If I only managed to do one comic, tidy the living room and dining room, listen to a friend’s rant, and hang up all the clothes strewn about my bedroom but ordered dinner in instead of cooking? Oh, and I managed to do two sections of digital coloring, too, for the Secret Project.
Still, compared to the mad dash of the last couple of nights tonight almost felt like slacking. Of course, I couldn’t really allow myself to slack, but I oh so wanted to. Tomorrow won’t be much better, laundry list of things to do then as well. I’m looking forward to the weekend, though, maybe I can carve out some serious downtime then. It’s always good to hope!
Last night was absolutely crazy. I was so groggy after work (I blame the paint fumes, even with the long weekend my office stayed closed up so they had no place to go!) I ended up taking a nap after supper and then was up til after 2am wrapping up articles, the webcomic and some things for the Secret Project. Tonight I finished another article, tweaked the Secret Project and, gosh, I know I did something else but for the life of me cannot remember. See, that’s how balls-to-the-wall busy I’ve been these last two nights. Sigh…
So I’m seriously setting an intention for December to be much more organized. I did pretty good in October with balancing the exercise, the comic, and regular writing sessions. Then November went straight to hell but–always the silver lining–at least its almost over. I’ve barely started anything Chirstmassy yet, hopefully the holiday spirit will kick in this weekend, now if I could only find my John Denver/Muppets Christmas album. I found the case but you know CDs, they treat cases more like vacation homes than primary residences so I think it might be on the spindle o various media (cd condo) that seems to have been put somewhere mysterious. At least that’s my bet.
Ugh! Even at limiting myself to just a bit of each item I still ate too much. Tis the way of it, I suppose. So why, then, am I wanting another piece of pie. I don’t /really/ want another piece of pie, I only think I do. Let’s see if I can hold out until tomorrow (and, no, I don’t mean midnight).
Hanging out at Mom’s was cool. We watched a few movies and the dog show. It was kind of nice that the dog who won best of show was the only dog in the finals who didn’t have a best in show title to his/her credit. Mom was put out that the Frenchie didn’t make it to the finals, but bot too much so.
Hey, we get Christmas Eve, why not?
Not entirely unexpectedly the boss let us go early today so I took the opportunity to run by the hardware store (mini power tool! vroom! and parts for an eHow article I’ve had drafted for a while, now) and grocery store (forgot dish detergent last night; pah!) so I got home at the usual time but at a much higher productivity level. I could have stayed and worked til 5–definitely had enough to keep me busy–but the paint fumes made me disinclined to acquiesce. Besides, Drew flew in last night and had Mom’s car so I was her ride for the afternoon. She was ready, we split.
Got completely sidetracked when I got home, though, and watched Free Enterprise before getting anything done. Luckily the comic was inked, just needed color, and all that I really had to do for dinner tomorrow was the pies and chop some vegetables for the dressing. I’ll have plenty of time for the other stuff tomorrow because Mom caved to the demands of the boys to move dinner from 2pm-ish to 4pm. Now, granted, J&K will have already been to at least 2 dinners by then and Drew will probably have gone to B’s for her family’s dinner so essentially we’re holding our dinner for people who will be too full to eat it! We fully realize it, but oh well. But this means I actually have to eat breakfast or something in the morning! Unheard of on Thanksgiving!
And I’ve been wreaking havoc on the web today, too. Started a couple of days ago (I think, I can’t remember what day it is anymore) when I actually managed to widgetize the Secret Project blog like I knew what I was doing and it actually worked. Holy cow! Then today I figured I’d have to be brave and do some more such coding only to find that the wonderful WordPress peeps fixed the stats-incompatibility issues so I didn’t have to! Yay! Of course, then I had a brainstorm on how to fix something that had been bugging me on the Oldenfeld site (granted, it’s something no one else would ever know I fixed because its a very back-end thing and I still haven’t patched the forums yet… sigh…) so I went into the panel and made the change and it worked but somehow changing the ftp user made the files invisible in Cyberduck so I copied them over (all 5.6MB which I’d already copied to my desktop just to make it ‘easy’) only to create an issue with a directory inside a directory that borked the front page. Dur! So then I had to delete the 5.6MB and the directory I accidentally put them in so I could reinstall the 5.6MB without the superfluous directory. But! Hopefully, once this is done, the ftp will be accessible as a stand-alone and not part of my other sites, etc. This is actually more of a safety feature than anything else, to make sure someone is able to get into the site should something happen or when the day comes and I hand over webmin to someone new. If I ever get so lucky, lol.
