Today has been an admin day in House of Karen (Actually House of Karen’s Parents, But Let’s Not Split Hairs).
Which primarily means looking over writing stuff (edit notes for Cheerbaby! Yay!) and dealing with interview requests and email and cleaning the house and doing the laundry and getting my fortnightly massage* and reorganizing my bookshelves and all that. I am not super bad at doing this in a timely fashion, but in order to keep up with this happy state of affairs, I tend to allocate less urgent “admin stuff” to one day a week. Depending how the week has gone, it can pile up!
Today had a chunk – on top of the ordinary, I helped my mum out at a garage sale of THREE GENERATIONS of family things. Make an offer! Everything must go! Except that copy of To Say Nothing Of The Dog, how did that get there, I’ll just put that in my bag right now.
Since I had to get up at 7am to do that, I napped for a big chunk of the afternoon.
Okay. I know there are some people who are perfectly happy with early to bed, early to rise, but my sleeping hours clock is set something roughly analogous to Regency England in the Season, if I were wealthy and socially privileged enough to be part of the ton. Late to bed, even later to rise!
However, my actual ancestors at the time were Irish farmers, so I cannot claim such sleeping patterns to be an inheritance from my dissolute forbears. It’s just how, given my druthers, I naturally operate. Alas, I live in modern New Zealand, and my druthers are rarely indulged.
However, this time I got to have a nap and it was AWESOME.
And then I woke up and I had editing notes (yay!) and an invitation to call Editor Connie** to discuss notes at some point. Our calls all have to be carefully scheduled, because timezones, and I had a choice between early morning (5am) and much earlier morning (1:30 am). I chose the latter, because: “Tuesday at 9:30am New York time/Wednesday 1:30am NZ time would work best for me – I much prefer sleeping late to rising early, because I am a REM junkie.”
And only just now have I realised that MAYBE SHE WILL THINK I LIKE THE BAND.
Oh dear.
* Mmmm, self-care that also FEELS NICE. Mostly. Unless we’re working on my hips and then it’s all oh god just breathe.
** I don’t think I told you about that, Internets? Super smooth editor transition from the excellent Alvina Ling to the excellent Connie Hsu at Little, Brown for very good and not at all scary or disagreeable reasons, with all parties amicable and vowing affection remained on all sides.
I didn’t know it could happen that way! Scary industry stories had led me to believe we had to send each other dead roses and impassioned denunciations. Apparently I am “too dramatic” or something.
Here is a picture of a dying rose:
