Writing – To Hither and Yon

I’m Going to Try Writing Again

I actually had a point when I first opened this editor, like, two days ago, but I can’t remember what it was.

I’ve tried, off-and-on, to “win” NaNoWriMo, which is, on the surface, writing 50,000 words in the month of November, but in practice, is about turning your brain off and not worrying about what you’re writing and just writing. So, in September and October, I’ll try to have some kind of point to my posts.

But in November, on days when I don’t have enough idea (and since my blog posts tend to run, you know, 200 words or so, I’ll have to come up with about eight blog posts a day), God only knows what I’ll end up writing about.

I’m also thinking that November would be a good time to take some kind of trip. If we can leave Texas by then, maybe Carlsbad. If not, maybe Big Bend?

Actually, if I take a four-day road trip in November, that’ll only give me 26 days to write. So nine blog posts a day.

Maybe I’ll come up with some kind of pattern. A travel idea first, a reading topic next, something from Google’s I Feel Lucky button next, a mobile phone gaming idea next, unpacking a childhood trauma next, something, I don’t know, music-related next, another I Feel Lucky result. That’s, oh, dear God, seven blog posts. What can be my eighth and ninth? Foreign languages? Art? That looks like a good place to start.

There has to be more to me than travel, mobile phone gaming, reading, art, foreign languages, music, and childhood trauma. Maybe this will let me find it.

Maybe I should dump one of those I Feel Luckies and post about trying to get my stuff together. I need to empty out my closet and find someone to gift a bunch of knit blankets to and bag up a bunch of books that I’ll never read again and shred so much junk mail.

And maybe, at some point, I will be able to turn off my inner critic and will be producing more than 200 words per blog post and thus can cut down on the number of posts I have to produce per day.

How do I know how many words a post is? I swear there used to be a tool somewhere that would tell me. I guess I can just paste the blog posts into a Word document and count them that way.

I remember what the point was supposed to be! It was reading and foreign language. But that’s another post for, probably tomorrow. I’m meeting Ray to go for a walk in nine hours and I haven’t gotten any rest yet.

Ooh! Photography! I haven’t posted an image in a blog post in ages. I think I’m just going to start looking through my old photos and picking out ones I like and pasting them into my blog posts regardless of whether they’re on-topic or not, and for the ones I *really* like, I bet I could make an entire blog post about them.

But, for now, good night.

Randomness, Because I Can* (November 1, 2018)

*Also because it’s the end of the first day of NaNoWriMo and I haven’t written a single word yet.

I’ve been doing work with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project for a few years and the thing I’ve been doing most often are surveys. I’m certainly not going to make my fortune doing this, but it gives me something to do when I’m bored and I’m making about $10 a year at it and if I can keep it up for another 100 years or so (!) it should add up to something fairly respectable.

The surveys, once in a while, ask me to check a box to prove that I’m not a robot and I’m, like, what if I am and I just don’t know it? Would I be able to plead that I’m not a robot, I’m an android? Or would that be splitting hairs?

Of course, I’m reasonably certain that I’m neither a robot nor an android and most of that certainty has to do with medicine. I mean, how many androids have wheezy lungs that respond well to albuterol and whose wheeziness can be prevented by daily doses of budesonide and formoterol? I mean, okay, “formoterol” does kind of sound like “for motor oil,” but that’s just a coincidence. I hope.

I’ve always been very mucousy in general (and my spell-check doesn’t like “mucousy”but Wiktionary has my back) which I don’t think that androids would be. I have produced so much mucus in my life that when I found that one of the key signs of cystic fibrosis is that people with cystic fibrosis taste salty because their sodium channels malfunction, I licked my arm. I’m not salty, by the way. Also, I’m older than 50 and the odds of a cystic fibrosis patient born when I was making it to 50 are slim.

Besides, I have humans who can attest to the fact that I have human insides. I’ve been cut open four times, I think (if having impacted wisdom teeth removed counts, then five) — a pilonidal cyst removal during my adolescence, a c-section, implantation of a subcutaneous chemotherapy port, and a lumpectomy. Oh, and removal of my sentinel lymph node, but that was the same time as the lumpectomy, so maybe that occasion would be four and a half?

