Coffee heat rising

Angst

OMG! I just got my life back!

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My God. I feel like a door that slammed in my face just came open. When I walked out of the doctor’s office this morning, I was almost weeping with relief.

Here’s what: After the surgery to relieve the bowel obstruction that I enjoyed at the end of June (the sixth major surgery in 12 months), it took a little time to recover. After about two months, the Mayo called me back for a “follow-up.”

Instead of seeing a doc for this appointment, I met with the surgeon’s P.A. And by the time I walked away from that woman, I was utterly terrorized. She said…

• The adhesions will (not “may”) return.
• They could return within a few weeks or months, or it could be as long as ten years.
• When that happens I’ll have to go through the whole horrible thing again: another five days in the hospital in agony with tubes stuck down my throat; another abdominal surgery; another God knows how long to recover.
• There’s a limit to the number of times they can do this surgery. After two or three procedures, they can’t do them again.
• And at that point, you’re pretty much done for.
• I must eat an extremely low-fiber diet. That means…
….No fresh veggies, properly cooked or raw
….No fruit unless it’s stewed or canned
….No salad greens
• All meats must be stewed or boiled: no grilled meat, no broiled meat, no fried meat, no roast meat
• No whole-grain cereals
….No oatmeal
….No whole-grain breads
….No polenta
….No brown rice
….No barley…and on and on and on

Holy shit. Basically she was saying that my life as I knew it was ended, and that 70 years worth of vibrant health was effectively ruined.

Needless to say, I’ve been in quite the blue funk these past few weeks.

I actively dislike soggy, mushy food. Some of it, I’ll eat, but it’s not something I would seek out, or that I look forward to eating. So, since I spoke with this woman, I haven’t had much to eat. Certainly not much I enjoy.

But I’ve gained ten pounds!

Part of the reason for the weight gain is that in the absence of anything appetizing to eat, I’ve been scarfing down ice cream. I don’t much like ice cream, but as a practical matter it seemed like about the only thing worth eating that didn’t threaten to send me back to the O.R. Part of the reason has been that I’ve been too depressed to crawl out from behind the computer. And part of the reason is that things like pasta and boiled potatoes tend to pack the pounds on. I can gain two or three pounds just from eating a hearty helping of spaghetti.

I’ve only gained ten pounds because I’m hardly eating anything.

Saved a lot on groceries, though. 😉

Then the GERD symptoms came back. I’ve had a lump in my throat for weeks and weeks.

At first I thought it was probably trauma from all the tubes they stuck down my throat — they had me intubated for three or four days, and the surgery (during which they stuff God knows what down your throat) took three hours. Thought it would go away over time.

But it didn’t. Instead more GERD symptoms joined it: burping and queasy and heartburn that wakes you up at three in the morning.

So I thought…I need to see a gastroenterologist, NOT a surgeon. And thanks to Young Dr. Kildare, I happen to know one.

The last time I was enjoying GERD manifestations, he wanted me to go to a specialist. Well, I don’t think much of the specialists who reside at John C. Lincoln, so I tracked this lady down through Angie’s List and managed to wriggle in to see her.

At the time she told me I did not need to have anything stuck down my throat to diagnose what was obviously gastric reflux and that if I kept taking the omeprazole YDK had prescribed, in a few weeks it would settle down. If not, they had other strategies.

She was right. Within a couple of weeks, it went away.

That was in 2012. It didn’t bother me again until after the most recent Adventure in Medical Science: three years later.

So I asked her if the GERD-like symptoms could have been kicked up by the surgery.

Yep.

And was the throat lump thing from acid reflux or from the various gadgetry shoved down my gullet?

Probably both. Keep taking the omeprazole. It’ll get better in a few weeks.

Is it true that this is going to come back and I’ll have to have repeated surgeries but after a couple more there won’t be anything more they can do for me and then I’ll be pretty much a goner?

SNORT! She said that?

Yesh.

No! I have one patient who’s had eight surgeries for adhesions. And it’s not a foregone conclusion that the adhesions will cause another blockage that requires surgery. I have one patient who went FORTY YEARS without a recurrence. She’s 80  years old.

Is it true that henceforth I must eat baby food? I’ve gained ten pounds on this stuff! I have to lay down flat on my back to zip my jeans.

