We were born to be real, not to be perfect.My mental vacation continued this week with a day of actual vacation. I took Friday off to extend my Memorial Day weekend to four days. My thought was that there have been so many little honey-dos on my list for so long, maybe if I had enough days in a row at home, I might get them done. I did. Finally getting around to hanging mini blinds that have lurked in a closet since we moved in, or putting together the bookshelves we bought last year to hold our burgeoning collection of Blu-rays, or fixing a broken toilet seat might not sound like a lot, but they have combined to create a sense of accomplishment and relief almost on par with finishing my novel last week.

Now my hands and arms ache, though, with the unaccustomed exertion associated with wielding power tools. It was enough to keep me up and restless last night, so I’m grateful hubs gave me a treatment tonight.

I suspect my remaining to-do (closet cleaning/purging) is going to wait for next Round, and my next long weekend at home.

The best part of my time off has been my continued exposure to some excellent creative expressions. Friday, because of my NetGalley membership, I got to read Carrie Vaughn’s newest, Bannerless. It doesn’t come out until July 11, but I posted my review on Goodreads already because literally my reaction after the last page of the story was… WOW. I’ll share one of the more thought-provoking quotes from the book here once more:

The worst storms were the ones that changed you. The ones you remembered not for how bad they objectively were, but for how much damage they did to your own world.

It’s a personal perspective that was reflected in a different way when hubs and I watched Arrival. The odd echo of losing children between the two stories made for an emotional viewing, but hubs and I have been discussing the central premise ever since. This is the kind of scifi I like to write. The kind that takes off on a premise science has explored (in this case, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) and pushes it in a philosophical direction that allows those who are open to the experience to participate in a different kind of thought experiment. One that might even open their hearts.

An article I ran across this week about how women are underdiagnosed and treated differently than men when they report pain, could easily be a plotbunny of that sort. So could the recent economists’ debate about Thomas Piketty’s hypothesis and its premise that “wealth begets wealth faster than economic growth creates wealth”–and especially the article I read based on Rognlie’s critique of that hypothesis. And then there’s the blogger who urges everyone to work on their story-telling skills.

That last has revived my itch to write again, though I still haven’t decided exactly what. Meantime, we’re keeping our uptick in walking alive. My phone says this week I averaged 3,473 steps per day. Tashie is now strong enough to keep up even at almost two miles, and that makes me very happy.

There are another 24 days to go in this round of ROW80, so I’ll keep checking in, though it’s hard not to feel at loose ends with my major goal of the round out of the way. Meantime, check out how my cohorts are doing with theirs.

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