Scraps (n. ,fem., singular)

Last night I managed to format all of the pages I had pre-blocked (up to 52 physical pages of the graphic novel) so it’s good that I planned to block in the car while Mom drives us to Orlando.

And, wow, tonight was just a whirl. A very good question was posed over at the A&E forum of eHow and it sparked an instant article. As soon as it gets approved (tomorrow if I’m lucky) I can post it as a reply instead of just a well you could do this, this and this. But it was just something I hadn’t thought to do an article on and there didn’t seem to be one already written on the site, so it was providence, indeed. That’s four of my 7 for the month

Also put my new tag on the car, today. Sweet! I wasn’t really “sold” on the State of the Arts plate but it really does look nice when it’s actually on the car, goes well with the blue. Then there was the SCA meeting, amusing as always, come home and pack my overnight bag, start the dishwasher, and worked on next week’s comics. Whew! Busy night!

Got another 2 pages in on the script (that puts me, um, 5 behind schedule, I’ll catch up this weekend). Sigh… Spectrum went back to Louisiana today so I guess I just needed an evening to adjust to the apartment being so empty again.

Little bit of a happy dance at the mail box, though: my personalized plate came in the mail today! Woot! Will have to put the tag on this weekend and take a picture of Electra with her colorful ‘R4ND0M’ license plate. Yes, I am just that much more of a dork now.

SO very different from last year when each trip to the service bay was fraught with stress, anxiety, frustration and much, much anger. But the little light is now off and Electra’s had her 6K-mile check-up and is just find. I’ve had her almost a year and only have 6530 miles on her. Not bad for including a trip to Atlanta and back, a trip to Mobile and back, and one or two trips to Central FL and back.

I also got to play with the shiny new toy at work today. That copier, etc. can do quite a few things, but it’s a bit temperamental at the same time. But the touch-screen is nice. Bink bink bink.

Tonight I mostly worked on some planning for NaNo while watching CSI and ER season openers. Tomorrow night is Ghost Whisperer, Moonlight, and NUMB3RS for fun! fun! fun! Meanwhile I’ll work on next week’s comics and plan for the next eHow article. It’s multitasking at it’s finest and most rewarding. I swear!

But I had to leave early today for a NaNo meeting so I didn’t get to see it in action. It’s a very spiffy copier, fax, scanner, printer, that walks an talks–or it at least better!

Not really much else to say. I have to drop off Electra tomorrow morning so I’d better make it a kinda early night.

No, seriously. This morning, shortly after arriving at the office, it hit me: I have OnStar.

So I went back OUT to the car, cranked up the engine, and pushed that little blue button and had a nice chat with a diagnostician was able to tell me that the vent solenoid was reading as broken. Mystery solved, and I have scheduled it for service on Thursday. Made me feel a lot better knowing it was actually something off rather than a loose fuel cap or water on the emissions sensor.

After work it was a quick trip to Target Copy to make up the packets for the teacher meeting tomorrow. I made 30. I’m optimistic. Usually I’d just stay late at work and use our office copier for this sort of thing but there was a slight hitch there: it died. Hellacious noise turned out to be the equivalent of an engine seizing and there’s no hope for it. Play taps and donate it to OAR. Of course, this was beneficial, because for under $20 and under 10 minutes I had the packets not only collated but stapled. The usual way would have had me collating by hand and stapling myself. This was much better.

The BYOP(5) invitations are about half assembled. Or, well, the cover bit is. This is turning out to be a slightly more involved project than I thought, but the hard part (well, it wasn’t even that hard, just tedious from the necessary trial and error) is done. I should be on schedule to send them out on the first. I’m really liking the interactivity of this years invitation, it should be more obvious than last year’s black bar and the mechanism is so very simple in reality… Thank goodness I went through all those old craft magaziens otherwise I wouldn’t have found the answer to my dilemma

At least not for quite a while. I had this weird feeling that I’d forgotten something even though I know I hadn’t. I’d completed most of the items on the to do list and the one that wasn’t got a decent start. I checked that the doors were locked, everything turned off that was supposed to, nothing was wrong. And yet, I couldn’t sleep.

