Check In- What Are You Doing?

Spent this morning getting the foundation fixed at the house I'll be moving in to. Now I need to call the general contractor to see about the bathroom and kitchen remodel.

Now to edit before BookMarketingChat tonight.

Back again, and no sooner had I typed the above than plans for after-work productivity were thwarted; someone needed a ride to the store when I got home from work.

Didn't get lunch (save an apple I inhaled the moment I got home after the trip), but since we returned round about when I needed to start dinner, I guess it works out.

Oh - found out the nearest food store, which had recently (inside a yearish) changed hands, is no longer there. No sale, no warning, no nothing - just a sign on the door saying they're permanently closed. Looked like there may have still been stock inside, too. We'd been suspicious as they hadn't had anything on their reader board for about a week, but it looked like it was still open...

So now we have no quick-run store on this side of town. And the apartments and senior centers (not to mention the high school kids, who would go to the deli on lunches) are out a food store. I didn't go there a lot, but when I needed them, they were there.

Dang it.

Away I drift. Got hot dogs (sorry - fancy-pantsy "chicken and apple sausages") on the stove. Yes, I went all out for dinner tonight.

Really hot day. Nice. Hit 30c in the office because the air con only works on cold days. FFS.

Had a cold bath, now got a lovely glass of white and I'm watching the bats doing what they do. A night like this, a thunder storm would be nice, but none are expected.

Thursday, and the weather warm-up's well underway after a chilly night. Memorial Day Weekend around here is usually either miserably hot or miserably cool; looks like the former this year. (Not that I have any plans.)

Work existed, as work tends to do.

Shopped my way home and topped the tank, because odds are I'm not getting near a gas station from Friday through the weekend. And right now I'm munching on my lunch, another apple with some Cheez-Its (the apple's healthy enough to cancel out the cheese crackers - that's totally real science and not a flimsy rationalization for being too lazy and cheap for a proper lunch...) Tonight's been declared nuke-your-own-dinner night, so I'm off the hook for that.

While I was driving around, I saw the most awesome orange paint job on an SUV. Orange is usually pretty flat, but this one had depth and shine, an ember jewel that shifted from bright to deep as it drove and the lighting shifted. True dragonfire orange - if I ever had to have an orange car, that's the orange I'd pick. And I'm not an orange person by nature.

Off I go, to decompress and then, with hope and luck and maybe a little self-discipline, doing something remotely productive to make up for yesterday's dropped ball on that front.

Had a chill day at work! Actually finished critiquing one more chapter for my beta swap buddy. Will send that out.

My friend dropped off her dog at our place for the long weekend since we're staying put, and he's a devious little creature. Does things behind my back that he knows he's not supposed to, and I yell at him.

Ordered dinner, and going to skim through AW, then onto the chapter I was supposed to work on last night! Hopefully the dog will stay put for a bit.

Really looking forward to the long weekend!

Really hot again, by UK standards. Due a thunderstorm at two-ish tomorrow, hopefully enjoy it at the beach with drive through burgers, after we've got some outdoor stuff out the way.

Stocked up art stuff in town today but need to order some stuff online tonight. I finally stopped the kids automatic response to TV ads being 'I want that', but instead they now ask, 'can we build that'. We can, but, I need more glue sticks.

Right now though, its Friday night and I'm about to deep fry some scampi and chips. Served with cold cold beer. Yomtastic.

Traipsin' through on warm-bordering-on-hot Friday afternoon... don't mind me...

Work was light, and we got out early. Still had to shop my way home, though. And later tonight I may have to go out again.

Dang it.

My productivity yesterday ceased to exist almost as soon as I finished typing about it; got drug out to the store (yes, again), which ate most of my evening, though at least I got dinner and didn't have to wash dishes.

Anyway, I'm downloading a couple purchases from the Rifftrax Memorial Day Weekend sale and generally decompressing after work. (Got Day of the Animals - monster attack film starring Leslie Nelson and various expendable actors - and a few shorts. I really want their new B-movie one, Star Games, too, but I'll wait for the next sale.)

We had our thundery showers but no awesome boom storm, its brought the temp down by ten degrees though, much more pleasant, fresher.

The hot weather makes me want to write, its set in an English heatwave, the scenes are easier to imagine and put down.

Morning coffee time now. Then its time to paint test my clay figure. Not sure poster paint will work, but I still need to resolve the surface cracking. All my mini figures look decrepit, even though they're supposed to be mid twenty.

WriterDude - Bummer on the paint cracking issues. Do you prime the surface at all? I have decent luck with gesso as a base coat, but then I use acrylics.

Yesterday was another slack-off Saturday; aside from the weekly room tidying, I didn't get much done. Gotta make up for some lost time today, though. Also need to mow the lawn again, it looks like, though I may wait to do that in the evening.

Weather has been rather warm the past couple days. It's supposed to cool off starting midweek. We'll see...

Away I go.

Trying to chill out on a sweltering upper Rhine Valley Sunday. This area calls itself the California of Germany. Can't ever remember reading that California has these levels of humidity.

Been surfing my favourite writer's forum and inventing characters for my WiP.

