So yesterday I didn’t sit down to actually work until around 5 or 6 p.m.
Because… A friend asked if she could camp in the Funny Farm’s spare bedroom during a transitional period in her life. Her DH landed a very fine job in the Bay Area and has already launched himself there. She, meanwhile, has a teaching contract that she’s loath to walk out on — because she’d like to get academic work in California, she’d like not to burn any bridges — and she’s in the middle of her first semester of a master’s program in her profession.
We propose, therefore, that she’ll stay at my house for a month or two while enjoying the thrills of a commuter marriage (hooboy! lucky kids…). I’m pleased about this idea: it’ll be nice to have some company for a change, and it’s also nice to be able to do something for someone else. For a change.
She’s moving in on Thursday, so before than I need to shovel out the unholy mess that is my dwelling. Number one: the piles and piles of unused clothing in that bedroom’s closet!!!!
In the normal course of events, that closet would hold winter clothes and dressy stuff, and the one in my bedroom would hold summer clothes. Events, however, have been far from normal.
After the deboobifcation surgeries, I tried on all my tops and dresses and put the ones that definitely we re still wearable in my bedroom closet. A bunch of shirts and knit tops were too uncomfortable against the still-healing wounds to wear. Plus I still had some size 10 and size 12 jeans, which I figured I’d better not get rid of because I’d need them if I got fat again — which indeed has come to pass since the accursed gut surgery.
So I took all the uncomfortable clothes that I thought I might be able to wear in the future and hung them in the spare bedroom closet, with a PostIt note reminding me to try them on in May, when I expected to be more or less functional again.
In May I did go through those, try them on, and retrieve the ones worth wearing in the summer heat. A whole bunch of long-sleeved knit tops, sweaters, vests, and jackets remained in the storage closet.
So yesterday, by way of emptying out the closet for my friend, I went through all those, folded everything truly wintery and stored them in a suitcase, and moved stuff that I might be able to wear now that it’s cooling down a little bit into the bedroom closet.
The closet is now chuckablock full… Read “I have got TOO MUCH STUFF!
Really, I need to get rid of it. Because I rarely throw anything away, clothing items drift up like snow or sand dunes or dog hair… But you know, every time I shovel stuff out, within about two or three months I’m searching all over the house for it and I really need it and then I’m upset because I can’t find it and then I’m even more upset when I remember I gave it to the Goodwill! So on top of my innate laziness, I tend to be kind of conservative about getting rid of stuff I paid to have.
I did, however, haul a big pile out to the car to try to peddle at My Sister’s Closet when I’m near there next Thursday morning.
Interestingly, at least half of that came from My Sister’s Closet!
We’ll see if they’ll take the stuff back. 😀
While I’m at the Closet, I’m going to drop by their home furnishing store and see if, by any chance, they have a decent set of stainless flatware at a decent price.
One never knows. Miracles do happen. If (as I expect), they don’t, then I’ll drive straight up Scottsdale Road to the Sur La Table at Kierland Commons and pick up a plain, manageable set there.
But y’know…when it’s just me, that’s fine. (Well…it’s not fine, but it’s eminently survivable.) However, when there are two people trying to use the kitchen…no. I think it would be asking altogether too much to expect another person to keep the silver and the cheapo stainless (a Chinese knock-off of my Christofle pattern) separate and to remember not to put the silver in the washer. There’s a limit. So, I’m going to pack away the Christofle and get another set of stainless flatware, which will provide plenty of utensils (because I cook a lot and only run the washer every couple of days, I’ll often run through the entire supply of forks or spoons, just on my own!).
If I like the new stuff, then I’ll just keep it and never have to wash another fork by hand. But if I pine for the Christofle, I’ll break it back out after my friend goes west to join her husband and use whichever stainless set I prefer for cooking and knocking around.
Anyway, even though I had to work until 1 a.m. to catch up with publishing stuff left undone, I felt very pleased. A lot of shoveling-out got done. The spare closet is pretty much empty (except for a few hanging linens), so she’ll have plenty of room to stash her stuff. Next: shovel out the bathroom so she can find room to park her make-up. Then we’ll be good!
🙂
Wait! I forgot to show you this. How do you like this cover I designed last night?
Heee! Hafta to ask you: how about that! I think I’m getting pretty good at this. In fact, I may have missed my calling: I should’ve been a graphic designer.