Gaining weight is what causes the GERD to kick up. Come to think of it, tight pants aggravate GERD, too. Go back to your healthy diet and lose the tight jeans until you can fit back into them.

Can I eat salad greens?

Yes. Have a Cobb salad for lunch today.

*** woooHOOOOOO! ***

So it was straight to Whole Foods from her office! Got a package of crunchy tempura sushi and a box of mâche for lunch. Have been afraid to eat sushi because of the seaweed wraps, and tempura and greens were verboten.

Also got a package of CARROTS (not allowed) and a bunch of RED CHARD (on sale on sale on sale!) and a cantaloupe and four juicy-looking peaches and some of those wonderful salty dried black olives (so bad for you!) and another head of garlic and some little green onions and a $4.99 bottle of wine. And some made-in-America chew toys for the dawgs.

Happy Dappy Day.

I figure at two pounds a week, it’ll take five weeks to lose the starch-and-ice-cream-induced avoirdupois.

Fortunately, the weather is cooling off enough that I can walk and bicycle during the day. So, in addition to getting back to the low-starch, low-sugar, low-salt fresh veggie and fruit diet, I figure I can walk an extra mile in the morning after the doggie-walk and then set the alarm to get off my duff in the afternoon and go for a three- or four-mile bike ride.

So with any luck at all, after about a month the fat will be gone and so will the GERD.

 

 

 

All I wanna do is WRITE!

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Damned if I’m not digitized out. The digital stuff is freaking consuming my life! I start at 5:30 in the morning and work through until 8 or 9 p.m. And what do I accomplish?

Unclear.

Whatever it is, I ain’t gettin’ rich on it.

Actually, I think the truly huge digital hassle factor may be coming to an end. I now have all eighteen Fire-Rider stories ensconced on Amazon, where they can be published with a single click, according to schedule. Two of them just went online as we scribble:

Book 12: Our Harried Heroes Struggle through the Mountains

Book 13: Wahoo!! The Trade and Flesh Capital of Our Heroes’ Known World

In the UNHOLY Time-Suck Department, yesterday I finally acquired 18 high-resolution versions of what I thought were supposed to be the cover images but what were actually 72-dps images, fine for thumbnails but trash for covers. These I uploaded to Google Drive, since DropBox doesn’t provide enough storage space to hold them all plus all the other stuff loaded up there by me, my sidekicks, and our clients.

Trotted over to Amazon and re-uploaded the 300-dps images for all 13 books now online there: not as deadly tedious as one would think, but still a time-suck. An unnecessary time-suck, which made it mighty galling.

Then I went through ALL EIGHTEEN DAMN BOOKS, averaging around 11,000 words apiece (some are much longer), and revamped them to fit the tastes of Smashwords — at least, as far as you can tell from what passes for Smashwords’ brain-bangingly verbose user manual. This entailed getting rid of all links to Amazon (of which there are up to 20 in each document) and making a number of other changes. Time-consuming and tedious beyond your wildest dreams!

And I assigned ISBNs to all the remaining .mobi versions, and then to about a dozen ePub versions. If you think manually deleting dozens and dozens of links (Word 2008 for Mac will not do a batch link deletion!) is time-consuming and tedious, you ain’t seen nuthin‘ until you fart with an ISBN form.

And of course, Bowker’s software developed some kind of a glitch, in which it decided I was trying to sell to the U.K., not the U.S. Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth — all in slow motion, of course — with Bowker’s tech people helped this problem only marginally. I would end up having to crash out of the form, sign out of the site, sign back in, and re-open the form. Of course, all the data I’d entered would be gone, so I’d have to re-enter all the form’s ditz and pray it would let me “Submit.”

However, all this stuff is now done. I also realized that I could adjust the size of the 72 DPI images to widget size in Preview rather than in WordPress. This relieves me from having to jump through that hoop three times for three websites. And Twitter. Building the widgets will still be a time-suck, but a slightly less lengthy & tedious time-suck. Assuming, of course, that this works. Which we’re about to find out…

right…

…NOW

 Yes. Yes, yes, YES!!!!!!!

It works!!!!!!! Check out those fine little widgets! → → → →

Now lookee here, dear readers: Your Beloved Funny NEEDS you to trot on over to Amazon, download one of these, and post a review!

If you would like to review one or more of the Fire-Rider stories, let me know (in the comments, below ↓ ) and I’ll send you a .mobi or a PDF (soon, I hope, we’ll have ePub files, too).

