I am an idiot, I lost the last couple hundred words I wrote yesterday and had to do them again today - I was disconcerted this morning to find that I had not written a scene I could have sworn I remembered having actually gotten down in words on the page, but put it down to absent-mindedness and overly vivid imagination. The absence at the end of the file of the daily word count subsequently clued me in to the fact that I must not have saved the final version of the document...
(I still haven't gotten fully used to the newer version of Word - it gives you the option to recover a document when you open up the program, but if you don't take it then and there and close up the sidebar, you cannot subsequently retrieve it - and the auto-save function doesn't save into the real file you're working on, just into this fake backup one. And this wouldn't be a problem if my laptop battery didn't seem to have died, so that "hibernate" leads inadvertently to a full shutdown including shutting down of Word and closing of draft file. ARGHHHH!)
On a brighter note: my first lecture yesterday was enjoyable, I am glad to be back in the classroom! - and I saw a great concert last night, the Chiara String Quartet playing music by Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigursson at Merkin Hall. The final piece on the program was Nico's "Diacritical Marks," a string quartet in eight movements commissioned by the quartet; it is truly lovely, it was a delight to listen to...
Light reading around the edges: Don Winslow's Savages (didn't care for it), Hiromi Goto's Half World (liked it quite a bit).
In between I read further chunks of Anthony Powell; I'm now near the end of volume six. I don't at all begrudge the time, I am finding it a quite enjoyable reading experience and it is remarkably convenient to have it on the Kindle (ideal for subway reading), but I am starting to feel grumpy about how much it costs to read this particular work this way - yes, it's 12 novels, but really it's one long novel, if I pay eight or nine dollars for each section I am spending almost a hundred dollars just to read A Dance to the Music of Time! Considering that you can get the whole of War and Peace for about twelve, that just seems deeply wrong - I think I might have to get the next six volumes from the library, it would certainly be the more prudent choice now that I am back in town.
Finally, the little cat is settling in very nicely, and I think this picture shows the extent to which all now seems right in my little world for the first time since Blackie died in May! I have renamed him Mickey, because I know a cat called Max already and because I wanted an endearing and suitable name that ended in -ey (but also because for the first few days he was here he was definitely a hidden Mickey!):
Now that's a cat that looks at home already! It's good to see him looking so content.
ReplyDeleteI must admit that "hidden mickey" had a different connotation for me; it being the description of a small bottle of booze hidden in a purse and taken thus to the Renfrew Fair ("The Greatest Fair in The Ottawa Valley"!). Not something I did, but I know of many who took along their favourite libation in this manner.
He is looking settled. Perhaps he will take up lying on papers when you are grading!
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