This book is part of the Travelers frame story that will go on sale through November and possibly into December. We have two sets of stories for the holidays: Travelers probably is best for December, because it’s premised on a bunch of airline passengers becalmed overnight in an airport. The other, Family, is focused on Thanksgiving: the stories of brothers, sisters, and hangers-on making the annual trek home to Mama’s house for the big family reunion around Thanksgiving dinner.
So: watch for these stories, all of which are upbeat and fun and probably tell stories that resonate with your own life. Onward!
Have you ever wondered why it seems to take SO much longer to get out the door and into your car than it used to? For a long time, I thought it was just me — probably a function of age. But lately friends have made the same remark. It may not be a universal phenomenon, but it surely does appear that a lot of people feel it takes longer to leave the house as the days go by.
Puzzling about this the other day, I decided to list all the things I had to do one morning before I climbed into the car and drove out of the garage, and then compare them with the routine I had say, 30 years ago: back in the day when I could grab my purse, jump in the car, and be gone! Here’s what happened, with the new stuff classified by “Security,” “Age,” “Burdens of Too Much Stuff,” and “Changes in living arrangements or habits.”
1. Locked up the computer
Security. Also probably Stuff. In the good old days, we didn’t have computers and so we didn’t have to worry about having our entire lives go out the door if one was stolen.
To secure my computer hardware, I have a solid-core door with a hardened lock on my office. Whenever I leave the house for more then ten or fifteen minutes, I lock that deadbolt. This has the same effect as a set of stairs to a second storey: whatever you want is always on the other side of it.
2. Unlocked door, went back in office, retrieved a pair of bifocals for driving and label reading. Relock door.
Security: See above in re: the door hassles.
Age: As a young woman I wore contact lenses and never needed reading glasses, even if I was wearing regular distance glasses. When you get old, contacts number among the many things you don’t want to be bothered with anymore.
3. Took out the garbage.
Changes. Security. The beloved old house had no fence, so I would step through the oleanders into the alley to toss the trash. Later, the gate in the fence we installed had no lock. To get out to the garbage can now, I have to unlock the latch, wrestle the gate open, wrestle it shut, and relock it.
The old house’s kitchen was big enough to accommodate a garbage can, so I didn’t have a trash bag in the sink collecting garbage and starting to stink forthwith. So, I didn’t necessarily have to take out the garbage before I could leave the house.
4. Locked eight (8!) doors and secured two sliding doors.
Security. Changes. It never entered our minds to install iron security gates with drill-proof locks on all the hinged exterior doors. We didn’t have sliding doors, so there was no screwing around with those things, either.
5. Unlocked two front doors. Tried (and failed) to unscrew an irrigation sprayer so as to get a 90-degree model to replace the 180 degree number that waters the front door every time the water comes on.
Changes. Whoever heard of an irrigation system in a residential yard?
6. Chased the dogs back in the house. Relocked doors.
Changes. Security. My German shepherd did not have to be chased. She came when called.
7. Washed the silver that can’t go in the dishwasher, by hand and on the fly.
Changes. My old KitchenAid dishwashers actually worked, if you can imagine. And they did not tarnish the silver.
8. Remembered to retrieve empty propane tank.
Stuff. We did not have a propane grill. Are you kidding? Gimme a break!
9. Unlocked three (3!) doors to get at the propane tank.
Security.
10. Relocked three (!) doors.
Security. Who is it, really, that belongs behind bars???
11. Loaded propane tank into vehicle.
Stuff.
12. Went back into house and checked that dogs are safe indoors.
Security. Changes. I never had little dogs that were vulnerable to coyotes and drowning.
13. Relocked door, got into car.
Security.
14. Unlocked door, re-entered house, walked back to bathroom, applied lip stuff.
Security. Changes. Age. Did we include “forgot” among our list of causes? I always carried a tube of Vaseline, a stick of lip balm, or lip gloss in my purse. Another item that comes under the late-life heading of “don’t wanna be bothered with it.”
15. Poured ice and water into car mug, carried it into garage. Relocked door.
Changes. Security. People didn’t carry water around in the car with them, except for a jug of water always in the trunk in case of emergency on the open road.
