Muse go bye-bye

Brief notes after a long week

It’s been quite a week, and at times such as these, my muse tends to go walkabout, as they say. (I mean, someone says it. Maybe. See above re: muse.) I have this delightful little daily task in Habitica that says “Write something”; that something can be journaling or an expansive letter, or it can be work on my novel or current project, or it can be, well, this. I’ve not been checking it off lately, I must confess. Luckily, Habitica lacks the funding for an owl that relentlessly stalks your waking and sleeping hours. But if it did, maybe I would write more. Or more likely, I would have kicked that owl into the sun.

Figuratively speaking, of course. The owl isn’t real. Neither is kicking. Neither is this sentence, or my muse.

Point is, I’m tired, y’all.

Yoinked from L.Z. Marie

The world, of course, has exploded in dire and seemingly insurmountable ways, but what else is new. I’ve not been sleeping very well, though I continue to be quite happy here in Halifax. I feel insulated in some ways, like I’ve stepped through a veil into an alternate world, into this country that’s sort of like the US but colder, friendlier, less densely populated and less governed by absolute frothing maniacs. This also makes me feel a certain degree of guilt, but again, what else is new.

The bigger story — or the smaller one, really, but the one that is immediate to me and therefore occupies that solipsistic sphere of attention of which I am the nucleus — is that it looks very much as though we are buying a house. (That “we” is a little spurious; I can’t quite buy a house given my status in Canada but am likely to buy into it after some time has passed and my status here has become clearer to the pleasantly non-frothing officials of their government.)

But as a team, my partner and I are going through the process of buying a house, him for the first time, and in a foreign country. If anyone reading has gone through it, you know how it is: you’re looking and seeing places and developing attachments and having little dreams about what you’ll do with this or that room or bit of yard. Then suddenly, once you start making offers, things start going Extremely Fast and it’s time to move unimaginable amounts of money around and hire 14 different people and sign 527 bits of paperwork you had no idea even existed until this moment. It’s wild and it’s stressful and it’s very exciting and very scary, and it’s taking up a huge amount of my bandwidth.

But at least something of my Gen X sense of humor comes back when my muse is out of town.

I’ll endeavor (I just nearly spelled that with a ‘u’) to be back at you next week with something a bit more developed, perhaps something on the Halloween/Samhain theme. Until then, if you see my muse, would you mind telling her I baked cookies? (I didn’t, but they’re pretty quick if it works.)