I also have a draft of the first boxed set, which I can send to you in .mobi or PDF. This will contain six of the serials, which are averaging around 11,000 words apiece. So a boxed set is about the length of a typical full-length genre novel.

Reviews are trending positive so far. So it’s possible that my elevated opinion of this book — that it’s surprisingly good and a fun read — is not a delusion.

And no, these are not the proposed p0rn, which won’t start going online until the first week of October. There’s virtually no sex in the saga, which is a Joseph Campbellesque journey tale. (Think Star Wars, only without the spaceships.)

At any rate, I’m hoping that once all of these are online at Amazon and through Smashwords, things will settle down so I can get back to my own writing projects. Ideally, I’d like to be able to write for three days in a row, followed by one day devoted to the digital stuff.

And so, to work…

↓ ↓ ↓ Get your review copy here!  ↓ ↓ ↓

Tales of Micropublishing

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LOL! Check out my wee squib at LinkedIn. With that one, I’ve probably blown my blogging wad for the day.

But y’know, I’ve really got to start haunting the social media more. I don’t understand how they work, and they look like still more techno-timesuck. Well…I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what they are.

The logic of “social media” where long strings of bloviations are posted mystifies me. Do people REALLY have nothing else to do but sift through all that chatter? Do they read any of it? Why?

I guess what puzzles me the most is that something like Twitter or LinkedIn seems so unfocussed. Finding something useful there — something relevant to your job our your interests — looks like a tall order. Among a great deal of chaff, I found this nicely written post at LinkedIn by Arizona graphic designer and book coach Michele de Filippo, but when I went back to find it, I had a time relocating it.

Twitter takes that staticky effect to a whole level unto its own. There what you see when you sign in is toilet paper. A long strand of toilet paper that apparently unrolls ad infinitum, with (as far as I can see) no end. Ever. Most of the posts there appear to be automatically slapped up there. A few live people are chatting back and forth. But the question is, how do t hey find each other and how do they filter out all the irrelevant static so as to have something resembling a “conversation”?

At Twitter, “Direct Messages” is clogged with spam…here’s some guy congratulating me on something I supposedly published on Disqus. Specifically what is not mentioned, of course, because the purpose of his message is to advertise something. A few live humans thank me for following them. Hm. I haven’t figured out how the hashtag thing is supposed to work on Twitter. Strange.

So…I gather we’re supposed to use the platforms to reach out to people who might be interested in whatever we have to offer. But the question is, how do we FIND them, so we’re not blitzing harmless bystanders with flak that doesn’t even faintly interest them? In the do unto others department, I’d rather not spray Web users with irrelevancies in the hope of reaching one or two folks who like what I’m offering.

?

Facebook seems to make a little more sense. The page that pops up when I go to that thing is filtered (somehow) so only my friends’ posts show up, and by and large what they post is either interesting or entertaining. Twitter feels like carpet-bombing. Facebook is more like a firing range. With targets.

In the marketing department, I finally got around to updating the Fire-Rider site. It’s been down, like all the other provinces of the Blog Empire, off and on for the past ten days or two weeks. When I’ve had time to work on it, it’s  been down; when it’s been up, my hands have been full of other work.

Speaking of the which, WonderAccountant wants to know where a stack of statements are (?? how would I know?) and why my bank account is off by approximately the amount of a Social Security check (no clue!)

And so, away…

Fleas?????? Is there ever a break from the timesuck?

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So I wake up this morning with a nice little pattern of bug bites on one arm. Now, there’s nothing unusual about the occasional solitary bug bite around this place. Arizona, as the local climate has warmed and the feckless humans have flooded in and tried to clone the upper Midwest wherever they come to light, has been overrun with mosquitoes.

You never used to see a mosquito here. Now they fill your house every spring and hang around until December, when the weather chills down a bit. One day a couple of years ago, I killed a dozen of the little monsters inside the house!

We haven’t had so many this year. I don’t know why. Haven’t had many flies, either.

WhatEVER. All that notwithstanding, I happen to know what a mosquito bite looks like. Having grown up in the Middle East, I also happen to know what flea bites look like.

Mosquitoes are not piggish eaters. They sit down to dinner once and then get up and fly away. Fleas, on the other hand, have never met a blood meal that they didn’t want more of. Right away, please.