16. Drove away.
Eleven of 15 pre-driving hassles are security-related! Of course, we did worry about burglars, muggers, and rapists back in the Day. But we didn’t live constantly under lock and key. On the other hand, if I’d run in and out of the house to deal with things I’d forgotten or felt needed to be done, I’d never have gotten out the door. And also, on that same hand, I didn’t have to wrestle with a locking interior door.
The difference, I think, has to do with the possession of computers. That and other kinds of junk we didn’t have then.
You know, if somebody had ripped off my house in, say, 1980, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. My dissertation notes were handwritten on notecards and sheets of paper; the manuscript was typed on paper — no one would have stolen that junk. Our checkbook register was exactly that: a real checkbook register, not a Quickbooks or Excel page. But today my whole life is on my computer! If a burglar stole even one of my computers, I would be screwed every which way from Sunday. It would be a real catastrophe to have a bad guy take a device that contains all my financial information, all my business records, all the projects I’m working on, and all my connection to the Internet. Absolute disaster. Hence layer after layer after layer of locks and gizmos to secure every entry into the shack. Layer after time-consuming, ditzy, annoying layer.
Only one or possibly two interferences relate to age: having to wear a special pair of glasses to drive and navigate the world beyond the house, and (possibly) forgetting to oil the lips before leaving the shack.
No wonder I run late all the time! If each of these nuisances took just 30 seconds on average, the combined bunch of them would make me run 7½ minutes late getting out the door. If they averaged one minute apiece, they would make me 15 minutes late.
***
Don’t forget to grab your boxed set of five-star-rated Fire-Rider stories! Books I through VI: SIX BOOKS for the regular price of two!
A collection of shorter works is called a “Boxed Set” in Amazonese. Isn’t that…annoyingly virtually cute? WhatEVER. We just put our first one out, and it looks pretty good. It collects the first six books of Fire-Rider, from the time our hero Kaybrel comes into possession of the captive Tavio to the time the traveling war bands decide which way to go next after leveling an enemy city. Along the way, we meet some colorful characters, learn what drives the warriors’ thirst for blood, examine Kay’s misgivings, and nearly get into a fist-fight.
The first three books have received five-star reviews. Apparently lowering the price to 99 cents causes people to buy it. Must mellow them out, too, which would explain the nice things they’ve had to say. 😉
Fire-Rider REALLY NEEDS those reviews. At $3.99, the set of six books is two bucks less than you’d pay if all six were priced at 99 cents, the lowest figure Amazon will allow me to post. It’s five dollars less than the present total cost of the six books, combined.
So, dear readers (♥♥♥♥), would you please, pretty please with sugar on top go to Amazon and get your copy of The Saga Begins? And then especially please with ice cream and chocolate sauce review the gilded prize at Amazon?
So along about the middle of the night, our latest issue, The Kelpie, went live on Amazon. Really…if you can stand a little explicit biology (this one is relatively tame in that department), you have gotta read this crazy little squib. It’s quite short — probably reading it beginning to end will get you through the waiting room at the dentist or the doc’s office. But what it lacks in length, it makes up for in Halloween spookiness. Our author came up with the craziest idea, and from there built it into quite a dark and spooky story with an odd, didn’t-see-that-coming twist.
Only one serious hangover from yesterday: the new Excel file I built for WonderAccountant to view the details of checks and deposits (now that I can no longer use Quickbooks online in its new incarnation) crashed when my computer went down yesterday. (You’re surprised by a catastrophic crash, after all those shenanigans? Surely not!). MS Office for Mac saved the files as “Version 1.” When I saved it back down to disk as an .xlsx file and then tried to reopen the file from that location, I got a “corrupted file” message. NOTHING I tried would reopen it.
But I did manage to reopen the “version 1” file, which I’d stupidly closed because Excel wouldn’t let me open a file with the same name, by calling it up from “Open Recent” in the File menu. You must be calling on something that resides in memory when you do that. When I saved it back down AGAIN as an .xls file (which usually works), it again wouldn’t re-open. Saving it as an .xlsb file finally did recover it and save the data in a file that will open.
Claro que it’s time to back up that entire disk and DropBox to the flashdrive…
Ugh. I worked until 11 p.m. last night, having started at 5:30 a.m. What a bitch of a day. Now, though, only about 75 pages of Honored Client’s book remain to be re-read, so I probably will be done by the time we meet on Friday. I sent him what I’d finished so he’ll have time to review 95% of the book, just in case something comes up on this end.