At any rate, that’s lots of witnesses — three surgeons**, at least three other doctors assisting, nurses and Thomas. He didn’t intend to see me cut open, but when he went to see Alex for the first time he forgot that I was cut open and when he turned around to come back to my side, there I was in all my glory. He found the process of them sewing me closed really fascinating, by the way. I’m sure if I were an android someone would have said something at some point. “Why are we cutting this android open? Androids don’t even (get pilonidal cysts, get pregnant, get cancer)?”

So, until it turns out that androids *do* get pilonidal cysts, get pregnant and/or get cancer, I’m going to continue attesting that I’m not a robot.

** The same surgeon did the lumpectomy and the port placement.

24 Hours of Happy Project Update

This project is seriously eating into my language learning time. Before I started this project, I was routinely getting $2 and $3 easily. Now it’s like pulling teeth to get more than my average daily amount (currently $1.32) so that I don’t lose ground. And I’m definitely not going to make it for today — it’s 11:51 pm and I’m only at $1.30.

On the other hand, doing this project is going to give me 20-something new blog posts, so that will advance this part of my future as a self-employed something-or-other.

Speaking of which, I had something of a setback recently. I know that if I want to reach my goal, I’ll need to start investing in the stock market. So, to that end, I finally saved up the money and then the stock market dropped. I watched my stock for a couple of days and once it started going back up again, I figured I’d better get in while it was still low. And then it dropped farther. And farther. Fortunately, I’m investing and not speculating, so I’m just going to wait this out and figure that it’ll turn around someday. And if it drops another $50 or so I might go ahead and buy my second share now and then work to pay myself back for it.

Notice the words “20-something” up there. The 9:56 to 10:55:59 hour was spent in Union Station. The dancers really didn’t explore around the station much, so I’m probably going to lump that hour in with either the 8:56 to 9:55:59 hour or with the 10:56 to 11:55:59 hour, which means that I will have, at most, 23 posts.

Has It Really Been Two Months?

Crap. I knew I’d been derelict, but didn’t realize it was that bad.

Sorry! I’ll try to get back on this horse soon. It’s getting pretty late and I don’t know if I have the time to cover our sixth (and final full) day in California. We spent that day finishing up the things we hadn’t been able to get to in the previous days (and we finally got to the Griffith Observatory!).

Until then, here’s a cat picture:

black cat on white washer in green laundry room — My Phobos on top of the washer.

I hope to link this picture to Jenny Lawson’s post on her bout of the flu. She asked for cat pictures and I’m really proud of this one. I’m going to try to post it in a comment, but just in case it doesn’t take, I’ll post a link to this post so that she can see it.

You see, Phobos has a bit of a weight problem and a few months back I began restricting his caloric intake (he used to free-feed 24 hours a day and now he only free-feeds 16 hours a day — I pick up the bowl between midnight and 8 am). So back on December 4, I was sitting where I’m sitting now and I heard a loud “WHUMP!” from the laundry room (which is behind me). I walked back there and looked in to find that Phobos had actually managed to jump up on top of the washer.

I was so pleased because this is evidence that, even if he’s not losing weight (which I’ll bet he is), his energy levels are getting better.

I Got a New Job

Well, a temp-to-perm assignment, for the time being. I’m still working as a pharmacy technician, but won’t be in retail anymore. Well, I’ll still be in retail part-time for at least the next few months, because I won’t be able to afford the COBRA payments if I were to leave completely. Instead I’m going to work at least enough hours to meet my share of the insurance payments until I can get on my new employer’s insurance. After that, I may decide to continue working at my old job part-time, because I like money. Also, did you see the words “temp-to-perm” up there? If I’m not a good match, I don’t want to end up completely without a job. So if it doesn’t work out I can always go back to my old retail job.

I really, really want it to work out, though.

What does that mean for this blog? Well, I’ll have more weekends off for travel, and even as a temp, I’ll be making about 110% of what I’m making at the retail job. If I stay on after the initial three months, and my pay goes up as much as the temp agency guy says it will, then I’ll be making 130% of what I’m making now. This means that I might be able to go back to putting a little money aside every week for an international trip in the next few years. Also, my day will now be ending, at a minimum, two hours earlier than it is now, so that will hopefully translate into (a) visiting museums and parks and things in the evening sometimes, and (b) more energy for blogging in general.

I’m still just so nervous, though. I accidentally discovered the off-label use of propranolol for anxiety (I was prescribed it to prevent migraines) when I was in and just out of college. I wonder if I could get away with intentionally using a beta-blocker that way.

