This week has been all about regrouping after the latest life-roll to disrupt my year (the third, and hopefully, the last). My brain is heavily scattered at the moment, and my anxiety gets to drive a lot more than I’d like, so I wanted to create a space where I could just sit down and get my priorities in order. Part of that meant dragging out all the work spaces on my desk and taking a close look at them. Which, inevitably, means dragging out a veritable mountain of notebooks and taking a look at everything that’s in progress, then looking at the current unfinished projects on the digital front. I had assumed I was in a notebook-lite workflow just prior to doing this. It would appear…not so much. That said, it looks worse than it is, as not every notebook represents an active work project. There are two finished Bullet Journals in there, left in place so I can

One of the most useful guidelines for blogging is sitting down every morning and asking yourself: “what is the most useful thing I can put out into the world right night?” Some days that will be a deep thought. Some days, it will be much simpler. Like this: There are plenty of reasons to be irritated by the Christmas season starting in October, but I’ll admit that the easy availability of panettone for three months of the year almost makes up for it. My partner sold me on these a few years back, when she described it as “delicious Italian bread cake,” and it lived up to the hype. Remarkably soft to bite down on, and lighter than most cakes I’ve picked up in my life, but also filled with fruity awesomeness. Interestingly, there’s an attempt underway to try and designate authentic Panettone as a product of a specific region, much like certain wines, but it hasn’t yet reached fruition.

Today I return to the internet the same way I left it a week ago: by posting a picture of my cat doing cat-like things. There’s a lot of gathering-up-the-threads going on today, trying to figure out where I’m at in a whole bunch of projects. First cab off the rank is calling the shelter we adopted the Admiral from last month, letting them know that our thirty-day trail is going well and that our cat is very definitely going to be our cat. We like her and want to keep her. Second cab off the rank is taking a look at my daily routine and hacking it a little, trying to figure out where the kitty fits in. The admiral is an inside cat, and our apartment is kinda small. That means she needs a lot of exercise of the hunting-and-pouncing kind, or the thing that she hunts and pounces will inevitably be our feet. This means there needs

Offline today, on account of heading to my Grandmother’s funeral, so I’m posting this picture of the Admiral engaged in one of her weirder sleeping habits. You don’t get to hear the tiny snores that kick in when she falls asleep with her head like this, but trust me, they’re adorable.

I’m largely offline today, so here’s a glimpse at the planning document for a future Brain Jar series. This is poking at a story idea that sits about halfway through an 8-book run. My grandmother passed away yesterday morning, and today I’m running on too little sleep and a fresh hit of grief in a year that’s already been heavy on grieving. I’m going to be paring back expectations on the writing front for a stretch, trying to winnow down process to the bare minimum of things that need doing right now.

I snapped this photograph while waiting at the door before Write Club yesterday. The snoot is donate by Lulu, a regular feature on the inimitable Angela Slatter’s Instagram. Today I’m off to the sunshine coast, where my grandmother is in hospital. She’s in her nineties and hasn’t been in great shape the last few times we caught up. She went into palliative care for a bit, but rallied later in the day and moved back into regular care. Regular blogging will resume at some point, but it’s fairly clear at this point that 2019 is not a year where regular anything is possible. On the plus side, it’s also a year that’s taught me the value of appreciating dog snoots, toe beans, good friends, and the rare moments when everything has been running smoothly and you’re free to put your focus on a single project.