The Spouse Thingy has been very industrious lately and has been wading through the piles o'crap and boxes o'crap in the garage with the hopes of turning it into usable space, and every so often he runs across something that makes us wonder where the heck we got it, what we were thinking when we got it, and then stuff like this:




Stuff to make me feel old and fat, and old...and fat.

Holy chit, we were young. The Boy was probably around 2 when this was taken (I'm guessing based on the sweater and watch I was wearing..) which means we were all of 24 or so. And thin. Sheesh I'd love to be that thin again if it didn't mean giving up M&Ms.

And funny...I thought I was fat then. People I worked with at International Fitness Center probably thought so, too, considering I was sometimes referred to as Thunder Thighs.

Hindsight and all that.

But don'tcha just love the Spouse Thingy's glasses?

Heh.

Yesterday was a beautiful day; the sun was shining, it was warm but not hot, and the breeze was gentle.

I argued with myself for a bit: go for a ride, or work? Go for a ride, or work? Go for a ride...

I worked. Max's books still needed to be formatted for the Kindle, and it wasn't going to get done if I went for a ride. I reasoned that I'd get his first two books done, then today would be free for a nice long ride.

And then came the 30 mph winds.

I can ride in wind, but it's no fun, and if it's no fun, what's the point?

=sigh=

I did laundry today instead.

Yes, I'm whining.

Because MS Word's grammar tools are PERFECTION:



Truly this is why I are a grate riter, so Phffffft to the naysayers!

I still haven't been able to find somewhere I can haul my laptop to in order to indulge in a little work/people watching in this little town. The problem with a little town? There's not a huge variety of places to go in general, and everyone tends to go to those places...so there's not a great balance between enough quiet to work and the number of people to watch. Plus, I'm getting some WTF You Up To? stares.

I tried McD's...no dice, it's too small for the number of people in and out of there, so I'm taking valuable table space. I tried BK...more doable, but I thik it freaks out the people who work there to have someone stake out a tablr for a couple hours.There's a bakery/coffee shop that showed promise, but the one time I wandered in there intent to work I got the evil eye from the kids behind the counter. It was an obvious Get out! We want to close up! vibe (there were still technically 4 hours til closing...but once they're out of donuts, they close anyway. Because hey, why stay open with nothing to sell?)

So today I went back to the Borders coffee shop. It seems too far, but there were too many distractions at home, and I had stuff I needed to get out and onto virtual paper. I haven't been there since we moved, and sadly, I am not remembered. (=sob=) I actually had to tell the clerk what I wanted. Sheesh. And the price of the large iced tea has gone up. AND...to make it hurt, they were playing country music.

Stick a spork in my ear, whydontcha?

I decided to press on and ignore the music and the fact that I had to actually tell someone what I wanted to drink. I sat down and started writing, and was on a real roll; I'd probably been there for an hour and was just getting to the stuff when my freaking laptop battery died.

It had a full charge when I left home.

It's supposed to run for 4 hours.

My spare battery? Dead.

On the plus side, I managed to get out of there without buying more books. It's very rude of them to have so many blocking the path between the front door and the coffee shop.

It's almost like they planned it that way...

The One Where I Get Fan Mail...

You r the wirst riter ever!

Thank you Thank you very much.
(Not sure if it was serious or tongue in cheek, but either way, it made me laugh.)

Truthiness...

I'm an advocate of doing what you can to protect yourself when you're on a motorcycle or scooter. Common sense stuff like a helmet, gloves, motorcycle-specific jacket. If you fall down and go boom, you kinda want something in between you and the asphalt.

That kinda hurts, falling down and going boom.

Tonight the Spouse Thingy had to spend a few hours at a class to teach him new and exiting ways to pass gas, which meant he had our only car. And while he was gone, I decided I needed some M&Ms. Truly, I needed them. No problem! I have a nifty scooter! I could cave into my Very Mature Craving!

Yay for chocolate!

So off I went, to the Super Walmart just .7 miles away. And when I got there I realized I'd worn my helmet and gloves...and just a sweatshirt.

You know that feeling you get when you're a kid and you're doing something your parents have forbid you to do, and if they ever catch you at it you'll be grounded for life?

Yeah, it was like that.

I felt really, really naughty.

And I giggled on my way home, because no one can ground me.

Yesssss, I am bada$$.

=snicker=

WTF happened to my blog template? ('Course, if it's fixed by the time you read this you're be wondering what the heck I'm drinking for lunch...)

I managed to solve my formatting woes, for the most part. I was able to take a PDF file, export from Acrobat to HTML, open it with Seamonkey, and edit the source code from there. My eyeballs burn, but they have not yet exploded. I should have my first three books completed by tonight, provided the Amazon preview thingy (which I'm using to test how well the formatting is going) speeds up a little. Today it has molasses running through it.

While I'm formatting, I'm reading. You'd think I'd know my own work inside out, especially when considering that I've read each book at least 15 times before it goes to print, but it's been a while and oddly, I don't have them memorized. I'm experiencing a whole lot of cringing and Holy Carp, I wrote that and let people read it...", but there's even been some Whoa...*I* wrote that???

While reading Charybdis, I cringed a lot. And I wondered a lot, why the heck the editor didn't cut huge chunks out of it, and why I wasn't forced to streamline the storyline a little more.

But...unlike after it was done, I no longer hate it. I no longer hate any of them, and can see my own progression from the first book to the third. If I keep making strides, someday I might be a real writer!

This guy lives on our front porch; he lounges on a little metal table by the front window, facing the street.

