The weekend of sloth

Nothing quite like a four-day weekend to recharge after a time of stress. I had been hoping for a few fun but low-key days, and I got them: some Kingdom Hearts, some LEGO Star Wars; a visit to the Ferry Building for fruit and pesto fixings; a couple of trips to check out the demolition of the Bay Bridge (photos to come!); lots of online conversation; and dim sum, tea, cream puffs, mah johngg, and kitty time with SE and SF yesterday.

A major goal of mine was to get some writing done, and I did so, every day. It went very well. Although my hopes of getting at least one of these shorts I have on deck finished were dashed, dashed I tell you!, thanks to a chat with bottle_of_shine that somehow led into the decision to finally write a Paine/Nooj 'ship manifesto. I figure, I've chattered at enough people about the pairing and all the evidence for it; might as well collect all my meta in one place. The first draft is basically finished, and now I'm letting it marinate for awhile. So tonight it's on to other things. I did spend some quality time with DSHnD -- it hasn't gotten enough love from me lately, and it was good to get back into the groove on it. Also a stand-alone Paine short, which is off to a nice start, although I'm not quite sure where it wants to go in terms of an ending. Unfortunately, I don't think is going to slot into any of the 30_fantasies themes. I had hopes that it might, since I haven't posted anything over there for two months and don't want to let my claim die, but I really don't see it happening.

In completely unrelated news, the new Barenaked Ladies album is out today, on the iTunes Music Store! [Edit: Not any more. Must have been an accident. Whoops. Not sure whether to feel guilty or not... though I did pay, fair and square.] :) It's a little odd, though. Since they've been playing these songs live, some of them for years now, almost none of the songs are completely new to me. So it's not quite the usual "woo, new music!" experience that a new album from a favorite band usually is. I am happy to hear the studio recordings, and it's fun to compare, but it's a bit of a letdown that I much preferred some of them live. But I'm not really complaining. I will never argue with new BNL. And it was fun to listen along with luvmoose and swap impressions about the various versions.

So yeah. A good weekend. Pretty much exactly what I hoped it would be. Now I can approach the impending end-of-quarter craziness with a fresh mind. Yay.

Demolition derby

The SF Bay Bridge is currently undergoing a huge renovation to bring it up to modern seismic standards. It's been going on for years and is scheduled to finish sometime in 2009. (This is just the retrofit of the San Francisco side. The new bridge, the Oakland side, is also under construction and probably won't be done until 2016 at the earliest.) Over the Labor Day weekend, they demolished a small portion of the upper deck. In order to do this, they had to close the bridge in the eastbound direction entirely, for the whole long weekend. It's supposed to reopen at 5am tomorrow.

Since we only live two blocks from the demolition site, of course we had to go take a look. T, a big fan of large-scale construction and demolition projects, took several pictures. ( Here are some of them. )

As I was pulling these pictures together, I noticed that the distant sound of jackhammers had stopped for the first time since very early Saturday morning. They're back now, intermittently, along with the dumptrucks taking away all the debris. We've been able to hear the noise from the bridge retrofit off and on almost since I started living here, in 2000, and for the most part I'm used to it. Still, headphones can be a blessing.

And now, for something completely different: Lexi climbing the walls!