One new habit I’ve developed after giving up cable has been Friday movie nights. There’s seldom anything on TV I want to watch on Fridays, and even though I don’t necessarily have a regular workweek schedule, I do like to treat Fridays like Fridays. I have a good-sized DVD collection that I seldom watch, and then there’s a lot of stuff available for streaming, so I can generally find something to watch.

That is, if I can decide on something. Sometimes there’s paralysis that comes with having too much choice. I’ll end up spending half the time scrolling through options, then end up picking nothing. I’m trying to choose things ahead of time so that at movie time I can just watch my choice.

But that choice is still hard. Right now, I’m caught up in playing with ideas for a fantasy world I’m building, so I’ve been watching a mix of fantasy movies and historical dramas. At the same time, sometimes I want to get entirely away from “work” and just watch something fun.

Last weekend, I did a mix. On Friday night, I watched Stardust, which is exactly the sort of thing I want to write. But then for Saturday night, I watched Cold Comfort Farm, an old favorite that I finally got on DVD.

I find there’s a big tug of war between wanting to choose something new and wanting to rewatch an old favorite. Rewatching means I know what I’m getting into, so I know I won’t be disappointed. My luck with new stuff has been hit or miss.

I need to decide if I want to get something off my very long Amazon watchlist tonight or if I want to dig out a DVD. I’m not sure what I’m in the mood for tonight, comfort viewing or exploration. I do have a frozen pizza, so I’m ready for whatever I choose.

After my rant yesterday about the stereotypical TV bookish smart girl, I had my own moment last night when I started reading one of the books I got from the library that may help me in developing something I’m working on, and after reading the introduction, I actually said out loud, “Ooh, I’m going to learn so much from this.”

However, I feel like such a slacker because I only read well in one language. I could probably make out an article in Spanish, though a whole book might be a bit of a slog. I can deal with signs and restaurant menus in German, French, and Italian, and that’s about it. Despite what they show you on TV with the bookish person being able to read a foreign language because she likes books, that just hasn’t come up for me, and I generally read more than a hundred books a year.

It actually was more of a thing in the past, when there weren’t readily available translations, and someone had to do the actual translation. That wasn’t something a publisher would hire someone to do. It was generally something someone did for fun. The upper crust were taught multiple languages and could read, write, and converse in something like six languages. They have documents written by Elizabeth I as a child in which she did translations to and from French and Latin. It might have been a little less common for women to be educated like that, but there were enough cases of highly educated princesses that it wouldn’t have been that startling. The daughters of James I’s daughter did things like correspond with Descartes to discuss mathematics and philosophy.

Thinking about all this is giving me some good character ideas and some worldbuilding for some future fantasy novel.

Happy Valentine’s Day, to those who celebrate. I tend to find the holiday annoying because it seems so artificial. Celebrate your love on a day that means something to you, by doing something that means something to you, not by doing the expected things (flowers, chocolate, dinner) just because the calendar says so (aided by massive ad campaigns).

The other thing I find annoying is that this is when everyone pulls out the “look at these romantic things!” articles, and most of them are really off-base. The lists of “romantic” books tend to be lists of books written by men that are definitely not romance novels. Many of them are “guy” romances, which means the couple has a brief time of passion before either someone dies or they go their separate ways. The “happy ending” of a guy romance seems to always involve the guy either being single or dead.

Then there are the things everyone thinks of as romantic that really aren’t if you think much about it. Like Romeo and Juliet. That’s somehow become the epitome of romance, but I don’t think even Shakespeare meant it to be seen as super-romantic. It says right in the prologue and epilogue that it’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of a family feud, that when you have two polarized sides that are that entrenched, bad things are going to happen, and it took two kids dying to snap them out of their idiocy. The classical radio station has been playing romantic music today, and of course the Romeo and Juliet ballet music comes up. I may have shouted at the radio, “That’s not actually all that romantic.”

