Month: June 2022

Long Day June 29, 2022

So today’s been kind of adventure from a phone perspective. Well, in general, really. 

First, I had a nightmare about Thomas and the end of our marriage and that was distressing. I mean come on now my 17 year marriage ended. That was by definition pretty stressful. And it has been on my mind a bit lately. That woke me up at 5:30 this morning, and I had trouble getting back to sleep. Mind you, I had to be up at seven to go to work. It took me a while to get back to sleep. I ended up getting up at 7:10, got myself together as fast as I safely could, and got to work 10 minutes early. Additionally, thanks to a clerical error that I didn’t catch until too late, I was actually scheduled for half an hour before the pharmacy opened. So I was there 40 minutes before the pharmacy opened. I got some steps in, so that was nice.

The day went okay, mostly, and, well, I have a Pokémon Go friend in Houston who always sends me raid invites during Raid Hour on Wednesday (from 6 PM till 7 PM in your local time). I always feel bad, because I’m in the suburbs and there’s not really anybody playing at that time. I mean, Walker Ranch Park usually has someone, but the parking lot is small and the overflow parking areas are now taken up by construction. So I almost never can send invites back.

So, after doing some research, I realized that I could be at the Pearl by 6:00 pretty handily, and there’s lots of parking there. So today I decided to go down to the Pearl after work. I could get some more steps in and hopefully get some Pikmin Bloom . . . I’m not sure what to call it. It seems that the game has new Pikmin spawn in places where you spend a lot of time. Like, there are always a bunch up by my work and a whole lot by my house. Since, as I said before, I live in a suburban area, that means I have a lot of Pikmin with stickers that say “S” for, near as I can figure, “Street.” So I’m always on the lookout for new locations. I figured that after I did my raid or raids, I could do some expeditions around the Pearl and maybe get some more expeditions out there in the future.

So after work, I headed off. I don’t like the Google maps navigation thing. The last time I used it, for example, it literally told me three times what street I should be on, then said, “turn right here” with no warning, so I ended up having to go around again, which was a waste of time and gas. So I just memorized the street names and the direction I needed to turn and headed out.

Okay, time for an interlude. When Thomas got his first cell phone it was on his work plan with Sprint. Once he left that job, they let him take the phone and number with him. His new job also gave him a phone, so I took over that original phone account. Basically, someone in Alex’s family has had this phone number for 25 years. Then after the divorce, I took over the account. Well, once T-Mobile bought Sprint, they said they’d shut down Sprint’s network and they sent out Sim cards. The deadline for the shutdown of the network was June 30, 2022. Which is tomorrow. Turns out, they shut it down right at midnight Greenwich time. I intentionally sat on the chip until the network went down because as fond as I am of my current phone, it’s starting to show its age (locking up, overheating, etc.). And in order to get a new Samsung phone at my store, I need to be fully on T-Mobile’s network. So I figured that once Sprint’s network shuts down, I should be fully on T-Mobile’s network and can get the Samsung phone I want.

I was not expecting it to go down just before I arrived at the Pearl. I was approaching McCullough, preparing to turn right, when my phone beeped. It was the notification that I no longer had service. So, rather than turning right and going to the Pearl, I had to make a left and head home. OMG.

So I headed home. Once I got connected to my Wifi, I discovered that I’d missed a raid invite. After doing another raid, courtesy of my friend, I installed the SIM card. I restarted the phone, which was apparently not restarty enough, so the phone restarted again and then it started to overheat. Eventually it settled down, and now when I boot the phone up, it has that nice violent pink color of T-Mobile instead of Sprint’s yellow. I am giving the thumbs up now, but you can’t see it.

I ate a little dinner and then decided that I wanted to do some more walking, partially for my health, partially for my Pikmin Bloom weekly event, and partially because it’s something I enjoy doing. Unfortunately, it was still way hot outside. So I went to take a one-hour nap, which ended up being a one-and-a-half-hour nap. Now I have to give my dad his eyedrop, eat a little something else, get rid of some more Easter candy (I still have a little more than one bag of jelly beans), maybe take a brief shower, since it’s really humid and I’m sweating like whoa, take my medicine (including my tretinoin for my acne scars), brush my teeth, and head to bed.

Now for a Gratuitous Amazon Link. Hm. Where was I? I think that The Witch’s Heart, by Genevieve Gornichec, is up next. The Witch’s Heart is the tale of Angrboða, Loki, and their three children, Hel, Fenrir*, and Jörmungandr.

