Life is a giant game of wiki-surf

I hate weekends.

Well, I really need them to try to rest and unwind from work week. But I spend every week accumulating a giant list of things I won't have time to work on until the weekend. Setting up way too much expectation and ending up Sunday night feeling like I wasted an opportunity.

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That's the thing, you know. Every time you learn something, or create something, you also create a sort of promise or obligation. You wrote a fanfic? Congrats -- now you have fans who are waiting for you to write something more. You learned how to run a lathe? Well, guess what? Now you need to find things to lathe to justify having spent that effort. And then stay at it because skills get rusty if not used. You built something? Good, now build a better one with all that you've learned.

And, sure, especially in the Digital Age we all of us have invested countless hours in learning how to work pieces of technology (especially software programs!) we will never, ever, need to use again. But as you age you also accumulate skills that you simply don't have the time, energy, interest in keeping up. I can't tell you how many people I've met who spent two years, three years, six years studying violin but haven't picked one up in longer than they can remember.

Everything is also connected in huge branching, multiply cross-linked trees. You get interested in ukulele and that gets you interested in guitar, in music theory, in Hawaiian culture, in Tiki kitsch.  Which gets you into rock music, fast-Fourier transforms, colonialism, Buck Rogers. And every one of those new interests is clamoring at you to give it some time. Especially after you've given in and taken a look and its good money after bad, all the way down.

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So I've got a half-dozen projects I'm contemplating at the moment. Most of them want me to buy something, though, and since I just made a big credit card payment (still paying off the Greece vacation) I'm loathe.

Making a drum: I can scrounge some but even building an improvised steam box means buying a chunk of PVC. I can bend without but I'd get better results with a spring steel bending strap ("only" twenty four bucks at Stew-Mac). I can force myself to using recycled scrap wood for the bending form but the head? Yes; I experimented with mylar, cotton-poly, oiled muslin, sized muslin (the latter wasn't bad, especially when I took a tip from tabla players I'd met and, lacking wax, put some wood putty on to add weight). But the decent sound comes from hide and that's yet another purchase. Even if there are goat skins sold locally.

Making a ukulele is going to be more, even if I avoid the temptation of Stew-Mac's catalog. But that's not currently on a front burner. I still have a box in the closet that's filled with parts and plans for a solid-body uke or two, and that box was stashed before I discovered Road Toad strings and the kinds of new instruments those opened up.

I've been thinking about video technology as well. I'm going to try throwing together a miniature LED-based soft-box. I can do the first one with what I have lying around, even though by the time you add labor I might as well have dropped the thirty bucks a pair of plastic ones cost on Anklezone. The more intriguing idea, though, is the combination of a retroreflective surface with an LED camera ring for low-hassle chroma-key. Glass beads don't come cheap, though...and somehow all my lengths of scrap green LED strip-light are already gone.

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Writing, though. No work and a nice sunny day and it is terribly hard to keep from dozing off and feeling pressured to get "something" done just doesn't help. I've reached a tentative approach to the thematic issues I mentioned a post or two ago, and am currently trying to puzzle out just what the opening "tomb" looks like so I can re-write that scene.

This is far, far from me believing there was even a slim chance I'd have a rough draft done before the last show opened. That show is now closed and I'm having to rewrite what draft I have from the very first word.

Yeah, I know. There's a lot of people who don't sweat the details like this, whether they are people who self-publish through Amazingbone or a surprising number of best-sellers. And I have to admit I'd probably worry about Getting it Right even if I was trying to do a generic fantasy novel. My excuse for the current is this is pushing all my buttons; I care about supporting good science, and I care about reproducibility. Much of this story is framed as travel advice and I'd really rather that was good advice. And the rest is joining a current debate on ownership of history about which many people feel...strongly.

So, yeah.