I’m supposed to go to a local FINCON group’s get-together this evening. Though they’re meeting at my hands-down favorite Valley restaurant, it’s way to Hell and gone in Tempe, and the weather is threatening some major rain. Really, I do NOT want to drive to Tempe through rush-hour traffic in a storm. It’s dangerous enough to navigate that effing freeway under the best of conditions…I do not use the term “fellow homicidal drivers” lightly. When it rains, people around here go absolutely BATSHIT. Batshit on the surface streets is bad enough. But on the freeways? Holy cripes.
The grill cleaning dude came by at 7 this morning. He said it was raining between here and the East Valley, whence he had to drive, and that people were already running amok. Said it was truly a horrible drive.
Today’s next chore is to figure out how to use Mailchimp to send out my newsletter, which has been sitting on the hard drive for several days. This will require sitting through a 25-minute video — probably more than once. I know I’m going to hate that, and so I’m putting it off. Hence, this blog post. 😉
Just picked up $245 from a client. Tomorrow I should collect another $800 from a second rather charming client, and Honored Client…well, who knows? I haven’t toted up the time. But at $60/hour, it will be enough to bring home a little bacon. This will be good, because yesterday The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., disbursed a shitload of money to writers and editing subcontractors.
Wow! Here it comes: the sky is getting black and the wind is picking up. Just ran off to shut down the pool equipment as lightning and thunder begin to crash around us. Dollars to donuts we lose the power (and the wireless connection) again.
Do you ever have days where EVERYTHING YOU TOUCH goes ker-sproinnnggggggggg!And explodes in your hands? All over you?????
Okay, about 90 percent of this is because of my own carelessness. No question, I make a lot of extra work for myself by overlooking a LOT of stupid little mistakes. But DAY-um! There’s just too much of this stuff…and some of it — at least today’s some of it — is not of my concocting.
So I start at 5:30 a.m., as usual, figuring to toss off a short job and then feed the dogs and myself before getting on with the REAL work of the day, which is to plow through at least 50 pages of Most Honored Client’s current iteration of his magnum opus.
First, though, the latest Camptown Races masterpiece is on the schedule: post to Amazon. This is a nuisancey little job that can take half an hour or more, and because it’s a pesty thing to do, I’d like to get it off my plate first, before moving on with my day.
TWO HOURS LATER…finally I clicked “Publish” on the damn thing.
Problem the first: When I upload the cover art, I see that the font color selected for the title and author name is too dim to pop out against the mostly black and dark aqua background.
This is really a very cool, extremely strange and dark Halloween story, and I WANT THOSE COVERLINES TO BE EFFING ORANGE DAMN IT!
None of the oranges in my program’s standard color palette are bright enough, weirdly, to stand out against the dark background. So now I decide to create a shade of orange or red-orange or something that will work.
Three tries later, it’s clear that nothing in the red to orange range is gonna cut the proverbial mustard.
Understand, ONE try can take 8 or ten minutes. Or more, depending on how bad Cox’s “high-speed” (har har!) connection happens to be at any given moment. It takes for-freaking-EVER for a TIFF file to load to Amazon. Not as EVER as an entire MS, but EVER ENOUGH.
Finally I decide to change the font color to yellow. But the standard yellow in my palette is not gonna make it. Too grating. So once again, I have to fiddle around and fiddle around and FIDDLE around to develop a shade of yellow that doesn’t make my teeth grind.
(And I’ve broken another crown, BTW, with the tooth-grinding. Good morning to you, too.)
This looks much better. Create TIFF. Upload. Watch Amazon grind away and grind away. View result. Realize the blue “glow” effect is absolutely positively not gonna make it.
Back into the guts of the program. Adjust glow to the newly invented bright orange; transparency (against a black background!) 50 percent. Change color of font line to black. Re-upload. APPROVE! Create new full-size JPEG, create new low-res JPEG, create new thumbnail.
How do you like it, by the way? Is this creepy or is this not creepy? That horse standing in the water is a kelpie, a type of Celtic demon. Be scared. Be VERY scared!
Click on the image for a view of the REAL THING.
Upload edited, templated manuscript. Download the .mobi file into Amazon’s Kindle reader.