Throw money at the problem.
(No, I’m not talking about the strike, though I suppose that would fit as well: AMPTP, ante up!)
I restarted Minnie umpteen times lsat night, ran updates, etc. No luck, the keyboard was still sluggish and intermittently responsive. Tonight after the pre-turkey grocery run I even changed the blasted batteries one more time. I unhooked and re-hooked the wireless pluggie thing on Minnie. I shook, I slammed (the keyboard) and nothing.
So then I got dressed (I was already in my jammies, folks), shut off the oven (which was roasting chicken thighs for the dressing) and hauled ass to CompUSA (Hallelujah Chorus for them being 5 minutes away, if that) while my hot chocolate cooled and tossed the plastic on the counter for an Apple keyboard and Mighty Mouse. I have had it with knock-offs to save $20-$40. Just no. Not worth it. The piece of shit Kensington desktop that they sent me to replace the first piece of shit Kensington desktop I purchased was what? Oh, right! A piece of shit. Or, alliteratively: Kensington Krap! I went through two sets in 11 months (and, honestly, the mouses didn’t even last that long since I used the wireless mouse on my graphics tablet about 4 of those 11).
And so what if I went back to a tethered keyboard and mouse? Frankly the wireless feature wasn’t doing all that much for me so you can tie me up and whip me with those precious white USB cords if it means I don’t have to fight with my peripherals!
I can has ports?
And while I was at it, I bought a seven-port hub so that I don’t have to swap USBs each time I want to use a different peripheral. Boo-yah! Between the still-open port on the new keyboard and those as-yet-unused on the hub I have a total of 5 USB slots open. The iPod and the digital camera cable would conceivably take up two of those if they didn’t live in my purse and camera bag, respectively, but even then. Dude! I can has ports!
So, thankfully I have a laptop that likes to cooperate with me so I can get things posted and so forth. You see, right now Minnie is having difficulties that I thought were being cause by having too many memory hogging programs open since the last restart. (Keyboard was taking freaking forever to register keystrokes and then only intermittently.) So I restarted once the comic was scanned but then there were three updates to install (one a system update) so I decided it could do that just fine. The keyboard seemed to cooperate when I had to enter my system password but when I tried to enter text elsewhere it was a no go.
Sigh… I would change the batteries but I just did that a week or two ago and the keyboard usually doesn’t eat them that fast so I don’t think that’s it. (Not to mention that those were my last pair of AA’s; guess what else goes on tomorrow’s shopping list.) Maybe once the update is done and another inevitable restart happens it will play nice again. Otherwise, disregarding all the work I put into modding it, I may be replacing the pretty red and white polka dot set with a non-Kensington set. I’ve had it with the knock-offs.
In other news… well, honestly, I don’t have any other news. That’s it. I got a smidge of work done on The Secret Project and got a good amount of stuff done at work (my office is naked! naked I tell you! the walls are bare and all my tchotchkes are in a box so as to be out of the way of the painters) but other than that. I got nothing. Nothing but frustration and tired.
Oh, wait, I do have something else: the first check from the revised writing contract arrived today. That is definitely a happy moment that will be followed by another happy moment when I make a considerable payment on my MasterCard account 
Oops. So this 7500 words a day on the weekends isn’t turning out to be as feasible as I thought, but I’m going to keep plugging away. The good news is that I’ve got Tuesday’s comic penciled and Thursday’s will be a one-shot for the holiday. The next eHow article is almost finished its draft, but needs visuals. These should be pretty quick, though. I’ve also got another drafted but I still need to find the parts for the visuals. A trip to the hardware store really needs to happen soon. Preferable before Black Friday becomes my only option!
Otherwise, the roses are still beautiful and still make me smile every time I look at them.
Got that much easier when these arrived this afternoon:
I was so incredibly surprised–it was totally out of the blue. And they’re beutiful and smell wonderful (which was perfect because they started painting today and the fumes! whew!) and Spectrum is just so dog-gone sweet to have sent them to me.