Making Money

Now, I want to make money from my travel writing somehow. I’ve actually made a tiny bit ($15 or so, I think) from writing on different for-pay sites over the years, but I really want to get somewhere with this. So I’ve got some ideas:

I’m actually breaking ground on a travel book. I really need a public-domain map that I can modify for this purpose, though. What I want to do is break the city up into manageable slices and do something a little more than a pamphlet but a little less than a book on each and then eventually join them up into larger regional guides (like having a downtown guide, a Missions-area guide, etc.) and then, if I ever finish the whole city, have one larger guide for everything. I have pictures taken of two of these sections of downtown and (as I write this on August 31) hope to get downtown to take pictures for the third soon. I’m planning to hit my friends up for personal experiences in/near/with these places to include. My dream is to include nearby towns like Boerne, New Braunfels, etc. in this guide eventually.
Kinda/sorta sell photographs. My idea isn’t to actually sell them, like setting up a booth or anything, but to take requests for photos to post in my blogs. If someone, for example, wants to see if the Alamo is really in the middle of downtown (it is, but it’s not really downtown as someone from, like, Chicago or New York would understand the term), they could pay me a relatively small amount and I’d go downtown when things aren’t so crowded (an early Sunday morning in January, say) and take a panoramic shot, which I then would post in my blog for the requester and anyone else who cares to look at it. There would be a sort of mileage scale to this, so 0 to 20 miles from downtown would be X and 20.1 to 40 miles from downtown would be 2X, and so on. And I would reserve the right to reject offers that I consider to be trespassing, like you can’t take photos inside the Alamo, and so a request for a picture inside the Alamo would be trespassing and I would refuse. I like this plan, and may make this an actual thing down the line. And if there’s a fee to take professional photographs in an area, and getting paid $X counts as “professional” for the owner of that area’s purposes, then the requester of the photograph should probably foot the bill for that fee.*
Start a Patreon. This is what all the cool kids are doing and I’d like to get into this, but I don’t have enough traffic to make it worthwhile and even if I did, I’m not sure how to give bonuses for people who subscribe. Maybe I could modify point 2 above to be $X into the Patreon will get you a picture posted on the blog, $X+Y will give you a photograph emailed to you a week before posting on the blog, $X+Y+Z gets you a photograph that no one but you will ever see? I’ll have to mull that over for a while.

*The fee for the Cibolo Nature Center is $20 and the Cibolo Nature Center is 31 miles from downtown, so assuming that the Cibolo Nature Center people consider getting paid $2X for the picture counts as “professional,” I’d ask the requester to pay $2X+20.

Harvey’s On Its Way

Author’s note: I started working on this post late on August 25 and while working on it, it became August 26. As a result, read all of the “tonight”s as “last night”s, all of the “tomorrow”s as “today”s and so forth.

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Hurricane Harvey made landfall not that long ago down in Corpus Christi. I’m really fond of Corpus and it looks like Alex and I may be visiting there again to see what it looks like after the storm sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Until then, though, here I sit in San Antonio, looking at the Weather.com map of my city and noticing that my neighborhood is pretty much surrounded by rain.

They’re expecting some flooding for San Antonio and at some point the electricity is going to go out. I got home from work a bit late, as we spent some time covering electronics with plastic bags and things, just in case the roof caves in or something. Then I got to work using electricity while I have it. Alex and I cooked some turkey bacon, I did a load of laundry (and probably will do another one while I settle down for bed), I’m running the dishwasher, and I’m charging pretty much everything that needs to be charged (I’m almost done charging my phone-charging batteries and am about to start on the bluetooth speaker that we bought for the Nebraska trip).

I’m probably going to do a lot of reading tomorrow (particularly if the electricity goes out), since the wind will probably stop me from really going anywhere. I may take a hike down to the creek, which is usually dry, to watch the water flow past (which will make a dent in the 6,700 steps I need to make to get caught up with my goal). And maybe I’ll start to make a dent in my next National Geographic post and, maybe even work on the post that will be the preface to our California trip, which will explain how Thomas and I ended up going to California for the very first time, in the mid-1990s.

Or maybe I’ll just stay in bed all day. That’s a possibility, as well.

It’s Been About Two Months Too Long . .

Every time I think about posting here, I remember how long it’s been and put it off again.

Welcome to procrastination.

I think I’m going to stop recapping absolutely everything I read in National Geographic. So much of what they are writing about now, all of the scientific research stuff, particularly, is interesting to me to read, but not so interesting to blog about. So I think I’m going to limit myself to travel articles.

