(Week 8: February 17-23)

This week, just as I was starting to get into my new routine, everything changed up again!

I wholeheartedly blame the Elderbeast, who is at last starting to take the bus to school—the delay being caused by waiting for his Smartrider card to arrive, and endured because his bus fare drops from $4.80 to $0.70 once he has the damn card.

Anyway, if you can recall as far back as last week, I was working on getting up around 6ish so that I could exercise/write/drink coffee until around 7:15am, at which time I would have to rouse said beast from his slumber and prepare him to be picked up at 7:45 and driven to school.

Now that he’s catching the bus, he needs to leave the house at around 7:15am instead, so that’s my schedule completely out of the window. However, I have a new plan and it’s very promising!

  • 6:03am – turn off ludicrously ambitious first alarm;
  • 6:19am – get up following far more acceptable second alarm;
  • 6:20am – cancel third alarm;
  • 6:30am – brief workout on the cross trainer;
  • 6:40am – start the process of extracting the Elderbeast from his bed;
  • 6:45am – present the Elderbeast with his morning kill (breakfast);
  • 6:45am to 7:15am – this time is now used for showering, checking emails, and general pottering about;
  • 7:15am – take the Elderbeast to the bus stop;
  • 7:20am – give the Kinderbeast breakfast;
  • 7:30am to 8:10am – writing time!!
  • 8:20am – leave the house.

As you can see, I’ve carved out at least half an hour for my writing. The big difference is that I’m now writing later in the morning, after I’ve done most of the annoying stuff. It’s only been in play for two days, but so far seems to be working well. I shall report back in further detail in a subsequent post.

Watching

Three fairly interesting films this week. Firstly, the long awaited (well, by the Elderbeast, at least) viewing of Predator 2. I remember this being a reasonably fun film, but it’s really, really not very good. Not painfully–or even entertainingly–bad, just disappointing. There are a lot of elements that should work, but the signs of a rushed production are far too apparent.

Also, as much as I enjoy seeing Danny Glover scrapping with aliens, the lead role should really have been rewritten to suit him a little better: he just doesn’t quite work as the sort of macho, flout-the-rules type character they’re trying to play him as. Also, he wears a range of perplexingly baggy clothes during the course of the movie.

Next up, this time for Friday horror, was Gerald’s Game: a film that’s been on my list for quite some time. This really was superb—a concept that I couldn’t quite convince myself would work as a movie, but proves to have plenty of mileage. And, this might be the first Friday horror film to contain a scene that I literally had to shield my eyes from. Let’s just say: degloving.

Finally, having recently read Northern Lights, I checked out the 2007 movie adaptation, The Golden Compass. As the reviews and lukewarm reception had suggested, this wasn’t an outright disaster, but was nevertheless a pale substitute for the book. To my mind it suffered from two critical flaws: they gave away pretty much the entire driving mystery of the book in the opening monologue (doh!); and the movie was edited so brutally that it came off as little more than a whistle-stop tour of scenes from the book. I don’t know if the original director’s cut would have solved that, but I’m left more with a sense of a missed opportunity than an outright disaster.

Still, at least I have the BBC adaptation to look forward to.

Reading

Bit of a reading lull at the moment, so you can take this week off 😉