Charles Gull:

I grew up in California, and can attest to the fact that the humidity there is quite low -- sorry I can't give you any hard numbers for relative humidity (or even absolute), but as far as "how it feels", it is negligible.

I currently reside in the midwest, where you can really feel the humidity -- quite a contrast to the west coast.

I hope you manage to create great characters!

Best of luck!

Had another autisticky day, but not as bad as yesterday, by a clear county mile. The two have major issues, but present so differently. When the time comes, I think I'll writes a book.

Been quite a productive day. I mixed some fleshy paint, one blob red, fifteen blobs white, three blobs yellow. Painted mini figure. Wrote a scene, in pencil, with child on arm. Watched three episodes of doctor who. Went shopping, did recycling, had a walk on prom (tide was all the way in so no beach), took a drive to devils bridge, roasted a chicken and a medley of Mediterranean veg (chorizo is a vegetable, right). Chickenpox boy is almost entirely crusty, and I came up with descriptive code names for them both.

Currently shirtless, approaching the bottom of my third beer, and being mithered to share out the mango. What a day. Must be bed time soon, more professor poopy pants I suppose, but I don't think any of us are following the plot, if indeed,there is one.

Brightdreamer said:

WriterDude - Bummer on the paint cracking issues. Do you prime the surface at all? I have decent luck with gesso as a base coat, but then I use acrylics

.

Click to expand...

No primer, the cracks are in the clay. Think its just drying before I've sculpted the detail. Using DAS Terracotta, its done OK in the past, but I wasn't trying this level of detail.

The poster paint seems to have smoothed the cracks, but acrylic is probably the way forward, but that's money I don't have spare at the moment.

In the middle of an "and then" crusade.

WriterDude said:

No primer, the cracks are in the clay. Think its just drying before I've sculpted the detail. Using DAS Terracotta, its done OK in the past, but I wasn't trying this level of detail.

The poster paint seems to have smoothed the cracks, but acrylic is probably the way forward, but that's money I don't have spare at the moment.

Click to expand...

Oh, okay. If it's like Paperclay, sometimes you can smooth over cracks with a second layer or some fine patching. (It can also mean your structure has integrity issues, creating stress cracks.) And if it's drying too fast, that might be an issue. (I used to keep damp paper towels over Paperclay to slow it drying.)

Traipsin' back through. Today has been marginally more productive, though I wound up riding along on a trip out of the house and the universe made me buy books so that set back the productivity meter a bit. (I didn't want to buy any more books, but I had a coupon and there was a perfect parking spot in front of the bookstore, plus there were surprisingly few crowds at Half Price Books for their Memorial Day Weekend sale. Far be it from me to defy the will of the Universe when it so clearly needed me to buy more books, you understand... I did limit myself to three total, though.)

We grabbed lunch at Shari's on the way home, with pie. Usually, I'm there with people who don't get pie. It's just wrong to go to Shari's, home of pies, and not get pie. So this time we had pie. Well worth it...

I'm debating whether to fire up the mower this evening when it cools a bit or if I should wait and do it tomorrow before it warms up so much. Leaning toward the latter because I'm a lazy shiftless twit, and because I might be required to go back out tonight round about the time I'd be mowing. We'll see how things go...

Haven't been at the clay today, but I'll try the damp paper towel approach. Made a start on some scenery instead, an 83cm long rail carriage, dang my commitment to scale.

Needed to get out the house, but it was raining, so went for a drive, explored the scary 10% incline winding roads of cumbria, with its Chelsea tractors up your arse at 60 mile per hour, lambs on the road, and annual average of 1254 accidents warning signs and not a single sodding petrol station for thirty miles. May or may not have killed a magpie with the windscreen. Told the kids we hit a branch.

Should be writing a presentation right now, but no, a cheeky Shiraz-Merlot combi from South Africa seemed more important. It'll do till tomorrow.

WriterDude said:

Haven't been at the clay today, but I'll try the damp paper towel approach. Made a start on some scenery instead, an 83cm long rail carriage, dang my commitment to scale.

Click to expand...

Scale'll get ya every time... (If you've ever seen the excellent stop-motion animated Kubo and the Two Strings, it includes the largest "puppet" created for such a movie: the bone giant was 16 feet tall, because whenever the filmmakers tried to "cheat" with a smaller model, it looked wrong. They had to make it to scale with the other puppets.)

Monday, and aside from mowing the lawn and posting a quick book review (my 1400th, if my records are remotely accurate), I've done precisely nothing with my day. Gut's a little buggy after the warm weather; things are cooling down again this week. Really need to get some writing in, or start another Lynda class...

Managed to pin down the bones of my presentation on paper but will have to PowerPoint it when the kids are in bed. Late night predicted.

After dinner, told the kids we could order something on line with their pocket monies, they've got a tin of old style pound coins that need spending before they're removed from circulation.

Sitting in a hotel in Terre Haute, IN, waiting to see how badly our van is hurt. With only 118,000 miles on it, the bottom end of the engine died yesterday as I was driving home from Ohio. It's one of those bad news/good news kind of things.

The bad news: Our van broke down over 550 miles from home on Memorial Day Weekend. The engine may well be is seized, and it's my fault for being sloppy and lazy on maintenance. The repair bill will have a comma in it, I'm sure.