*I have the worst time trying to remember Fenrir’s name. I keep wanting to call him “Fenris,” as in Fenris Ulf, from the Chronicles of Narnia, and Fenric, from the Sylvester McCoy Doctor Who episode The Curse of Fenric. I’ll figure it out someday. I hope.

A Short Note About My Book

I really need a title, even a temporary one, for this book project.

Anyway, I’ve decided to have the characters speaking Italian most of the time. Our Heroine spent most of her prep time focusing on things that interested her, and since she’s a budding geologist, she knows the very, very basics, like “What time is it?” “What is this?” “How much does this cost?” and “Where is the bathroom?” and a bunch of geology terms. She can talk about fumeroles and calderas, and name an assortment if igneous rocks, but not much more than that.

So when her first friend tries to make friends with her, she is friendly, but has to go around the long way to describe concepts she doesn’t know the vocabulary for for a while. This will pass after some practice.

This is also why she starts to look for the prince at first. She overhears a conversation and cannot understand what they’re saying, but since the participants in the conversation are acting sneaky, she figures that they might be up to no good.

The only thing is that I need to find a way to differentiate between conversations in English and conversations in Italian. I’m thinking that I will use a serif font for one and a sans-serif font for the other. If this story were set in Switzerland, I’d use Helvetica, because I think I’m funny.

I know that I don’t need to brush up my Italian for this, but I guess if I refresh my memory about the basics, I’ll have an easier time building realistic beginner Italian sentences? Maybe?

Scheduling Writing, Part 2

Wow. I started trying to schedule my writing and immediately blew it.

Let’s see. I worked on my novel on my lunch hour for one and a half days. I actually wrote the first day. On the second I was about to write and suddenly it hit me that if the people of the island that may well end up with the name Santa Chiara are so eco-conscious, then they’d probably want to be served by electric, rather than gas-powered passenger boats. So I stopped writing to see if that’s possible. And I found a few concept vehicles like that, but nothing in production. I’ve decided that that’s close enough.

Then, on Friday, I used my writing time to figure out what to do about my phone. My phone locks up and reboots for no apparent reason, and since I am one of those unlucky people who had Sprint and are being migrated over to T-Mobile, I’ll need to put a new SIM card in to make it work anyhow, I’ve figured that maybe I should just get a new phone. I asked the phone guy at my store about getting a Galaxy S22 or whatever the newest phone is and found that T-Mobile will need to migrate my plan over by hand so that I can use the T-Mobile version of the phone.

I worked Sunday, but on Sunday, I only get half an hour lunch, so I didn’t have any noveling time then.

So, tonight, I couldn’t sleep because details are backing up in my brain since I haven’t been able to put them into actual writing since Wednesday. I’m not even supposed to be up now (it’s 1 am on Monday, June 6* as I write this). I was going to go to bed early so that I can get up early and get my walking in before the heat hits. Then I lay awake trying to sleep instead of, what’s the meme? About some people being able to sleep instead of plotting seven-book epic fantasy series or broiling in existential dread? I can’t figure out how to post it here, but the author is C.G. Drews, who posts on Instagram under @paperfury.

Yeah. That’s the kind of night I’m having.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! I know I’ve done this one before, but it’s a goody, so I’m posting it again. Solutions and Other Problems, by Allie Brosh. So funny and relatable and just amazing. If I didn’t have 400 books in my to-read, I’d probably go back and reread this again.

*I remembered that today is the birthday of one of my childhood friends and then I spent half an hour trying to figure out what he’s up to these days.

Scheduling Writing, Day 1

I took a stab at doing some fiction writing on my lunch hour.

My protagonist (I’ve named her Abby temporarily, after the mom of my cat Velcro) and her dad are still on the hydrofoil out of Naples, and I’m using this time to start to establish the family and the relationships.

Much like me, my protagonist has motion sickness in boats, so she’s bored. She can’t read because she . . . . Actually, her motion sickness is more like Alex’s and Thomas’s. Abby cannot read in a moving vehicle. I can, so long as I’m completely wrapped up in what I’m reading. Neither Alex nor Thomas can do this in most situations.

My motion sickness comes from a mismatch between what I’m seeing and what my inner ear is feeling. I do pretty well with open windows or in the front seat or, again, if I’m distracted.

Anyway she’s bored and her dad’s keeping up a conversation with her, telling her what they’ll experience there and things. Abby wants to be back home helping her mom, who is a jewelry designer, open her first showroom.

I really only know two cities well — Chicago and San Antonio, so I’m setting Abby’s home in Chicago. I figure that it’d be more likely that a diplomat of some sort would have a home base in Chicago than in San Antonio.