They’ve also played music from The Phantom of the Opera. I recall being rather irked during a recent touring production when all the ads promoted “the most romantic story ever told.” It is kind of romantic if you think of it as the love story of Christine and Raoul, childhood sweethearts reunited, and his love for her helped her escape an abusive, murderous creeper, but I don’t think that’s what they meant. But since the radio station played “All I Ask of You,” which is the romantic duet between Raoul and Christine, I’ll let it count as romantic.

For my celebration today of my most successful long-term relationship (me), I think I’m going to make something chocolate and watch Stardust, which is my favorite romantic fantasy movie. We’ve got a couple who initially dislikes each other, for good reason, then begins to like each other when they have to work together to escape from danger, and then falls in love. I need more movies like that.

Meanwhile, I’m writing while listening to the music the classical station considers romantic.

Well, apparently the weather does take requests because I got my rainy Sunday afternoon for listening to music, drinking tea, and reading, and it was divine. Even better, the weather looks like it will be similar next Sunday afternoon.

I don’t have any real obligations this week other than choir, so I’m hoping to make big progress on my book. I had just started to really dig in at the end of last week, probably thanks to me finally turning on the project tracker in Scrivener. Being made acutely aware of how many words you’re writing and how many words you need to write makes a huge difference. The moment I see that red bar on the screen, I’m driven to turn it orange, then yellowish, then green. Then there’s the joy of seeing the next day’s goal recalculated if I go over the goal.

I guess this is the adult writer version of getting a sticker.

It’s a bit sad how well this works. I’d hope that I’d be capable of doing what I need to do without that visual reminder, and sometimes I can, but it’s almost like magic for creating accountability. It even seems to make writing sessions go faster.

Now I need something like that for tracking things like housework. I know there are to-do list apps and things that turn it into a game, where you score points by having good habits, but I tend not to check into those. I want to be online less, not more. This works because it’s part of the tool I use for the task I’m tracking. What I need is a vacuum cleaner that shows you how often you’ve used it and gives you points. A Fitbit would do the same thing for exercise, so maybe I should break down and get one. In the meantime, I am actually giving myself gold stars on my calendar on days when I exercise. It’s surprising how motivating that is.

We had something approaching winter yesterday. It was cold and rainy, with bits of sleet. I didn’t have children’s choir, and they canceled choir practice because there was a chance of it getting below freezing while the roads were still wet, so I had a delightful evening of snuggling under the electric blanket with candles going in the fireplace (I have a fireplace candelabra, which gives the flickering light of a fire without the mess or without having to open the damper and send all the warm air up the chimney), classical music on the radio, and a good book — basically, peak hygge. I even went to bed early.

And because I went to bed early, I seem to have forgotten to set my alarm. I woke up at about the usual time, anyway, then since there was nothing pressing, I let myself lie there for a while, which meant I went back to sleep. I have a thyroid condition, so I’m supposed to be watching for signs of low thyroid, like fatigue. I worried for a moment when I overslept in spite of going to bed early, but then I remembered that more than ten years ago I was using a TV show that came on in reruns at 9 a.m. as a way of forcing myself out of bed in the winter. Sleeping until 8 is actually an improvement. I really am part bear, I think. When Daylight Time begins, I’ll be hopping out of bed much earlier.

Today it’s colder than it was yesterday, but it’s sunny, so it feels less wintery. The annoying thing about this winter (for me) is that it’s been warm and sunny on weekends and the cold, rainy days have always been Wednesdays. On weekends, I could hide under my blanket and read, but on Wednesdays I have choir stuff, so I have to go out.

I’m willing to compromise and take a cold, rainy weekday other than Wednesday, and then I can switch workdays. Still, there’s something about a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon (with the rain starting after noon, since I have to go out on Sunday mornings) with a good book, a pot of tea, and the appropriate music as I lie on my bed or sofa under a blanket. It looks like Valentine’s Day is going to be cold and possibly rainy, so maybe I’ll indulge myself then. There may even be baking.

For today, though, I have writing to do. I’m making headway on the book I’m drafting, and I’ve set a deadline for myself.

