Reviews, Recipes, and Random Slices of Life

fayde has been doing these craft afternoons one Sunday afternoon a month. I am not really a crafter sort of person, but so far I have managed to scrounge up things to do. And perhaps I will become more crafty over time. This would not be a bad thing as long as it did not also become a time-consuming thing.

This Sunday I did a lot of gluing of things together and a little sewing. I mended:
* a desk gargoyle
* a Santa house Christmas decoration
* a Christmas bells doorknob-hanger/cat toy
* a hairstick that snapped in half in my hair
* a high school ceramics project
* a shiny tea-light holder, and
* a coaster

I reclaimed half a shelf in my study by finally fixing all these! And I learned some valuable lessons about Krazy Glue. Lesson 1) Wear latex gloves before you lose skin. Lesson 2) Figure out how you will balance the object to keep the glued parts together before you do anything with the actual glue. Lesson 3) The newspaper you are using to protect the table is an object, and it is rather easily glue-able to other objects.

Sewing--I mended/decorated/blinged out a wonderful knit maxi skirt that I love (the level of love that sent me back to the store to find another one and made me very sad to find they were gone) but that had sprouted holes that made it improper wear. Strategic diamonds of blue fabric and bonus application of bling made the patching look like intentional decoration. I hope. After fixing it and putting everything away, unfortunately, I discovered another hole near the hem. Looks like I have a project for next craft day!

There was also discussion of Facebook invites when one friend revealed that she pretty much ignores all Facebook invites (she gets a ton of them). This was upsetting for me. It's never nice to think that your attempts to socialize are being ignored, and the mindset behind it as initially explained was hard to square with how I see socializing. (And also that as far as I can tell, event planning is the one thing Facebook actually does really well!) But we hashed it out, which is good, because Unresolved Things are Unresolved. A large part of it is how large her social network is, and her desire for more personal socializing instead of large events socializing. It's good it came up, because it got me to finally set up that "Non-Facebook Invites Preferred" email group for peoples not on Facebook and, apparently, those who don't like using the Facebook events features.

If you want on the list, speak now!

And then I came home and Phil confessed gloomily that he felt sick again, and it did turn out that he was running a high fever. One day last week he was feverish too. This is UNACCEPTABLE. Fevers are things pregnant ladies are supposed to avoid, and so he is doing the sleeping on the couch/no physical contact thing. No hugs or kisses for me. Very sad. But he is home from work today, so I get some extra time in.

I got a little writing stuff done in the evening.

2/27/11, Sunday, writing log

Total


* Posted freewriting and writing log.
* Persuaded Phil to read and critique the next episode of CoBB
* Wrote a snippet on CoBB and promptly accidentally deleted it, though I jotted down what I could remember of the best bits. There was much gnashing of teeth.
* Read 3 Critters and 2 Duotrope newsletter and updated market list from them.

ETA: It's back up now, after popping the CD Drive out, it booted up again (?). Who knows if this will last.

But. It booted. Then it crashed. Blue screen saying something about "If this is the first time you've seen this" and something about the drive. (Sorry, I panicked and restarted and may not have paid as close of attention as I ought.) Then it couldn't boot. It would go through the booting up screen and then go to just a blinking cursor on a black screen and eventually give notice that no bootable drive was found. When going under settings, it did not see the internal hard drive. Multiple attempts to restart failed.

So, O My Fabulous Smart Computer People:
1. Any idea what's going on?
2. Will this happen again?
3. Anything I can do to prevent it happening, or is my laptop now toast as well?
4. Was I abducted by aliens? Why is all technology I touch dying?

Yesterday, cvalenti* opened up my computer and prepared to install the new power source to make my computer capable of booting up again.

Alas, it turns out that the problem was not the power source, but the CPU fan. So we ordered the part and it should be here by UPS soonish. Unfortunately, then my computer decided to stop staying on or booting up.

Laptop docking station to the rescue! My laptop is now hooked up to the docking station balanced on top of my defunct desktop computer, all surrounded by a nest of cords that must be seen to be believed. I'd take pictures, but the place where I organize my photos away to is currently out of it.

All this so that I can continue to work from home on a day job project, and also so that I can do writingy stuff. (The amount of typing I do, working at my desk with a real keyboard that's at the right height and a real monitor likewise is pretty essential.)

* On the entertaining side, I did feed cvalenti a meal in which everything had vegetables in it: broccoli and onions in the chicken divan; zucchini, squash, cucumber, and green beans in the "seasonal vegetable"; and fennel in the cake**.

** Which was very tasty, being a banana-fennel cake the documentation of which will occur eventually (with pictures).

x-post from Livejournal to Facebook, as it is sufficiently significantly updatey--

I do not like being in car accidents.