Even though it’d be nice to put them in San Antonio. I remember a couple of years ago reading an article about how the city has been trying to encourage “creative class” jobs in San Antonio and how it’s just not working.

Heck, they can’t even keep corporate headquarters here. In the last few years, we’ve lost the headquarters of both the La Quinta hotel chain and AT&T. Both left here for Dallas, because Dallas has better infrastructure for large corporations and also is better connected to the rest of the world.

San Antonio’s airport is better than it was, but it’s no DFW. Additionally, if you look at a map of San Antonio, the perimeter of the city is 330 degrees of not much, and 30 degrees of congestion in the form of US 281, Interstate 35 and Interstate 10. More or less. I’m not going to pull out a protractor. It could be 320 degrees of not much and 40 degrees of congestion.

But if San Antonio wants more “creative class” jobs, having Abby’s mom be a world-class jewelry designer opening her first showroom would help raise awareness there.

I know it might be more realistic to put the family of a diplomat in New York or DC or somewhere like that, but I don’t really *know* those cities like I know San Antonio. It’s likely that this book may be set entirely on the island (I’m toying with calling it Santa Chiara, after St. Clare of Assisi, St. Francis of Assisi’s BFF). But what happens if I finish the book and discover that the story of Abby doesn’t end there and we have to follow her home? That home better be somewhere I know well.

Abby is going to, of course, have friends. One is a young man who is like Snuffleupagus. No one else will see him for a long time, if ever. Is he the missing prince? Is he a ghost? Is he just shy? Or does he just have lousy timing when it comes to everyone else? Her other friend is a young jewelry designer who makes friends with Abby, then realizes that Abby is her mother’s daughter and that her mother is kind of the friend’s hero, but the friend is trying to figure out how to be “Hey, your mom’s my hero” without sounding like that’s the only reason they’re friends.

I’m still working on what happened with the Prince and where he is going and what’s going on and things like that. It’s kind of funny because like nobody reads this blog and so I’ve been like “Let’s talk about plot points of my novel; no one is ever to read that either.” But I’m going to keep plugging away at both novel and blog and hope that someday I’ll be able to make the money I need to pay off my mortgage.

Speaking of money, here’s today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link. Ooh! Palace of Stone, the sequel to Princess Academy, by Shannon Hale! Britta’s wedding is coming up and the other girls from the Princess Academy are coming to the capital to help with the festivities. Miri is particularly excited because she is going to spend a year at the university.

Hm. One of my plot bunnies that I’ve been feeding for the last . . . 10 years? It started out as alternative history, but I would be telling brown people’s stories and aside from a thin line leading me to a Krai of Russia on the border with Mongolia and a rumor that my father’s mother’s family have Rom ancestry, I’m so white I disappear in front of a blank wall. So I’ve been, like, “Fantasy?” But I don’t really have room for magic in this world. But the Princess Academy books are fantasy despite not having spellcasting and things. The magic is that the people of Mount Eskel can communicate through some kind of kinship with Linder, the stone they harvest. I wonder if I can use something along those lines . . . .

Summer Travel Plans?

Unfortunately, I don’t have any money to travel this year, well, not much travel at least.

Here’s the deal. Years ago ,Thomas and I went to Louisiana. We didn’t really have a plan, we were just tired of being in Texas, so we got on Interstate 10 and when East. It was a nice drive we ate at Popeyes in Orange. Our local Popeye’s had been tasting sort of off for while by then. I think that they hadn’t been cleaning the fryers correctly or something.

So this Popeye’s looked pretty new, so we stopped there and the chicken tasted really good. It didn’t have that rancid oil taste. By the way, in the years since then, our Popeye’s has gotten their act together and it’s much better.

We stopped at a Welcome Center in Louisiana that was on a bayou or something and had beautiful plants, Spanish moss, and bugs. Lots of bugs. We were just amazed at the quantity and quality of the bugs available at that rest stop.

We got back in the car and drove until we got almost to Lake Charles Louisiana. At this point we saw a sign for some kind of nature preserve so we exited from Interstate 10 and made a right turn we just kinda drove south trying to see this nature preserve. There was a big ditch, or creek, or canal or something by the side of the road. We saw lots and lots of alligators and the stupid things clearly didn’t want to photograph them because every time the car stopped they sank. I got lots of lovely pictures of the ditch, creek, canal, etc. We never did see the nature preserve but we got to the ferry. We were out for an adventure, so we took across the, I guess it’s probably a bayou. The road that we got on on the other side took us back Interstate 10 and we drove home.