For the fantasy world I want to build so I can set a bunch of loosely related stories there, I’ve been reading a lot of history. I’ve always been a big history buff. I read history for fun and most of my electives in college were history courses. And yet I’m still learning new things. There are aspects of history that I’m only just now starting to understand.

I know it’s a broad topic, but in general, I think the way history is taught in American (or possibly just Texan) schools is woefully inadequate. All my junior high and high school history teachers were coaches. That meant they taught history by telling us to read the chapter in the textbook and answer the questions at the end of the chapter while they sat at their desks and read the sports sections of all the newspapers the library got. Occasionally, they’d show a film. Even so, they never seemed to get all the way through the textbook. In eighth grade, American history, part one, ended just before the Civil War, even though the textbook covered the Civil War (though I guess we were lucky there because some schools in the south never cover much other than the Civil War). Then in 11th grade, it picked up after Reconstruction but barely got beyond WWII. World History was even worse. I got so frustrated in that class that I took over and started teaching it in a vain attempt to make it even slightly interesting.

If all you knew of history was what you learned in school in the schools I went to, you’d be utterly ignorant, which explains a lot about our nation today. Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it, and all that.

I picked up more in college, but those were deep dives into particular topics, and I was focusing on modern European history because at the time my goal was to be a foreign correspondent.

I didn’t get a really good understanding of the American Revolution and the issues relating to it until I started researching the Rebels books. In my recent reading, I finally get what was going on with the Thirty Years War, in spite of growing up with ruins from it all around me. I’m starting to have the big picture of world history click into place, which makes some current events make more sense.

The problem with the way they tend to teach history (at least, in my experience) is that they focus on names and dates, when really it’s about stories. Some of this stuff, you couldn’t put it in a fantasy novel because it would be considered too outrageous to be believed.

I kind of love that it now counts as “work” to read lots of books about history. I seem to be working my way through the history section of my local library branch.

The work on my walls is done, and I’m enjoying a day of having my house to myself. Now, though, I have some serious housework to do. I dusted away the worst of the fine, white powder that was covering everything, but now I probably need to do a thorough vacuum of the carpet and a more thorough dusting. And I probably should make use of my steam cleaner on the carpet. Then I need to put everything back in my hall closet, which was part of what was redone.

Now I can finally get around to thinking about replacing the flooring, but I so don’t want to deal with the hassle of waiting for workmen to show up. I’d also have to box up and move just about everything that’s downstairs, then put it all back. I’m not sure that any value new floors would add to the house when it comes time to sell would make up for the cost plus the lost productivity of about a week worth of work.

I’m trying to get back in the swing of my routine, but I couldn’t resist not having to worry about being ready and waiting for the workers to show up this morning. It’s been nice just sitting around and drinking tea.

One thing I’m realizing is that my quirk of not being able to read books in a series back to back without burning out may also apply to writing a series. I’ve generally had months between books, at the very least, and in between I’ve worked on something else. This time, I went straight from editing book one to trying to draft book two, and it’s not flowing. I don’t know if that’s because I was interrupted unexpectedly by all this disruption, which started last week with people showing up to assess the damage for estimates (sometimes with no appointment) or because of the burnout factor, or because the brain is trying to work on several things at once. I got some additional ideas for scenes I’ve already written last night, so we’ll see if doing a little revision will get me back in the flow.

Meanwhile, I used the time I was hiding in my room while the living room was being ripped out to catch up on bookkeeping. The accounting for my taxes is pretty much done. I’ll just have to plug the numbers into the forms.

This may not be a very productive week. There was a leak in my house around the front window a few years ago, and it took the condo association years to get around to fixing it, so the baseboard and front wall were damaged. It’s taken years since then for them to get around to repairing it. I don’t know how many contractors have trooped through my house to look at it. There was an appointment set today for what I thought was yet another estimate, but it turned out they were here to do the work. At the moment, they’re cutting out sheetrock and ripping out baseboards.