I ended up reading an entire Stuart Woods novel that Mom had leant me and finally was able to get to sleep sometime towards 4am. And overslept a bit. I wasn’t all /that/ late for work, but I was rushed and didn’t have time to stop for gas on the way in. At 10 I had a dr’s appointment so I left early enough to take care of that little detail only to find that the gas-cap was, in fact, not secured. Now, I’m compulsive about turning it until it clicks once or twice and I hadn’t gotten gas in almost 2 weeks so how it came loose is anyone’s guess, but in light of this little development I’ve decided to give that pesky light another couple days to reset itself. Grr

And then things got really interesting.

As I approach my dr’s office I notice signs advertising a (new?) dr’s office in the area all pointing in the direction I was heading. See what’s coming up? Yeah. I kept thinking that maybe he was renting the other half of the building but, no, when I walked in the lobby stretched all the way across both halves (a change) and it was clearly redecorated.

Bewildered and a bit irritated since it was four minutes until I had to be who knows where, I tap on the receptionist’s glass and explain my confusion. She wasn’t exactly sure where the new office was but thought it was on Centerville (where I’d just passed but is split so backtracking gets a bit interesting). Luckily I had my old appt card in my purse so I was able to call and get the new address. Fifteen minutes, two circles around a warren of small offices, and two different mis-guesses I finally find the office, only to find out that the doctor isn’t even in yet! Oh brother.

Now, granted, he’d been on call all weekend at the hospital, I later found out, and got hung up on a consult that morning, hence the delay, but it was a full 2 hours before I got back to the office. The good news is that things are still moving in the right direction, he’s happy with my progress (even if it is incremental) and will see me again in March unless something else presents itself.

The rest of the day was blessedly uneventful until I got the initial pictures from Q. She’s awesome, I just wish I’d given her more to work with. I really need to work on my posture! I’ve just barely narrowed the 66 shots to my fav 10. And you really can’t tell that we were all sweating buckets in Sunday’s humidity.

And tonight, thank heavens, television has returned. Yay! And I will say that holy hell but Heroes has won me for another season. I really didn’t expect to watch this season since the original plan had been to dump the season 1 cast and start fresh which made no freaking sense. But after tonight’s episode I barely know what to make of some of the details but I like what I see so far.

This has been an incredibly busy and productive weekend.

Friday night Palmie and I went out for sushi and then back to her place to pack pack pac. She’s moving in a week and still had a lot to go. We made a dent and then she kept on during the weekend.

Saturday the to-do list was long and included shopping for a few things. Turned out to be a stellar shopping day as I came across one sale after another. Including a pair of free shoes! I was at Bealls Outlet and saw some cute ankle-strap pumps for 16.99 but they had a little discount code sticker on them that I thought was 70% off. Nope. It rang up as 95% off! Eighty-five cents, people, for shoes that originally retailed for $44!

Today we (Q, myself, along with T&C) tromped all over Maclay Gardens where Q took tons of pictures of the three of us. I had decided it would be a good idea to have a decent headshot done for my profile over at eHow and just to have some shots for general use. It’s been years since I’ve had photos done anyway and let me tell you: working with a photographer who’s also a friend is a far different experience than going to some studio who just moves you through. I can’t wait to see the pictures.

With a couple more hours to go before bed I’m going to try for one more project at least started. This one will be for the pumpkin party. I thought about whether I should cancel it, whether I would have the time to put it together, but since the canopy and favor containers have already come in, I have all the basic supplies already and the party almost plans itself there was really no reason to forgo it this year. While I may not be able to do such extensive decorating as I’d planned, I think it will still go off well and not interfere with the increasing writing demands.

This week, though, is going to be a smidge crazy. I’ve got a follow-up visit with Dr Z tomorrow at 10am, Wednesday we have a Q&A meeting at 3:45 for the teachers participating in NaNo and I may very well have to take Electra into the dealership because the engine light came on Friday. Granted, I’d splashed through a puddle on the way into the parking lot that morning, at if the water splashed onto the emission control that could cause the light, but I really think it should have dried out by now and the light it still on. If it hasn’t gone off by the time I get back from the dr’s tomorrow I’ll call and let them know I’m bringing her in. Hey, I didn’t get around to getting the oil changed this weekend so they can do that, too, and it’ll only cost me $10. Probably have them rotate the tires as well. But that’ll be all that gets paid for since she’s well under the bumper to bumper warranty.