Max noticed him today.

Max has been talking to him off and on all afternoon, and now well into the evening, yowling as if he's pleading for that other kitty to turn around and pay attention.

I can't seem to convince him that it's a lost cause.

I'm pretty sure I'll be listening to him plead with that ceramic kitty all night long.

Oh joy.

Um. Yeah. I've had a major case of blog block this week. I had stuff to write about, but when I tried... it was TeH BorInG. Like this, I imagine.

In the midst of my blog block I've been searching high and low for the CDs with the original source documents for my books. Apparently I saw no need to keep the .doc files, but I did keep the PDFs. So now I'm trying to format the books for use on the Amazon Kindle, and my results are less than spectacular. Essentially I need to change it from PDF to HTML, which is entirely doable... but I wind up with this:

Sentences that have this very annoying
break in the middle,
often in several places, because for whatever
reason, exporting
from PDF to HTML does not autoflow.

I can fix this, but it's a PITA because I have to go through the HTML code and find all those little line breaks. And with a 400+ page book, all jumbled together with a mess of < span: line=goobldy; gooblygook; p = "INDENT DAMMIT" > < div class = whut? Whuts that mean? > between just about every paragraph... Just buy stock in Ibuprofen, because with the amount I'll be ingesting over the next couple of weeks, the price will surely soar.

And the end result? When I get those books up on Amazon for the Kindle, I'll make about $1 per book! (If any sell, which is not expecially likely.)

So why am I doing this?

Beats me.

For Hoss...



And so it goes...

---

We lost one of the Kings of the Blogosphere yesterday. I just found out, and I'm reeling. Gene Maudlin, aka Hoss, was one of the coolest old guys a person could ever hope to know, even through the thin lines of the Internet. Vicki wrote a most wonderful tribute to him; please go read it, and read all the way through. Hoss deserves the attention. And perhaps leave a kind word for Vicki, as she knew him well and loved him dearly.

And so it goes, indeed...

I'm not sure why I dreamed that Barbara Walters took my car so that she could learn to drive in it, but I think I need to figure out what weirdness it is I'm eating before bed...

Oddz N Ens Part 938,457,097

• I'm getting kind of annoyed at Blogger & Firefox. There are still a lot of blogs out there on which I can't comment because the combination just hasn't been working for commenting (IE isn't working on some, either.) I can comment using SeaMonkey, but all my bookmarks are on Firefox... =sigh=
  
  
• I'm really annoyed with Blogrolling. I was patient after they were hacked, I stuck with them, was all right with not being able to edit my blog roll...like a lot of others, I waited for it to get fixed. Now it's supposedly fixed...and it kind of sucks. And that's when the links actually show up in my Blogroll; so far today they're only there about 10% of the time. Plus now, unless you cough up some cash, every time you click on a link in a blogroll, you get an ad. OK, so they need the money. I get that. But it is so painfully slow, and there's nothing on their website that says how much an upgrade costs (I'm guessing if you click on the PAY UP link you'll find out; I'd like to know before I click on it...) There's no way to change account information... they really should have gotten it REALLY working before re-launching.
  
  
• I'm pretty sure all the blogs in my blogroll are also in my Google Reader. So I won't actually miss anything while they keep working on it, but still... The whole thing is annoying me today, so I must whine a bit. I'll get over it.
  
  
• Books read over the weekend: Ur by Stephen King (he wrote it for the Kindle. It is truly awful, imnsho.) Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher (I agree with yellojkt, it would be ideal as an audiobook); Fool by Christopher Moore (if you like him, you gotta read this...King Lear was never so funny); The Reader by Bernhard Schlink (different than the movie, both are decent); and a chunk of The Shack by William Young (not getting into this one as much.)
  
  
• My eyeballs haven't exploded.
  
  
• My books are not yet available on Kindle. I need to find the original Word documents for each manuscript and convert them. I don't know in which box those CD-ROMS are. And I hope I saved the original texts and not just PDF copies...
  
  
• :::pokes Blogrolling::: Work already, dammit.
  

Every so often I get email about a conspicuous absence of blogging. But no, not about me; I can go days without posting and no one says anything. But Max?

Max hasn't blogged in two days? Why not? WHAT'S WRONG WITH MAX???

Um. Yes. What's wrong with Max that he hasn't blogged in two days?

There are two reasons Max has not blogged in a few days:


At least they're sharing...

and


'Twas a gift...and I hearts it


Ohhhh...and you want this toy. In three days I've read a Stephen King novella, Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking and am almost through Christopher Moore's Fool (a wickedly funny retelling of King Lear. You don't have like like Shakespeare to like this book, but you can't be easily offended.) I'm find it a lot easier to read on the Kindle; I can increase the font size, which is a plus for aging eyes, and the electronic ink on the greenish gray background makes for less eye strain. I can curl up in bed, find a comfy position, and stay in the same position for a long time without having to shift because the book is starting to feel heavy or turning pages is awkward. I can have up to 1500 books right there at my fingertips (presuming I want to buy that many books...)

So far the only downside I can find to the Kindle is that I can't share books I've read on it with people. Not unless they get one and register it to my Amazon account, and that's not bloody likely to happen (Well, maybe the Spouse Thingy...if he wants to buy things on my Amazon account, that's ok. He'll pay for it in the end...)

But that's why Max has not blogged since Wednesday. He and Buddah are getting comfy on top of me, and when they're not, I'm reading. Often with Max right there in my lap.

It's such a hard life, truly it is.