Julia Slaughter

Posts Tagged ‘Random’

I was born and raised in New Orleans, and even now that I’ve moved I still consider New Orleans to be my hometown. “Do you know what it means to Miss New Orleans?” brings tears to my eyes, more so today than when I moved almost fifteen years ago. I love the City That Care Forgot, the crazy politics that pit crooks and klansmen against each other, the food,the music, the style that is completely unique to the city.

I’ve lived in different places along the Gulf Coast and I’ve grown to appreciate the unique charm and flavor that each provides, Pensacola where the white beaches permeate the whole community with a laid back beach attitude and Mobile with its proud history and beautiful pageantry. However, this time of year despite the places where I’ve visited or the places I’ve called home I start day dreaming about some place I’ve never really been.

I live in a part of the South where it’s green pretty much year round. In the Winter I’m grateful that the highways are lined with green instead of the blues and greys of my friends in the North but in the Fall I long to see the leaves change. We have a tree or two, here or there that will blaze to herald the Fall but for the most part, it’s just green and in September, on the first day of Fall – it’s still hot. (Today we’re expecting highs in the upper 80’s)

A Picture of Fall Leaves from Sleddogmusic.com

Every year I promise myself that I’m going to back up my car one weekend and drive North until I find Fall, beautiful brilliant colors to mark that Fall is here. However, I haven’t managed to pull it off yet, it seems like there’s always too much to do, but today I’m looking at the heating rising off the asphalt dreaming of the colors of Fall. I’ve also been poking around blogs reading about things like apple picking and fall baking, and I look forward to the smell of Pumpkin Bread coming out of the oven soon.

In high school I was a prolific writer,I wrote two novel length works that were passed around by my friends. I also wrote countless poems, short stories, etc. I mention this because I felt like in high school I was completely and totally focused on the task at hand – writing. So imagine my surprise when I reconnected with an old friend from high school and I told her she was never going to believe this but I had grown up to be a computer geek. Her response is that she easily believed it. Ouch, I guess I wasn’t as focused as I thought. I mention this because lately my “day job” has been rather time consuming and it’s computer geek related.

For more than a year we have been preparing for an inevitable upgrade, there have been countless conference calls, meetings, and mass emails flying back and forth. The upgrade is made more difficult by the fact that the machine we’re upgrading is a main frame, not a regular PC. When I maintained a Window’s network most of my software upgrades took an hour, maybe two, and that usually included prep time. So today should’ve been the beginning of the down slide, the bulk of the project behind us, (We expected some user hysteria, but that’s all perfectly normal.) but the bulk of the work should’ve been behind us. Did you notice the use of the phrase “should’ve,” well the upgrade didn’t go through as planned and so now everything is in limbo. The upgrade is kind of like a hurricane brewing out in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s going to make landfall and ruin my weekend eventually the question is when.

At times like this the desire to flee my “day job” is almost overwhelming. I would much rather focus my energy on writing, but when projects like this hang over my head it’s hard to concentrate on anything but that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m doing other things – watching True Blood, reading what other people are writing, but I just can’t lose myself in my own story the way I wish I could. (Frankly, I’m proud of myself that I’ve been able to keep my once a week blogging thing going.)

Anyway, let us pray that the Upgrade will make landfall soon so that I can weather the storm and get back to doing what I love to do.

“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.