Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

I'm in a rather tumultous sort of state of mind at the moment; there's just so much on my mind and it's quite impossible to get everything nice and clearly set down where it'll stay before it gets up and wanders around and then I have to go chase after it again. So let's start with... well, for once work isn't the Big Crazy Issue dominating my mind that it usually is; or at least right now it's only one of the Big Crazy Issues. Which is not at all a good thing, of course, but one learns to look for the small blessings in life. At any rate we will begin with my personal life, because that one at least is easy to describe. I've been having dreams again - my dreams are always weird, I'm not sure why. It's as if my subconscious looks over my shoulder when I'm awake and chatting on MSN and it sees all the horrible things I type at people in jest (today, for example, the prevailing topic of conversation was "horrible things I will do to yo...

Good heavens. It's been a long time since anything new appeared on this page, hasn't it? But then it's been a long time since I wanted to write the way I want to at the moment. I don't know why, but words and sentences have been churning in my mind for awhile... maybe it's just that a lot of things have been percolating and now they're brewed and I might as well set them down somewhere. It's better than letting them stew in my mind. And yet now, looking at this blank page, my mind wanders and cannot be pinned down to write of anything. It's very annoying, but it does show the state which my self-control has fallen to. I'm not very good at reining in my thoughts or impulses, and that's a great failing in me. But let us then impose some kind of order on things, and I will cover the main spheres of my life. Work is going somewhat well. We had audits some months ago, and the findings are still being responded to because the auditors apparently we...

It’s been a rather terrible week; or at least, last week was. I’ve been tired all weekend just thinking about it, and having to go to work tomorrow and face it doesn’t help. I can only hope this coming week will be better, but I don’t expect it to be. Last week was the preliminary audit week (for lack of any better descriptor); our main customer sent an auditor to wander the place for three days asking questions and so I spent all of the previous week frantically trying to get everything in place. My boss had, quite nicely, set out a number of requirements and I just ticked them off as they were accomplished or at least set in place to the best of my ability. All the same it was quite frustrating seeing things happen so slowly, partly due to the strange placement of the work breaks and partly due to my subordinates not being terribly enthusiastic to finish all their tasks on time because getting to work overtime gets them paid time and a half, so assigning any task within half an h...

It turns out that I’m quite capable of going a full day on quite little sleep. At least, I’ve managed to do it today, though it’s quite uncomfortable and I don’t plan on doing this often. But then it’s not quite been a normal couple of days. It’s not even been a normal week—although, I must admit, normalcy is not a quality often found in the time that I experience. Which is a good thing according to my GM, but then his views on a lot of things are alternative to put it mildly. To put things simply most of this week has been rushing things out to prepare for audits next week; somehow every time I think we’re quite ready, I go explore a little bit and check or some issue comes up and then it turns out we overlooked something and now we have to start a whole new task. On the upside it does mean less things overlooked now than before, but the obvious downside is that I keep wondering what I’ve overlooked during the latest check. And Friday night there was a birthday celebration and the...

…and like all good resolutions, the above is broken already. I suppose I should be proud of myself for remembering to write this post in the following week, but that’s cold consolation. I’m quite sleepy. I’ve been this way for a good part of the week; very often I’m staying awake through sheer willpower and if I were to rest my head on anything and close my eyes I might very well just drop off and not wake up until somebody leaps on my head in a very exuberant wake-up call. That, if you’re wondering, is a very bad thing because the whiplash might kill me or the impact might break my spine, but then not many people have that sort of jumping ability anyway. I should probably go to sleep except I want to type this up so as to have at least one thing ticked off my mental to-do list, and besides tomorrow is Saturday. I don’t know if this tiredness is due more to the fact that I’ve been getting an average of 6.5 hours of sleep a day for the last few days, or that I, an introvert, have ...

I suppose the first of May is as good a time as any to start on new resolutions. Here’s one: I resolve hereby to write a new post every week. I used to be quite able to, and I do not think I’ve lost that faculty or that facility; but of course now I have a great many more distractions and demands on my time and sometimes it does seem as if the effort of sitting down somewhere and shutting out everything that I need or want to do and spending a half hour or an hour just remembering and recording is beyond me. I don’t suppose anybody’s been hanging on me and waiting for my next post and screaming in silent despair every day that goes by without an update; but in time to come I think it would be nice to sit down and look back and smile in indulgence at my past self. So, because I can’t necessarily say everything in between the last post and this one—mostly because I haven’t got Internet access at the moment and have forgotten when the last update was—I should perhaps spend a little ti...

So, today's March the 10th--it's practically a month since my last post. But being the person I am, there's very nearly nothing about my personal life that needs updating, because the car still needs repairs and I still do pretty much the same things every week. I suppose it bears mentioning that I haven't gone back to the ancestral home since the last post... It's possible that I don't really feel terribly welcome there when every trip back seems to be an opportunity for them to ask me to please take away everything that I may have ever put there (and in their eagerness this has started including cousins' stuff that they forgot was theirs); and even when there there's very little to actually talk about... one of the results of a nomadic life is the complete inability to join in on in-jokes or stories about how somebody did something particularly amusing at some point in time, which was like the other time somebody else said or did something else differe...

I'm spending this weekend in the ancestral place--originally I had two items on the agenda, which were 1. get a haircut and 2. get the car door hammered back into place (I put a rather bad gouge in it while leaving church a few weeks ago, which has a rather straight and narrow gate that opens pretty much directly onto a ditch--the city planners have some things to answer for--and it's been on the To Fix list for awhile now); so far I've only managed to get the haircut, because apparently mechanics don't work very reliably after 11am on Saturday and I couldn't get hold of the family people who know mechanics before 11am. But this is going to be less of a what-I-did post and more of a what-I-think post, though the things I think are brought on by weird things that happen while I do things... so it'll be a bit of both, really... "Let us converse." I've been acclimatising quite well, I think, to work and life and the people at the local church, though ...

Well. It's nearly a month since the last post... and of course plenty has happened since then. Even if nothing had I would still be able to type for an hour about all the nothingness that had happened, and now I have three weeks to fill in. Not that I will, of course; but I might as well record some of the things that, hm, stand out more in my memory from the past month. I suppose it would be a good idea to start from, let's say, about two weeks ago--the week before the Chinese New Year week-long holiday, since that was quite a time. So we'll start from that. It wasn't a very good week; not many of the weeks preceding it had been good, either, since what with one thing and another it had always seemed like everything was a rush to get things together before the factory shut down for the week; and when your entire job scope revolves around future planning (and not very dependable a future either), having one week effectively rendered null and void is something of a handi...

There are times, like now, when I wonder if I’ve ever been really competent at anything in my life. Not to say I’ve not been able to do some things well, and enjoy doing them; I’ve managed to win two NaNoWriMos in a row even if I’ve never been able to make it to the celebratory gatherings, and I still retain a little (very little) of my ability at the piano, and every now and then I even say something witty that I hadn’t just read somewhere and was waiting for an opportunity to use. But I never seem, come to think of it, to really have been good at whatever it was that I was being expected to do. At least, I don’t think I was ever a good student. And now, even three months after starting work and having been confirmed as a passable worker, I don’t think I’m anything like my own definition of competent. It’s possibly personality; the way I think bleeds over into the way I work, and there’s very little I can do to stop it; the same goes for my co-workers, of course. My senior is the sl...