I had no idea where we were. I mean we were in Louisiana, clearly, but we weren’t that far into the state. Alex and I are planning to take a day trip at some point to find it. These days we have Google maps and things. We might even be able to find the preserve because it looks like there is a nature preserve down by Cameron Louisiana which also has a ferry. My guess is that that’s probably where we were, but my memory of the ferry is there being something like a small town on the eastern side of the ferry. In my memory it looked kind of like the town from the Popeye movie with Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall. Of course, that was 30 (!) years ago, so I’m probably misremembering. .

Oh also when I first came up with this idea, I researched ferries in Louisiana and that seems to be the only one that actually fits. It’s not impossible that this is not the fairy and the fairy I went on the very wrong has been replaced by bridge also it’s been 30 years (!).

Actually it’s no less than 30 I became friends with Ray in 1994 and we told him about the trip we came back, so it had to been 1994 or later. So there’s that.

Of course, there is a another wrinkle to this, which is the cost of gas. My car gets some pretty good mileage for the age of the car. I tend to run about 25 miles the gallon on the highway. So, since gas is supposed to get more expensive as the summer wears on, I’m going to estimate how many miles it’s going to take and budget six dollars for every 20 miles to make sure we have extra. Additionally, we may end up with car trouble, so I probably should budget extra. Or, alternatively, we could rent a car, which would cost more upfront in car cost but save us may save as little gas and may not end up with a stranded in Louisiana with a car that doesn’t drive.

I wish my mechanic hadn’t closed. I am looking for new mechanic — reasonably priced, does good work also Alex is looking for one for me because my car is making is kind of strange noise when I turn. The noise goes away once the car warms up. Alex is actually going to get one of his friends who can identify car sounds to listen to my car turn.

Maybe I should look into how much it would cost to rent a car for the day.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! Today we have Heist Society, the first, well, Heist Society book by Ally Carter. The Heist Society series is about a bunch of teen art thieves. Our heroine, Kat Bishop, comes from a family, both biological and found, of professional thieves. And Kat has her own found family of thieves who help her as she uses her skill set to right wrongs.

Setting A Schedule for Writing

Today’s chapter in Pep Talks for Writers was about setting a schedule for writing. Ha ha.

My current job has a variable schedule. This means that I can start work anywhere from 8:30 AM to 12 noon and I can get off work anywhere between 5 PM to 9 PM.

Figure out how I can come up with the schedule with that, well, schedule.

For the most part, I tend to do my writing 11-ish? But I don’t know if that’s really a schedule.

I guess I could do some writing on my lunch hour, because that gives me a little bit less of a spread. Lunch is basically between 1:00 and 5:00, but that still works out to that four hour spread that I have at the end of the day. At least it’s a normal time for human beings to be working. I guess?

If I were to try to dictate like I’m doing here on my lunch hour, like I said it would be a pretty constrained amount of time. Of course, I would be walking around the store talking into my phone like an idiot, kinda like I am now. But at least, right now I’m alone, nobody there to watch me and wonder what I’m doing.

Additionally, I do have to work eating and going to the bathroom into my lunch hour. So I guess I’m back to 11 o’clock-ish. It’s ten minutes to ten as I’m writing this right now, because I’m walking around my neighborhood. This is something I can’t do every day, though, particularly since I’m usually really tired after I get off at nine, and sometimes I have to be back to work early the next day.

In fact, I’m really tired right now. It’s 12 zillion degrees out here and the evening breeze hasn’t started*. I’ve been walking for almost an hour and I’m really tired and really hot, so let’s try going back to the 11-ish. Of course there’s nothing says I can’t do both. I can write a short blog post on my lunch hour with the about a half an hour I have available on my lunch.

Oh! I could work on my novel on my lunch then blog posts either now during my 9 o’clock walk or my 11 o’clock sit down my computer. I could even do one of each a blog post now a blog post at 11? I like this idea. Of course that’s assuming I can keep with it.

My theme song when I’m when I feel my enthusiasm for whatever it is I’m doing start to flag is the Daft punk song Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. Even though it’s like about the hustle and having no work-life balance, which do I need more? A work-life balance or the money to to pay off my mortgage? I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Yeah I need the income. My job is not keeping up with inflation. It’s not even keeping up with my first job out of college. I finally reached the purchasing power of my first job out of college and then get this hyperinflation thing starts and now I’m two dollars an hour behind.

I’m thinking I can can stop rambling now and save this to post. I just realized I haven’t gotten my Duolingo in yet. I’m going to copy this to an email, then email it to myself, clean it up, and post it.

*The evening breeze started up just as I was coming back to the house after my walk. Figures.