Laundry Day!

First order of business for the day is what I forgot to do yesterday in the scramble to get something small posted when I lost a long draft: thank the mothers in my life. I did my duty directly to the two of them - my mom and my sister - but I meant to put something a little more into Mother's Day. In some strange way, I count both of them as some form of mother to me, and I'm incredibly grateful to both of them for everything that they taught me. I guess I sort of touched on that in my "work ethic" rant a few days earlier, but clearly I believe very deeply that my family molded me in some profound way from a very early age, and I can't express my appreciation for them enough. A few things I really wanted to point out about these two remarkable women in my life, but which in no way are nearly a complete catalog of the great qualities that they taught me: my mom, with her dedication to a cause, really amazes me on a daily basis. When most people would have long since given up on something, she continues on, and does it with the exact fervor that she started with. She just never gives up, on people or on missions. I hope one day I learn to be as industrious as she is. My sister every day teaches me something else entirely, but a lesson that I value no less. She exhibits this kind of grace that I can't accurately describe, but one which even in my limited experience with it, touches every facet of her daily life in a really beautiful way, and maybe most importantly in the way I see her interact with her children. I hope I inform them of my admiration on a regular basis, and it's not just a yearly kind of thing, but I just want them to know that I find myself humbled every day by how amazing they are.

My dad sent me probably the sweetest e-mail this morning, and it really warmed my heart. There's a small number of people from whom praise takes on a different significance entirely, and he's one of them. The message that he sent me included a line about how proud he was of me, which just means the world to me. I guess I've been rambling a lot about my family lately, but I think being gone, even for this short time, has made me appreciate the network of amazing family and great friends that I left behind. Those of you who I love the most know who you are, and hopefully how much I appreciate you. And since I'm really going on about it - probably to the extent that some of you are starting to think I'm crazy - I'll leave it at that.

I'm going to legitimately cry next time someone asks me to rotoscope something like this. That is to say, tiny tiny details, multiple planes, and a long shot that makes the details hard to see. If Simon says, "Rachel, could you tighten up this rotoscope for me again?" I'll break down into tears of pain and rage. At risk of coming off sounding ungrateful, which I'm absolutely not, since I'm so thrilled to be doing work at all, this project has had its moments where I've had to step away, take a few deep breaths, and come back to it later. The occasional futility of it slays me. You fix one thing, scrub forward, realize you didn't fix something else, scrub backward. Repeat, repeat, repeat, until you're pretty sure you haven't actually made any progress at all.

The problem with me actually ever getting anything explored in this city is my train of thought: "ooh yeah, exploring sounds fun. Ohh, but I have to get out of bed first. Hmm. Okay, well, let me do a little work first. Oh man, it's three hours later already. Guess I better go out. But oh crap, I have to do laundry or I won't have anything to wear tomorrow and I can't do it tomorrow because Simon will be back. Okay, laundromat first. But jeez, it's cold outside. I think I can make it to the laundromat, but do I really want to go traipsing through the city when it's this cold? Man I wish I had my jacket with me. I wonder if my mom's going to ship it to me. Stupid jacket, why did I not realize it was going to be cold here? MAN it's cold."

So I managed to blunder my way through my first laundromat experience. The counter guy was onto me - oh, he was so onto me - and would occasionally glance over at me with a look of disdain on his face. I had to buy a little single-pack of Tide, which means that my clothes all smell nasty now, but they didn't have the stuff I normally use for sale (All Small and Mighty, just in case you wondered). The laundromat was an entirely new experience for me - I do my own laundry, don't get me wrong, it's just sitting around and waiting on it, feeding coins in, dealing with a new washer. All strange to me. I felt like I probably came off as some kind of spoiled rich brat who'd never used a washer before, but what can you do?

The sheer quantity of laundry most of these people were doing kind of blew my mind. I'm washing the six shirts I brought with me and the two pair of jeans I thought would be necessary (I brought a little bit of formal wear, I just haven't broken it out yet). The woman next to me was doing two full loads in the larger-sized washers, which took up two of the rolling baskets littering the floor. I think that if I had that many clothes, I probably would only need to wash them once a year or so. She was probably washing for a family of five, but it still amazed me.

Those old Cool Beans war wounds are acting up again. I noticed it first while climbing up and down ladders endlessly on Friday. The knee that I banged up (pretty badly) thanks to my dear elf shoes - the one that has been fully healed for several months now - started giving me trouble whenever I'd take a more significant weight on it, like when I climb ladders or go up and down stairs. It's that exact same twinging pain, that annoys more than really hurts. I'm apprehensive, but I'm hoping once it gets used to all the new walking and standing, it'll be fine.

Finally, I finished American Gods. It was really good, although I won't lie and say I understood all the intricacies of the references to varying mythology. I got a lot of it, and he explained a lot of it, but I feel like a full comprehension of this book would require a huge amount of knowledge concerning basically every mythological system in the world. Neil Gaiman is really a brilliant writer, as far as I'm concerned. There are occasional phrases that just floor me (pg. 578 - "[Shadow] felt a pang, like a minor chord being played inside him."), quirks in the ways he tells his stories that amaze me. He doesn't always let you in on the idea right away, and I like that. I like how easily he evokes moods, even more than he evokes images. Now on to find the next book of choice . . .