So three or four really itchy bites clustered within a radius of an inch or two or three usually means a flea has come visiting.

And you know what that means?

Oh yes.

TIME SUCK!

Time suck of the first water.

You need to get on the job of flea-whacking instantaneously if you’re to have any hope whatsoever that your DIY efforts will work.

So. First thing after the requisite doggy-walk (we do the doggy walk at 5 a.m. because i wish to live and because one corgi will boss a human around but two corgis will reduce the human to full obedience at all times), it was into the bathtub with the hounds.

Actually, before we left, I inspected both pooches for fleas and didn’t find any signs that I recognize. It’s pretty easy to tell if the animal is heavily infested. My mother once brought a badly infested cat home from a pet store…the vet taught us how to recognize flea eggs and flea debris. They don’t seem to have any eggs in their fur, nor did I see any flea sh!t. However, both dogs had a strange dark deposit around their hindmost titties. I think this was dirt — probably congealed urine, since a female dog can spray her belly by accident, especially when it assumes as deep a squat as a corgi does. So I smeared these areas with olive oil, figuring some oil would loosen whatever that was.

Olive oil will not harm your dog, BTW. Baby oil and bath oil may, since they consist mostly of mineral oil. That’s antithetical to an animal that can be guaranteed to lick the stuff off.

So by the time we got home from a mile’s stroll, the dogs had been marinating in olive oil for twenty or thirty minutes.

Into the bathtub.

You do not want to know what a circus it is to launder a corgi. When they say a corgi is “a big dog in a small dog’s body,” that’s not quite spot on. The fact is, under certain circumstances, a corgi IS a big dog.

Two wrestling matches later, the dogs were clean and the bathtub was filthy.

Scrub bathtub out.

Now it was time to gather ALL the bedding, including the bedpad, all the mats the dogs lay on, all the area rugs in the house, all the clothing I’ve worn lately all the towels I’ve used, all the…whatever. These all needed be washed in HOT hot water and then dried on the dryer’s hottest cycle.

Six loads of laundry got stacked in the garage next to the washer.

The ACCURSED GODDAMN SAMSUNG WASHER!

That thing takes about an hour for every load. So we’re looking at SIX HOURS OF LAUNDRY out there!!!!!!!!!

One of the damn thing’s many charms is that you can’t select “hot” water on most of the cycles. There’s actually only one cycle that lets you select very hot water: the one that’s intended to “sanitize” the inside of the thing, since as we know these so-called “high-efficiency” washers tend to grow mold and stink to high heaven.

“High efficiency.” SNORT!!!!!! How exactly is having to run the electric for SIX HOURS to do a three-hour (or less) job “efficient”?

Then it was time to drag out the vacuum. Vacuum every nook and every cranny in the bedroom. Vacuum every square inch of the mattress and bed springs. This is complicated by  the fact that it’s one of those “pillow top” monsters that were in style at the time I bought the thing. “Pillow tops” are held in place by stitched-down patterns, which collect…yes…dirt and debris. Had to get an orange stick and a stiff brush to dig that stuff out of the stupid stitch thingies and THEN vacuum all that up. Endless.

Then climb under the bed (which weighs too much for me to budge) and vacuum every square inch under there. And vacuum every square inch under the dressers. And in the closet. And up the hall. And in the other rooms. Ugh.

Thank god for tile floors.

It’s almost 10 a.m. Good thing the dogs rousted me out at 5, otherwise I’d still be doing all that. Well, I am still doing all that: the accursed goddamn Samsung washer is grinding away out there.

It’s 10:03 a.m. and I have done no work. I mean, real work on the writing empire. Well. I uploaded an image to the Camptown Races blog, which will be called “Camptown Ladies Talk.” The images I wanted to use turned out to be a) too large and b) too difficult to fit into the header image space without some serious Photoshopping. But I found some images in the public domain that simply defy belief.

If you’d like a preview, you can peek at her here. But IF YOU ARE WITH THE CHURCH, DO NOT GO THERE, DEAR FELLOW CHOIR MEMBERS, CLERGY, AND HANGERS-ON because that will pop your eye out. That site is strictly adults only. Racy adults.