Last night, Costco was having its annual corporate member renewal thing. They feed you li'l smokies and meatballs and pizza and cake and give you some sales pitches. If you renew then, you get a (humongous) apple pie and some cash back. So Phil picks me up from downtown after work and we sally forth into rush hour traffic.

Traffic slows to a halt. We're stopped. Then there's a tremendous crashing and our car's flung forward and it feels like a huge hand just punched me in the small of the back and between my shoulder blades. The back of my seat flops down, so it's from a recumbent position that I watch us slide forward to smack the car twenty feet ahead of us.

Everybody's pretty much unhurt (though my back is sore), so insurance information is exchanged and we limp off our various ways. The entire rear bumper is cracked and dangling down from the back of our car, including the license plate, so Phil jerry-rigs a bumper sling out of my scarf to hold things together, and we proceed to Costco. Our car isn't really that driveable at the moment, what with dangling license plate and non-functional seats (Phil's is also permanently reclining, if not flat like the passenger seat one). We're looking at $?? to repair it, or $1,000 - $2,000 for a new-to-us car. We have liability-only insurance, so ours isn't helping out, but we can file a claim with the other guy's insurance, though we'll have to do it on our own. Fun times.

This morning, we had $1,000 apple pie for breakfast.

05/09/2009 - Saturday, no work
* Read WritersDigest newsletter.
* Submitted "Diplomatic Relations" to M-Brane SF Queer Anthology.
* Fought a lot with OpenOffice 3.x's crashiness and problems saving in RTF format. By "fought a lot," I mean that Phil was on another floor of the house and I traumatized him.

05/08/2009 - Friday, full work, some downtime
* Dealt with the hazards of multiple versions of a working draft: merged the updated first three chapters from my home version with the more-recently-edited-elsewhere thumb drive version, and changed the paragraph I'd saved in my email. Then synced that version on home computer and thumb drive.
* Decided to be patient a little longer and not query about the status of "Salvaging Scottwell" (they've been holding the RTF version for 3 months, but molasses moves a lot faster than the publishing industry).
* Joined http://www.mnartists.org and submitted "Dining on a Dead Girl's Dime" to the MNArtists' miniStories Flash Fiction Contest (thanks for the idea, inktea!).
* Began formatting "Diplomatic Relations" for a reprint submission. Stumbled up against AbiWord problems with headers.
* Read Writing-World, FundsforWriters, and FFWMarkets newsletters.
* Writing-World feature article, "Music to Write By" (http://www.writing-world.com/newsletter/2009/WW09-09.shtml). I use music to set the writing mood, but the idea of "anchoring" is a new and interesting one. Now I just need to figure out what my starting song should be.
* Posted writing log.
* penthius freewriting about Death's need for a gardener.
* Worked on making editing changes to Vicesteed ch. 17

04/30/2009 - full work, but there were a couple of beautiful hours of downtime.
* Posted writing log.
* penthius freewriting about this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/us/30zodiac.html?ref=us
* Updated market list from my Gmail to-do labels.
* Updated submission order for "Charity From a Thief," "The Radiator Burped," "Road of Dreams," "A Phoenix By Any Other Name," and "The Miracle Material" and picked where they're going to next--not necessarily the market that pays the most, but the new market that pays well and is what I think is a really good fit. Given the choice between an older magazine and a newer one, I sub to the newer one on the theory that their slush pile is smaller.
* Processed Dead Bait Anthology's very nice form letter rejection of "Miracle Material." Le sigh.
* Read Critters newsletter and various mid-week ad mailings from my writing newsletter people.
* Submitted "The Miracle Material" to Shock Totem after much wailing and gnashing of teeth over OpenOffice's difficulties with, it seems, the very notion of the .RTF format. (More on that later--the quick answer is "AbiWord.")

What on earth did writers with day jobs do before there were decent-sized thumb drives?

I have an ancient and very crotchety computer. A number of years ago, when we were still on dial-up, I turned off Automatic Update because it just crashed the internet connection every time I tried to use it. Now I am trying to clean up the computer and install all the updates and make it pretend to work (OpenOffice and other programs crash way too often--only on this computer, too, not on my laptop).

36 out of 37 updates went smoothly, until it tried to install a security update for Microsoft .NET framework, version 1.1 Service Pack 1. Then it went bad, with a "Failure to Delay Load Library mscorlib.dll Win32 error: 32" message. I'm not even sure I have this .NET framework, but I've got no idea how to tell. The Microsoft support site is useless, unless I want to pay several hundred dollars to actually get a personal response (I don't). Grumble. Grumble grumble. I bought the damn operating system; I think I should get some honest-to-goodness tech support included with that!

Oh, well. Ignoring the update and moving on.

Next up: installing CCleaner, cleaning off some of the crap, and then running a nice long defrag. Then reinstalling OpenOffice and seeing if it will stop with the crashing.