Now the good news:

• I broke down just a few miles outside a city of 60,000 people.
• I have roadside assistance, so the tow was free. For the van and the trailer I was hauling.
• There was a shop open that will be able to look at the van first thing in the morning.
• There's an extended stay hotel 3 blocks from the shop. With a room available.
• We have money in the bank to be able to afford the repair bill.
• We have the money in the bank for me to be able to stay at the hotel and eat dinner.
• We have people and vehicles available to pick me up if the van is tied up for an extended period.
• I have my computer and can write almost all day without interruption.

Not a great day. But way better than it could have been.

cmhob - Be extra careful... that sounds like the start of one of those mystery/thriller novels, where the MC breaks down and stumbles across some horrible secret in the city/town they're stuck in. (Just don't be the idiot who goes to investigate the weird place or noise with nothing but a flashlight. Really - flashlights are only good for illuminating one's own impending death.)

Tuesday, and the weather's cooling off. Hope the cloud/fog cover sticks around past noon - I have an eye appointment today, and driving with dilated pupils in bright sunlight, even with sunglasses, isn't fun...

Yesterday, I got almost everything off my list done, except working on my long-neglected site overhaul. Gotta get the lead out on that... I got a half-baked start on it, but I'm dragging my feet on specifics. Also gotta finish that danged short I've been working on...

Guess I'll wander off to see what I can do with today's little list.

cmhbob:

Oh! Your (mis)adventure sounds expensive!

But perhaps you can use it as a source for some of your writing.

We drove to CA once, and the car kept making little random burping noises, which we could not identify because they were so random. When we returned home, I took the car in, and turns out that the timing chain was about to go -- so we were very lucky that we managed to get home safely.

If you were in IL, I would offer some sort of help -- place to sleep, eat, relax, etc. But Terra Haute is a little too far away.

Best of luck getting home safely.

And I hope this is something that will make a good "fireplace story" later on.

Suffering the rigmarole of pajanimals and playdate before ushering the dudelings up the wooden hill. They've been promised a movie night tomorrow, with pop corn, but they must settle down tonight.

Work to do, and if there was somewhere else I could do it, I would.

Okay, speaking of mysteries...

I went in to my eye appointment. No real change (given our family eye health history, that's a definite win), and they didn't have to dilate my eyes, but there's an interesting plot twist. Apparently, the glasses I've been wearing for the past three years... aren't the right glasses. They aren't the prescription she gave. They aren't the frames the place sold. They're an older pair, apparently. Only thing is, I'm nearsighted enough I'd have noticed if I didn't have my glasses for any significant stretch of time. When would I have lost the newer pair and not noticed? When could the switch have occurred? Where is the alternate universe me who swiped my glasses? What the ever-lovin' heck is going on?

Anyway, on the plus side, I was able to skip buying new sunglasses (because the others are working okay - and I swear these are the ones I bought with the missing pair, though I don't notice the "pull" of a new prescription when I swap them, which makes me extra confused about how I wouldn't have noticed I was wearing older glasses), though I can get new lenses for the frames in 30 days for a discount. We'll see if I notice anything with the new regular lenses. If I don't need them, I'll have saved enough money to possibly justify a new Kindle eReader; I've been eyeballing a Paperwhite to replace my aging old Kindle keyboard model. Still works good, but it's getting little cracks in the plastic and I'd really like a built-in light for reading in dim situations. But Amazon won't discount Kindles like they used to, because they're pushing their tablets. I can get a starter Fire for less than half the price of a Paperwhite on sale - the most they do anymore is twenty bucks off the eReaders.)

Away I go.

Thanks for the good thoughts, all.

If it weren't for my health issues and related meds, I'd just hang out here until it's fixed. But I didn't bring enough meds for an extended trip, and because I'm in the Veterans Heath System, it's not simple to get refills or short-term help "on the economy." In exploring ways to get me home, we considered a one-way car rental. Turns out there's a drop-off fee of around $375. But a round-trip rental from Terre Haute is only $150. So I'm renting a car tomorrow to go home, then I'll drive that back up Monday to pick up the van with a brand new very expensive engine.

Life goes on. It's a bunch of money we didn't want to spend right now, but at least we've got it to spend. And yes, good writing material and good editing time.

Fourth draft completion is in sight.

Wednesday, and I'm wasting time that I should be using to update my website and otherwise be productive with my worthless little excuse for a life.

Weather started cloudy and cooler, but it's cleared off and warmed up to about the low 70's F (average late-spring/early-summer temps.)

Work was an early-start day with a bonus hot dog roast, so I didn't have to bother bringing a lunch. (Any time we go over five hours, we get a half-hour "lunch" break instead of the usual 15-minute "sit down for a bit" break.) We didn't finish the load, but got closer than I expected. So maybe we'll catch up tomorrow.

Shopped my way home after work to replenish dinner supplies. Yippy skippy.

Gotta get to that site update while I'm thinking of it... I checked it and got it ready to go last night, so all I have to do is push the proverbial button, or throw the proverbial switch, or start the literal FTP transfer program and make it do its update thing.