Yesterday I finished what I hoped would be the last chapter of the current Bobbi and the Biker bookoid, but as it fell together, I found Bobbi and Billy demanded at least one more chapter. This is alarming, because we’re already over 7,000 words. Whatever wraps this episode up is gonna have to be succinct.

This weekend I also posted book III of Fire-Rider. The marauding war bands get back on the road, after having flattened a major enemy stronghold, and the journey begins…

And now, speaking of metaphorical journeys, I must away!

WHEN am I supposed to get any writing done?

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Well, actually, the first grutch of the day is not about the endless series of roadblocks to the writing venture. It’s about my usual hobbyhor$e, money.

Dammit. I went in to get my teeth cleaned yesterday and the (wonderful!) dental tech informed me that she found a crack in a molar.

Make that ANOTHER crack. I already have four crowns holding broken teeth together. So that will be ANOTHER THOUSAND BUCKS out of my already impoverished funds!

Quitting the damn teaching job may have been a mistake…

I’m not convinced: in my experience, a cracked tooth hurts. This elicits no pain at all. So I expect it’s a superficial crack in the enamel. Maybe it can be fixed with bonding. One way or another, it represents MORE money drain and MORE time suck.

Time suck seems to be the story of my life.

Yesterday I spent the entire damn day at the campus computer commons, because Kindle will not read & convert ANY linked table of contents generated on ANY Macintosh computer. So I had to drag TWENTY-THREE FILES out there and convert every TofC on a PC. While I was at it, I had to (try to!) correct an error that happened in some of the Fire-Rider files, causing images to pop up in the middle of the TofC.

Then while I was there, I called  up the cookbook and discovered that the Wyrd “style” I used to format the all-caps design flourish in first-of-section paragraphs came over as fucking MICROSCOPIC TYPE! As it develops, what you see in Kindle’s “Preview” tool ain’t what you get!

To fix that, I’ve got to get into an HTML file from an unzipped bundle and screw around with that without causing any more chaos. I do not KNOW how to zip and unzip files in Mac, although I do know it can be done. So that will represent another whole afternoon wasted.

Thank god I didn’t do it in any of the 125+ recipes in there! There are only about a half-dozen initial paragraphs with this little quirk. But it’s still going to take time…I find most of my electronic time-waste is entailed in fiddling with code and crap and not with anything that does anything even remotely creative.

Today the ENTIRE DAY is going to be absorbed. In 14 minutes I have to leave for my early-morning bidness group meeting. Then fly back into town, let the dogs out for five minutes, and fly north up the freeway to meet the designer, who has the remaining Fire-Rider covers ready plus a bunch of other stuff. Then race home, bolt a few bites of lunch, and race back out to the Mayo for an afternoon checkup with the gut surgeon.

Tomorrow is mostly gone: Meeting with a would-be writer in the morning — mentoring, more than anything, unless I can persuade the guy to write porn and unless he can actually do it. Then meet a friend who wants to introduce me to another writer over happy hour — that will blow the evening. So, only a few hours will be open in the afternoon tomorrow.

Saturday is mostly gone: West Valley writer’s group shindig occupies the ENTIRE afternoon. I happen to really like this group, though — it’s the only group of amateur writers I’ve ever seen that’s not mostly comprised of flakes and nut cases. They’re very professional, very together, and many of them are pretty successful at this game. So it’s fun to meet with them even though their events take place halfway to Yuma.

Yes, I knew it was going to take some time to catch up with the ten or twelve months lost to the medical disruptions. But y’know, this wrestling match has gone on since the first of the month. I haven’t finished the second Biker Babe book because literally I haven’t had more than an hour or two uninterrupted in which to focus on it, not when I’m not so damn exhausted I can’t hold my head up.

Cripes.  Thirteen minutes to blast-off. Gotta get the dogs in and gather all the junk and get out the door. Bye!

So much for creative work…

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Note how wallpaper brings to mind a black hole into which Time Itself is being sucked...
Note how wallpaper brings to mind a black hole into which Time Itself is being sucked…

Did I actually say I daydreamed of spending my days writing for a living? Really? What on earth could I have been thinking? Wouldn’t you think that after 70 years on this earth I would have figured out that NO ONE MAKES A LIVING DOING CREATIVE WORK.

My entire day has been consumed — utterly, totally consumed — with screwing around with  other people’s websites. And what have I accomplished?

Almost nothing.