Of course there was much in the way of ‘who are they from’ etc. from Mom and my other co-workers (which, according to the note, office gossip was another part of the perk, lol). I haven’t been able to stop smiling since opening them and stopped many time to bury my face in them.
What an absolutely awesome day!
Deadlines met. At least for this week. *thud*
Actually, no, it wasn’t that bad. I just need to get back into some sort of real routine for the rest of the month. Only NaNo-writing on the weekends should help. In fact, since that’s the case I have both Thursday and Friday after work to get started on the next article, next week’s comic, and maybe a few of the miscellaneous things that need to get done as well. This could work. Honest.
But first a pitiful excuse at catching up on sleep by going to bed relatively on time.
Not literally.
Today was going pretty well (aside from the cough returning with annoying force and the slight dizzines caused, more than likely, from the beginnings of an ear infection–I swear, I can’t seem to get around this wanna-be cold) until the tag end of the day when some unfortunate word-association mind-jumps had to go and make me all contemplative just before driving home. Now why’d it have to go and do that???
I suppose we have to revisit old battlegrounds and warwounds from time to time just to remind ourselves of what happened and how we learned from it or otherwise can avoid it again, I just didn’t need the extra stuff on my brain when I had two projects already in progress and a third pop into my brain that just /had/ to be done tonight as well (it’s not nice to ignore a muse, you never know when she’ll come back again).
Oh, well, I think I rambled enough in it for now and then got the one new project done and the preexisting two worked on. Tomorrow night will see completion of both by hook or by crook. Deadlines!!!
No new novel words written. None. Barely even thought about it to be honest. As soon as I got home I took the last article picture and edited and uploaded while I ate supper. Then I did tomorrow’s Random Acts… start to finish. Thankfully Tuesday’s was a simple strip, Thursday’s has a little more detail to it, but with it 2/3 sketched it’s actually not looking to be as involved as I was fearing. Of course, I still need to figure out panel 3… and I really need to draw palmetto more because each strip she’s in I keep changing her face. Oh well, I’ll figure it out.
One more eHow article to write this week. I think my plan is to draft it tomorrow night after work, edit and upload Wednesday night. Which reminds me, I wanted to do a little graphic for the title. I can submit without it, but I should at least start it. Usually these don’t take but an hour or two, total.
Didn’t quite catch up, did I?
I was rolling along fairly well during Saturday’s write-in but once I packed up and got home I was beat. Intending to get back to it I did some NaNovel-related resesarch but couldn’t convince myself to actually write any more.
Then reality intruded: I need to have 2 more articles in to eHow by end-of-day Thursday and I haven’t started on next week’s “Random Acts…” yet.
So last night, before bed, I did some reading for one of those articles and today, after laundry and grocery shopping, I picked up some supplies for 3 other articles this month (writing for Arts & Crafts does come with a certain amount of visual expectation, at least to my mind). The painted ceramics items are curing in the oven now and I’ll go back to drafting those instructions as soon as I finish this post. Once that draft is done I’ll start this week’s comics.
The thing that’s getting me right now is that I am so incredibly exhausted all of the time. Ever since the party I haven’t been able to perk back up. I don’t know if it’s the shortening days affecting my circadian rhythms or maybe I’m feeling the time-change more and haven’t adjusted yet, but I find myself exhausted by 6pm seemingly no matter what. Even now, not quite 9pm, my eyes are heavy and I really feel like I could just sleep for days.
I could really use some caffiene right about now. Too bad it’s still firmly on the ‘not on your life’ list.
Hey, look, the counter moved some more! I still feel a bit like I’m pulling teeth but at least I’m pulling. I still need to write about 8K tomorrow to catch up but my eyes are getting tired and my brain more so.
Is remembering to post to both on the same night. Mondays and Wednesdays are when I update the RA… blog (it uses the ComicPress theme for WordPress) so I frequently forget to come over here and post because I feel like I’ve already blogged and it easily slips my mind. I’ll work on it. I promise. In other news…
6224!
