I’m starting to get used to working from home, finding I really love it. Except for the lack of exercise, of course. But I found myself sitting in the study/not-study (it’s what used to be the study and will be again, but right now it’s the lounge room), looking outside at the liquid amber, with the sun lighting the leaves and realising that I hadn’t sat in that room in daylight and looked out like that in years. There’s work, and on the weekend there was shopping, and other things to do, and by the time you get home again—especially on these short autumn days—the sun is gone and it’s getting dark, and you’re thinking about dinner, and you’re lucky if you even open the blinds to see the garden at all.
These beautiful autumn days are something to enjoy and I’m glad I have the opportunity to see them.
Why I’m in the study/not-study, by the way, is because of my work Mac. Which is a good little workhorse for most of what I want it to do, but it has a weakness. Dead spots. I have a fast internet service—fast for Australia, anyway—and pretty much every device except the Mac can go anywhere in the house and run at 40 mbps. My PC, my Go, the iPhone (through wifi), and the iPad. The Mac, however, is particular where you put it. It runs at a paltry 0.2 mbps in the kitchen, for example, and anything from 6mbps to 20mbps in other parts of the house. Fussy isn’t in it.
One place it does like is the study/not study.
Maybe it likes the view, too.
How are you going?
Despite enjoying my work from home, I’m still working long hours and I find I look forward to the weekends more than I ever did. Which is strange, given the rhythm of the days and how some people might say that the weekends aren’t that much different to the weekdays. They are, believe me, they are. You can sleep in.
And you can read books. Lots and lots of books. Which I have been doing. Rather than writing, sigh, but last week a whole lot of books I’d pre-ordered all arrived, and so I gulped through them. Murderbot, mmmh. So good to give our favourite AI a whole novel to breathe in. Suzanne Palmer’s second Fergus Fergusson, and … and … so many. I’ve read most of them now, so there’s no excuse not to get back to writing.
Another book I read this week (not part of the big haul) was Steve Margolis’s The Toaster Oven Mocks Me, which was a quick read about living with synaesthesia. (US spelling drops the first a.) It was fascinating.
Synaesthesia is a condition where one sense is stimulated, but two senses respond.
Steve Margolis, My Toaster Oven Mocks Me.
Ean Lambert, our protagonist in the Linesman books, has synaesthesia. Margolis gives great first-hand detail of what it is like to have synaesthesia and how it makes life difficult at times. He also talks about when he lost it—which I didn’t realise could happen.
We need more of these.
As writers, we can read scientific books to research a topic, but real, first-hand experience written in the manner of Margolis’s book, is invaluable.
Here’s a TedMed talk about synaesthesia.