Well. Along the way I’ve taken notes and printed out how-to guides, so I now have a kind of user’s manual for the wanna-be micropublisher:

• Tracy Atkins’s guide to formatting hard copy and e-books with his and Friedlander’s book design templates.

• Atkins’s detailed instructions for how to upload your book and cover to KDP.

• Amazon’s detailed instructions for how to upload your book and cover to KDP, which conflict in places with the latter.

• The KDP contract, all 22 single-spaced pages of it.

• Kindle’s cover image specs.

• Nook’s cover image specs.

• Amazon’s detailed instructions for how to create a cover image using that monopoly’s new cover image building tool.  (This will put quite a few graphic artists out of work.)

• Detailed instructions for how to move a domain off WordPress, which don’t work.

• William King’s (now outdated) detailed instructions for how to create a Kindle cover using PowerPoint.

But otherwise, what have I accomplished? Damn near nothing.

I’ve managed to upload the body copy for the diet/cookbook to the print-on-demand publisher. But since I wanted it coil-bound (so it would lay flat on a reader’s kitchen countertop), I imagined all I would need is the front cover image.

Wrong: after much puzzling and wrestling around and begging for help from support, I learn that you have to submit a PDF for a wrap-around cover, only with no spine copy.

Lovely. God only knows how long it will take the graphic artist to produce that. You understand, I’ve been waiting for MONTHS for cover  images to come forth.

I’d hoped to get the cookbook up on Amazon today in e-book format. At the outset, it looked like Caliber was the way to go. Considerable time-wasting study later, it appeared that was a bad idea.

Instead, it would be better to go directly through KDP, despite constant bitter complaints about the difficulty of said process. By the time I’d figured that out, though, I was already too tired and too frazzled with computer-generated frustration to take on a monster job like that. It will have to wait till tomorrow.

And that will mean ANOTHER day will go by in which I get exactly zero (0) writing done.

WordPress.com will not let go of my writersplainandsimple.com domain name, even though in theory I own it and in theory they’re supposed to move it over to GoDaddy at my request. I paid the bastards to renew it, and now their records say it expires in less than a month. They kept the money I paid to renew that but canceled the Akismet subscription, so soon that site will be spammed out of existence.  I have been banging my head against that wall since 9:07 this morning, to exactly no avail. I’m about to threaten them with a lawyer…this is getting ridiculous.

My friend the e-book builder sent a link to a very interesting market research tool that effectively deconstructs and reconstructs data from Amazon Kindle sales. Tried to download it. The outfit marketing it will only take cash or charges through PayPal. To do that, you have to have a password. Since we took both of our accounts off PayPal after the recent hacking attempt, at the behest of my bidness partner’s fiancé who has a degree in IT, I’ve forgotten the password. The one in my records doesn’t work. So I couldn’t buy the damn thing. Too bad: it looks extremely useful. Or…ahem…it could be just another time suck…

To Do, 7/21/2015

• Remind artist about need for 5.5 x 8.5-inch diet/cookbook cover image.

Mooted, two ways from Sunday.

a) He headed me off at the pass and sent the image before I could ask.
b) See above: a full wrap-around cover PDF is needed even though there’s no goddamn spine!

• Finish domain transfer from WP.com to GoDaddy, which didn’t get finished yesterday.

Foiled and frustrated, see above.

• Try to convert diet/cookbook to Kindle format using Calibre.

Hah!!!

• Build BikerBabe cover in PowerPoint, using William King’s somewhat outdated strategy.

Mooted by the discovery of Amazon’s proprietary cover-building tool, which looks useful but probably will prove to be another goddamn electronic frustration. If it works, though, it’ll be a godsend.

• Ask new web guru to build new sites for Camptown Races Press and Camptown Ladies Talk.

He still can’t get into Westhost.

• Inquire at PVCC about opportunities for Scottsdale Business Association to partner with the college’s internship program.

Bingo! Their internship director will meet with us next week. One count it (1) thing accomplished today!

 • Get domain name for Camptown Races Press.

Pointless until web guru can get into the hosting service.

• Do pool chores

Most of those were automated and so they got done. By now, I imagine, the filter probably will need to be backwashed.

 So. Think of that. By quitting the comp job, I’ve gone from spending my days doing a mind-numbingly frustrating activity that I hate to spending my days doing a mind-numbingly frustrating activity that I hate. Interesting.