I hope to fill with strangeness and adventure, or at least blood and blisters.