I’ve been stressed out by work and my elderly animals. Diabetic cat, Cosmo, has been losing weight and we’ve slowly been decreasing his insulin. Long story and I need to get to bed. We’ve added gabapentin to our arthritic dog, Foxy’s regimen. Another long story.

Why do I need to get to bed?

Because in about six hours from right now, Alex and I will be off to Los Angeles for our annual “big trip.” In less than 12 hours from now, we’ll be starting our trip along the Pacific Coast Highway starting in Orange County and working our way northwest. I also plan to stop off at Sweet Cup in Garden Grove for an ice cream taco in the morning, as well. So I hope to have a bunch of adventures to share with you once we’re back. I may make a post or two while we’re out and about.

Oh, and I’m doing the Samsung Health Global Challenge for the second month running. I ended June somewhere in the low 100,000s and right now I’m in the low 80,000s (with 194,000 steps so far this month). Hopefully we’ll find lots of opportunities to walk over the next week and I’ll be able to keep and improve upon my standing. We’ll see what happens down the line.

A Post-Mortem on November 2016

I guess that “post-mortem” is probably as good a term as “look back” or “wrapup”or any other term that comes across more neutral, particularly after that election.

So, here goes.

We all know how that election went. The less said about that the better. However, I did offer to do something to help the Bexar County Democratic Party. What will I do? No clue. Let’s see what I come up with. Perhaps I’ll have something definitive to say at the end of December or January.
I did catch up on my steps with one day to spare. I ended up averaging a little over 8700 steps.
I did not win NaNoWriMo. 2016 may have been one of my worst years yet, with just a little over 10,000 words. But there’s always 2017. And I don’t mean just November. I attempt the same goal in February, April, June, and September, as well. If I make it, I at least will know that I can do it.
I’m sticking to my schedule of working on my language skills. I’m doing a couple of Duolingo Spanish lessons every day and also a few Rosetta Stone lessons. My employer is one of the companies that gives access to Rosetta Stone to its employees and so, based on my experience with customers with limited English, I’ve chosen Vietnamese. I’m almost done with Unit One. If I keep to my schedule, I estimate that I’ll spend about six months learning Vietnamese. I also try to do an Italian and a German Duolingo lesson every day and I’m trying to get back into Rosetta Stone Mandarin. I’m paying myself more for Rosetta Stone because Rosetta Stone lessons take a lot longer than Duolingo ones. So far I’ve saved up over $14 and will have accrued at least a penny in interest by the end of the month.

You Gotta Get a Gimmick . . . .

No, I’m not taking up stripping. There’s no way I’m in shape enough for it. I have to admit that I have nice legs, though.

When I first started blogging, I read a bunch of articles saying that you need a “niche.” If you don’t bring your readers something that no other writer focuses on, you’ll never find an audience or whatever. The examples they gave were budget travel, traveling with children, and so on. Like there aren’t dozens of blogs on those subjects.

Then, sometime this summer, it hit me. Two things I really love, and the reason I cannot see myself living in a rural area, are public art and urban parks. I’m not going to only write about those things, there aren’t enough days in the week for me to visit all of the art and parks in all of the cities to be able to keep up a regular schedule of posting on just those two subjects. But as Alex and I (and, once Alex is grown, just I) travel, I’ll be visiting the parks that I can get to and photographing and exploring the history of the public art that I see as we go. There will probably be a side order of museums along the way as well.

The plan (and I’ve saved nearly all of the money up for both) is to visit Quebec City, Montreal, and Toronto in July 2017 and then Memphis, Nashville, and Cincinnati (possibly Louisville as well, depending on how early we get out of Cincinnati) in August on our way to and from Kentucky for the eclipse. I think I’ve only visited one park in one of those cities, Centre Island Park in Toronto, so that will give me some new areas to explore while I’m on those trips.

Speaking of “You Gotta Get a Gimmick,” it was probably about 10:00 p.m. or so when I heard Gypsy coming from the other room (my dad watches Turner Classic Movies a lot). I knew that Alex had never seen most of the classic movies and Gypsy was a particular favorite. So I offered Alex a choice, he could go to bed or stay up with me watching a movie about a stripper. I assured him it wasn’t *that* kind of movie (its TV rating is PG), and he was intrigued enough to check it out and interested enough to stay up until the end.