The next step is for them to spray stuff inside the walls to kill off any mold, and that will have to sit for a few days. Then they’ll put up new walls and repaint. I may be living with open walls for a while, and my schedule is going to be iffy because I have to be home when they’re working. It’s hard to concentrate on writing while people are in my house, ripping out walls, so not much writing is likely to happen. I’m holed up in my bedroom while they work in the living room. I need to get the office upstairs so that I can work in it later in the week. I’d been planning to do that this weekend, since I thought they were still getting estimates.

I’m not complaining (much) because I need this work done, and I think it will make me healthier if they take care of any mold and mildew. And it makes the house actually sellable. I want to get it over with. But the process is probably not going to be much fun.

I think I’ll be focusing on research reading and brainstorming, since getting in the writing zone is going to be hard. I’m not someone who can write at a place like a coffee shop. I need solitude and silence.

I’ve been talking about doing a short trip up to the mountains in Oklahoma (yes, there are mountains in Oklahoma) to do some hiking ever since last fall, but it seems like every time I had a couple of days free when I could go, there would end up being storms forecast on those days (and you don’t want to be in Oklahoma when it’s storming). Meanwhile, I’ve been stockpiling Hilton points and was in danger of losing them if I didn’t stay in one of their hotels soon, since none of my conventions this past year were at a Hilton. But this weekend is supposed to be nice and unseasonably warm, and there’s a Hampton Inn near one of the parks I was looking at for hiking, so I’m taking a mini vacation.

The plan is to do a little hiking and then enjoy the indoor pool and hot tub. It doesn’t look like there’s anything I want to see on HBO on the night I’ll be there, but I have a ton of books loaded on my tablet, so there may be some hanging out and reading.

And now I have to get ready for it. I checked out my swimsuit and found that some of the spandex has died. There’s a big patch down the back where it’s visible (and getting a bit see-through). So, I need a new swimsuit. And snacks, of course. Those are critical for a road trip. As is updating the playlists on my phone. I think I still have Christmas music on there that needs to be deleted and then replaced with a few new CDs I have to rip into the computer.

I’m not normally this spontaneous about travel. Then again, when I go overboard with planning, I tend to never actually take the trip. It’s as though once I have it all planned, I feel like I’ve already taken the trip, and the actual trip can never live up to the one I took in my head from visualizing it so clearly from all the planning. Maybe I need to do more trips of the “where can I go this weekend?” variety.

We’ve reached the time of year when I really just want to hibernate. I joke about being part bear. In January and February, I want nothing more than to wrap up in a blanket with a cup of tea and a good book (that I’m either reading or writing). It’s not a seasonal depression because I absolutely love it and it makes me very happy. It’s that Danish hygge thing. There’s a similar concept in Norwegian, koselig. It loosely translates to “cozy,” and it has a lot to do with enjoying warmth in the midst of winter. Some nice, fuzzy socks, books, candles, maybe a fire in the fireplace, a hot drink, and a blanket, and the nastier it is outside, the better. When I first read about this concept, I had a big “That’s it!” reaction, so apparently it’s genetic. My Norwegian blood must run true.

This works great if you make your living by reading and writing books. It’s perfect working conditions, and I tend to get a lot done at this time of year.

The problem is that the rest of the world doesn’t conveniently stop, and the interruptions that require dealing with the outside world feel even ruder. I really don’t want to go anywhere or do anything, but I still have to get groceries, return library books (I also need books, but I have enough of a stockpile at home that I wouldn’t suffer), and teach children’s choir.

Today I’m trying to psych myself up to either go to the library, go to the grocery store, or go see Frozen 2 (I have to deal with small children, so I really need to be able to communicate with them about things that matter to them). But it’s gray and foggy, and the blanket is calling. I seem to have missed my chance at the early showtime for Frozen, and the fog is lifting, so maybe I’ll walk to the library and take care of an errand and get exercise in one fell swoop. Then back to my blanket, even though it’s actually fairly warm today.