This process being one that takes forever, I finally get up and feed the dogs, who have gone back to bed.
Problem the next: Amazon detects a half-dozen “spelling errors.” These all appear to be Scottish dialect spellings in the Robert Burns verse I put in the front matter. Just as I click “ignore all,” I spot ONE real typo: Scottish is set lower-case somewhere in the MS.
Yes. Well. But that particular line is the book’s subtitle, which is set all caps, so no one would know whether you typed “Scottish” or “scottish.” However, knowing Amazon, I figure I’d better fix it. They can penalize you if they think you’ve got misspelled words in your MS: apparently part of the upload process is having one of their abused, terrorized wage slaves check the copy before it goes live.
Fix one character, reload. Go brush my teeth while this takes place.
Download the new .mobi file into Amazon’s Kindle reader. Go wash my face while this grinds and grinds and grinds away.
Back to proofing the .mobi file: In said front matter, half of the little definition of what a keltie is appears in italic! WTF? The name of the source, a website, is set italic, but the blurb itself is set roman. I can NOT figure out why a half-dozen words in the blurb appear as italic.
I screw around and SCREW around with this, racking up another couple of interminable uploads and downloads.
Finally I give up, scroll down the page, retype the copy, and retype the source, leaving it roman. Delete the corrupt passage. Pull up space pull up space pull up space.
Upload and download again. Pour another cup of coffee, open the back door and sic the dog on the new accursed cat that’s come over the wall, anti-cat barrier be damned. Takes almost as long to roust the puppy out of the sack as it does to re-download the .mobi file.
Return to proofing copy. The new passage I’ve typed spells “also” as “alos.” Alas.
Fix, upload, download.
And so on to infinity. Of course I find a few other errors. By the time this process is finished, it’s 7:30 in the morning! I haven’t had anything to eat. I haven’t walked the dogs. I haven’t come anywhere NEAR starting the project I’m supposed to be spending the entire day on.
A boxed set of the first six Fire-Rider stories is slated to go live on Wednesday. I haven’t updated the table of contents on a PC.
Yeah. Clever Amazon’s clever Word-to-MOBI converter cannot read the links in a TofC created on or even touched by a Mac computer. Don’t ask.
I send the MS to Tina. In the requisite 20 seconds, she returns it with the TofC updated on one of her terminals.
Now I need to enter new lines to break this thing up into the books it anthologizes. This, I hope and pray, will not fuck up in conversion (you may be sure the “hope” part is pretty forlorn). Ten minutes later I get down to the end of the thing and realize ONE CHAPTER in the last section lacks its numeral. Entering it in the TofC doesn’t work. AND the title of that book, which is supposedly formatted in a style undetectable to the ToC function, appears in the goddamn TofC as a chapter.
So I have to reformat the book title and fix the chapter title. And send it BACK to Tina to format on her PC. But not before deleting all the work I’ve interpolated into the TofC field, so as not to bollix it up on her end.
After all this screwing around, I see I haven’t assigned an ISBN to the damn thing. This requires ANOTHER ten or fifteen minutes of dorking-around time.
Right this very minute, I drop scribbling the present post (which I started as a device to vent and maybe allay some of the frustration factor) and head over to Bowker to get an ISBN.
Do you suppose I’ve written a stupid “description” for Bowker? Hell no. So now I have to write that, which you may be sure I don’t feel like doing to such an intense degree that I come up blank. I decide to wing it.
I upload the wrong cover image for the boxed set. Where’s the one Gary did? I search all over Digital Creation for the designer’s excellent rendition. Finally find it. Re-upload the cover image. Upload the PDF; watch the computer grind away and grind away. Jump through the remaining hoop after hoop after hoop after hoop. This consumes a good 15 minutes, maybe twenty.
BTW, you must get the first boxed set. It’s an incredible bargain: SIX FIRE-RIDER BOOKS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE!
Reviews of the serial installments are trending quite well. It is NOT p0rn0graphic and is, as a matter of fact and in my not-very-humble opinion, a truly terrific book. It will go live on Wednesday, probably around 6 p.m. Pacific time.
Just as Bowker finishes killing fifteen minutes of my time, the pool pump kicks on.
