Spending time

Apart from poorly managing my time, as usual, I don't know what I've been doing to result in this blogging famine of late. You must be starving, Dear Reader - ! It's not as though I'm working a whole lot on anything, I'm not running, I'm never on facebook anymore (are you? That was short-lived!), so what is going on? This is normally the place I go whether I've got other things to do or not. Maybe once I start writing, all these fascinating activities taking up my precious time will reveal themselves, but really, that's doubtful.

Work keeps changing. One project ends and another begins. Unpredictable, and still part-time, but interesting. Climate change has completely finished and livestock is just about wrapped up; these have been replaced with seniors' transportation and a sustainability plan for a small town waaay up north. The local transportation project continues. Sense of competence is okay, but maybe that's because I haven't had to chair any meetings. Or attend any, for that matter.

Thesis is stagnant, mainly because I'm moving to the next stage and I'm having a mental block. I don't feel like writing about this right now.

What I will write about is Fishy, J-Lo's aptly-, if somewhat unimaginatively-, named new pet. It's a Japanese fighting fish and it's in my care for a week while its owner gallivants around the country on business. His new girlfriend just 'gifted' him (as one of my profs likes to say) with this critter a few days ago so he brought it over in a tall, lonely-looking vase and instructed me to feed it 4 pellets a day. I put the vase-with-fish on a high shelf but that didn't stop the cat from noticing it immediately. Soon afterwards, I found him on the shelf below, meowing madly, trying to figure out a way to get up one more level. I threw the cat out of the room and closed the door for the night. The next day, I surrounded the vase with a book, a lunchbox and a plant and tested the cat's memory. Apparently, he has none, so Fishy swims in peace, cut off from the rest of the world by a copy of Madam Bovary. I check on it now and again and it seems content enough, but I just have a hard time understanding how anything can be happy stuck in a glass like that, alone, with nothing to do. Maybe I need to stop projecting human capacities onto fish.

I come across as sounding bitter there about having to look after J-Lo's fish, but I'm not at all. He always looks after our cats. He sounded so apologetic when he asked me to do this, as though he was sticking me with this god-awful responsibility at the last minute, that it made me wonder if I shouldn't recognise the burden on him when we go away with a little more grace. A six-pack will no longer cut it!

Also worth writing about is last night's lunar eclipse: The local astronomers had set up their telescopes at the two rivers here and, considering the bitter cold, there were a lot of people who showed up to have a peek at the moon, magnified. It was beautiful! Orange and brown! Craters! Shadows! Another, massive telescope was pointed at Saturn. I'd seen Saturn a few years earlier when I was working at that science-y place. It looked nothing like the clear, colourful pictures in magazines; it was more like a tiny, fuzzy, white dot with big ears. It was so much more fascinating, though, knowing I was looking at the real thing. I remember feeling awestruck by it. It felt the same last night.

B and I had some wine at the pub nearby afterwards. We are into red wine lately, mostly because it feels warmer than drinking beer, which is nice at this time of year. This is only the third time we've been to this particular pub, and we asked ourselves why we aren't there more often because it's nice. The first time was about two years ago, and the second was last Friday, after curling. There were about seven of us and we were all chatting away until the band got up to play. This tends to indicate the end of any conversation, which normally annoys me, but this time I didn't mind because the band was really good! They were three young guys who played the blues and they were fantastic.

I don't think this has shed any more light onto where I let the time go, but who knew writing about nothing could be so enjoyable?