Still a long ways from catching up but at least the counter has moved some. It was shameless padding, I admit it, but if it gets me closer to goal I’ll take it. Tomorrow night and Saturday will be a big push to catch back up. I need about 10K or more by the end of Saturday to be back on track. At a rate of a little more than 1K an hour at the write ins I should be able to get half that Saturday at the Library so the other 5K+ should be doable, maybe even surge ahead a bit.
While I admit to a remarkable amount of ennui about this NaNo I would hate to throw in the towel mid-run. I read a great quote by Dick Block today: projects don’t fail, people just quit too soon. Or something like that. Anyway, it made me really want to see it through, even if the end result is less than 50K I’m going to keep chipping away until the end of the month. Granted, the webcomic and my eHow contract require higher billing, but it’ll all get done even if nothing else does. That’s what NaNo is all about, right? Pushing oneself to do something previously believed implausible.
Sigh… By the time I got to work I was feeling pretty cruddy and coughing enough to get pitying looks from my coworkers. I really don’t have time to be sick this week so I’m going to bed early. This is why I didn’t write on my NaNovel tonight. Same reason I didn’t go to Knit Night, too. Boo hoo!
But I did get Thursday’s RA… sketched and the draft for the needle felting article written and the photos I took last night edited for inclusion. And now, at 8:45pm, my cold meds are making me verry verra sleepy so I’m going to give in, go to bed, and maybe be not really sick tomorrow. Please? Kthxbai!
Um, yeah… a wee bit behind.
I actually caught up at the write-in on Saturday and then didn’t even open the file Sunday and today, well, today didn’t happen. Chances of me making Knit Night tomorrow are looking a leetle bit slim if I hope to not slip farther behind.
Of course, the reason for me not writing up a storm the rest of the weekend was a good one! Honest! Spectrum got to town about eight thirty Friday night and left around two-ish on Sunday. It’s hard to be sure of the exact time because I hadn’t changed the clocks yet so it was constantly look at the clock, subtract an hour, then subtract another hour for central time to figure when he’d get home. Wait, that would make it 3 my time he left. It was just a perfectly lazy weekend and very much needed. *tries to wipe dopey grin off face and fails terribly*
Tonight was just trying to catch up on stuff. I convinved myself into not walking after work because I still had to ink RA and do visuals for an eHow article before writing. Then I’d promised I’d get the Halloween pictures uploaded and I hadn’t finished the gallery upgrade and then the applet thingy needed some plug in I couldn’t find the first five times I went through the admin panel looking for it and then tried to upload the first batch manually only it stalled and stalled and stalled. So a sixth time through the admin panel (it was a grudge match by now) and finally found a tab to get more plugins (whew!) updated the applet and remote plugins (yay!) and went to the gallery to upload the pictures only to find out that despite the upgrading I had to manually activate the remote plugin and then life would cooperate. So now I’m babysitting the first 81 files (which are taking forever, probably cause the filesize for each is big) and then I have about two dozen more to add from another folder. But at least its working and I didn’t have to choose each file by hand: yay for drag and drop.
Once the second batch starts I’ll just turn off the monitor and call it a night. I’m sleepy and verging on cranky and, even though it doesn’t necessarily seem possible, wishing I’d gotten a few more hugs this weekend, lol.
If it’s November, it must be a wordcount!
It’s a slow start for day 1. I may write more later but I really need to get to work on tidying the apartment so I’m willing to stop for the night here. If nothing else I’ll try and get up early tomorrow morning and write some. Friday night is out (I have plans!) but Saturday is the first write-in of the month. Oh, I should probably send out a reminder email, shouldn’t I? Adding it to the list!
This year’s story is turning out a lot differently already than I thought it would. I had written a short story for the Bard’s site several months ago and though that maybe it could be turned into a longer work along the genre of detective/medical examiner fiction. But as I was thinking about it today at work, paths started to branch out and suddenly I’m looking at subverting an American legend into the basis for some freakish cult set in Ohio and it’s beginning to sound a lot more like an M. Night Shamylan work than Patricia Cornwall. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, just remarking how easily the page turns and courses redirect.
Oh, and I don’t forsee another update before Sunday since I’ll have company this weekend. Not sure, other than the write-in, how much writing or computer time I’ll have. Good luck WriMos!