Yesterday, while my friend Carol and I were at a concert, a huge monsoonish storm came up. I don’t know how much water was dumped, but…whatEVER. Because I was across town, I wasn’t here to shut the pump off by way of preventing it from sucking up bushels of flying debris. When I got home along about 5 p.m., it was making a weird noise. The pump pot was gorged. I ran outside and shut the system down, figuring first thing in the morning I’d clean out the pump pot basket.
Yeah, well… First thing this morning, I was working. And the second thing. And the third thing. And the fourth…and so on to infuckingfinity!
I swear aloud, LEAP up, and FLY to the pool equipment. Shut down the gasping system and discombulate it. So much crap has been sucked up it has burst the plastic basket. That’ll be another 15 bucks I can’t afford.
Satan, the former owner of the Funny Farm, was an inveterate Happy Handyman. As you may know, the work of handyman hobbyists is usually suspect.
One of Satan’s projects was installation of a 12 x 5 metal storage shed on the east side of the house. Instead of pouring a concrete foundation, he laid down paving blocks, upon which he set his structure. The floor of this fine building is — wait for it! — oh yes! PLYWOOD!
Yeah.
The Sonoran Desert crawls with termites.
A family of these little munchers has found the shed and is eating its way across the floor. They’ve also invaded the shelves on the brick-and-board storage I built outside the shed — so those have to be taken apart and the boards tossed, somewhere far away from the house.
Saturday, I called my pet exterminator.
His wife called this morning to explain what they propose to do. No, they can’t use their (stinky!) organic (maybe not quite SO poisonous to humans and dogs?) product on termites. They have to use a standard termite product. For the same price, she said, they’d trench and apply prophylactic treatment to the entire house. They do not understand what this will entail, and I fail to enlighten her.
Price to treat the Funny Farm with a toxic product that is almost guaranteed to make me and the dogs sick? EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLAH!
I can’t very well not do it. Once they get into your house, if a home inspector spots damage you can NOT sell your house without expensively treating it, and by “expensive” we do not mean a mere $800.
This reduces me to tears. I have no idea how I am going to come up with $800, now that I’ve quit my teaching job so as to free up time to work on the publishing endeavor.
Another client sends work that she thinks I’m going to do forthwith. Alas, it will have to wait until I finish reading Magnificently Paying Client’s project, which has to be done by Friday. I don’t even open her email: it’s now another message marked “unread” and flagged with a little red flag.
I need to pay my writers. Simultaneously, I should create another spreadsheet for WonderAccountant to display checks and deposits for the S-corp, as we are having to do with my personal account thanks to the kind ministrations of Intuit.
So I get into my checkbook register, another target of my haste and carelessness. Transcribe entries for checks and deposits going back to last April. Now I realize a $300 check I wrote to one of the authors has never cleared. I’m not sure how much I still owe her, since things were a little muzzy before this.
I get in touch with her and inquire about the missing check. She’s never received it, and by the way, the Copyeditor’s Desk owes her $700.
That’s exactly what I figured, but not for the reasons I thought. Oh well.
Now it dawns on me that the missing $300 check was written and mailed on the same day as a check I wrote to another writer, who also reported that it never arrived on his end.
This means the post office has lost two checks.
I drove these checks up to the post office specifically so I could drop them into THEIR box, so they would not be stolen out of my mailbox. Thank you SO much, dear USPS.
Neither check has cleared. So I decide not to shoulder the hefty stop-payment fee to head off any fraud. In fact, if someone succeeds in fraudulently cashing the checks, the credit union will eat it anyway, since they should’ve noticed that Clorox or some such was applied to the “pay to the order of” line. I write a new check to Writer 1 and send out two other checks to a couple of other contributors. These I place in the unsecured mailbox out front, since there clearly is NO EFFING POINT IN MAKING MY WAY THROUGH A MIASMA OF ROAD CONSTRUCTION TO TAKE THESE THINGS DIRECT TO THE POST OFFICE.
It’s now 12:36. I’ve had one banana and a handful of pecans to eat today. Plus three cups of cowboy-strength coffee (it’s ready when a spoon will stand up in pot).
Every single thing I’ve touched or so much as looked at today has devolved into some kind of fuck-up. I am hungry (whaddaya bet the grill is out of propane?) and I want a bourbon and water and that is exactly what I am going to have.
Fire-rider needs your reviews!
