Busy, Busy, Busy

I’ve been a busy girl this week. Just not here. I’ve been flitting all over the web on little tasks that purport to help promote your site: rings and registries and rolls etc. I also posted another book review over at Blogcritics. The first one in a year. I had barely signed up with them at about this time last year when my world fell apart and it took me a few months to gather the pieces. The story is in my September thru December archives. I don’t feel like dredging it all up again. The current Katrina headlines are dredging up enough of it already. I wasn’t directly affected by Katrina but I was grieving for the victims and the floodwaters were still high and Rita on the way when I was hit with a personal grief whammy, followed by two more in short order. I must have conflated the emotional contents of one with the other for reminders of one will remind me of the other. Our minds work in mysterious ways.

Anyway, I posted a book review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close here on Joystory last spring that I noticed had been responsible for nearly ten percent of my traffic here all summer. I noticed earlier this week that it was about to drop off the front page of Joystory and I was afraid that would affect its rank in the search engines. And since I was pretty pleased with it for its own sake, I wanted to give it more exposure. I immediately thought of Blogcritics. But it took me several days to find out how to get back onto the posting platform. I was surprised to find that I didn’t have to re-register or something. It took me several hours to get my review posted though as I had to relearn their platform and, as so many of them do, it has the bad habit of not preserving text formatting when you copy/paste across platforms. It also forces me to work with a very tiny font which is not kind to my poor eyes. But I managed to get it done. If you would like to see the result, you can find it here.

I am really pushing the envelope this morning. I’m supposed to be asleep. I have to be awake and alert by two this afternoon to head over to Grandma’s where I spend Saturday nights thru dirt-track racing season so the rest of the family can go enjoy something that would push all my panic-anxiety buttons. I got into a bad habit this week, staying up until late morning and even past noon. It is hard to switch back. Yesterday morning I stayed up to do laundry as the need was dire. Friday was supposed to be my walk to the library day but my husband said before he left that morning that he was anticipating a short day since they wanted him to work Saturday morning. He said not to be in a hurry to leave for the library, especially not to short myself on sleep because if he got home by four he would do it for me and that way my time and energy could be devoted to the laundry without fear of loosing my night computer session. Well he not only got home in time, he woke me at two to ask me to move my books off his side of the bed and to turn off the alarm if it was set as the library books were already taken care of.

I was grateful. And yet, it just doesn’t feel like Friday without the library run. That’s probably why it doesn’t feel like Saturday morning right now either. And because he had no way to know which of the reserve items I had left behind last Friday he didn’t dare leave anything back this time as those items wouldn’t wait for another week. So he brought them all. Problem was I had not been as careful as I thought monitoring the flow of items and my place in line on a number of them and there had been a flood in the last two days. He brought home 29 items, two-thirds of them DVDs, for me plus the nine for himself. Ever since he got the fine paid on his card a month ago I’ve been gradually lowering the number of items checked out to me by making sure to check out fewer than I brought back each week. Now all that progress has been undone in one week. Still, I’m glad I didn’t have to make the walk this week. I’m thinking that maybe I should skip the library altogether next week anyway since I am going to be spending four out of five nights with Grandma because there are a series of big races. Wednesday night and then Friday afternoon thru Monday afternoon next week. Which means I won’t have internet access next weekend. I was planning to get drafts ready that my husband could go up and publish for me each day. I am still hoping to. But that means trying to do double content when just posting once a day is already a challenge.