Julia Slaughter

“Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.”
~Jane Austen

I think my blogging often comes undone because I feel like I don’t have anything terribly exciting to share, life is busy and yet uneventful. I’ve always loved that Jane Austen quote because I think it sums it up perfectly. I know you can’t always have Comic-Con type events, and I can’t say that my life is boring, but it’s just stuff that I’m not sure is of interest to anyone else necessarily.

I was very proud when I left for Comic-Con that the house was in order. I like to come home and have everything in its place, I feel like the mess you bring home with you is enough. After my heroic efforts to have everything tidy, imagine my irritation to come home and discover that in my abscence the refrigerator had languished away leaving behind an assortment of questionable contents. My motto was “when in doubt, throw it out” leaving behind an odd assortment, mostly of condiments. The death of the refigerator has brought in an added element of drama since, of course, the repair man “got in the wrong part” so the process that was supposed to be resolved last Wednesday lingers on today. (I don’t think I’ve ever had the right part come in the first time when a major home appliance fails.)

I jumped straight from vacation into a buzz of month end activities at work. My work life is married to the accounting fiscal year, which means that as you get closer to month end life is chaotic. The chaotic period before the end of the month lasts longer as you get closer to fiscal year end, when it reaches a fevered pitch that lasts for almost the whole month. For me the good news is that our fiscal year ends in September so the holidays are not completely ruined by the stress of year end activities. The downside is that when the “day job” gets crazy, the time I get to spend on my writing, any and all writing, seems to go down. (I blame it on the face that I end up going home and engaging in mindless entertainment as much as possible.) Its this time of year that makes me wish more than anything that I could devote myself to my writing full time, I just hate having to have what I love eclipsed but what I have to do to live.

Other busy nothings that barely seem like they would hold a glimmer of interest for anyone else – dinner with friends, dogs escaping and going visiting one morning, a neighbor’s dog deciding to come visit for dinner and then subsequently trying to find out who his family was, I contemplated some yard work but decided against it as it was hot.

Life, as always, keeps moving and for the time being it seems to be dancing to the wild beat of month end activities but hopefully something more than a busy nothing will happen so I can bring it here to share with you.