Peeking into the rock

Seriously I am eating a reasonable amount of food but I feel like nobody lets me near the victuals. What the hell? I'm having to do reality checks on my consumption instead of just following my appetite because it's never satisfied. Maybe I'm missing some important nutrient? "Satiatine!" the vitamin that makes you feel satiated.

I have a new keyboard for my laptop but I can't figure out how to get the thing in. I mean, I understand that all the components of the laptop have to come out but I can't see how that is done--there are a lot and and a lot of screws in there and many odd plastic structures. So I decided I needed a new computer guy because the guy I was using spaces me out all the time and can't be in my presence for more than a few minutes before he tells me what an asshole my son is and how much he disliked my dog (he's in the category of "old friends" but I'm thinking this category might be too broadly defined). I called the one down the street I can walk to and it was a weird conversation in which the guy seemed to be trying to convince me not to bring the laptop and keyboard in. So I guess I'll call the other one a few blocks farther away.

I drafted a new sleeve for that top but I have my doubts I did it right, so I haven't cut  new ones out yet. It's no use saying "use a well-fitting sleeve for a guide" because I don't own any. I have some t shirts that work right, but the woven shirts I own all have oversized sleeves and giant armscyes, whereas here I'm trying to make a just-normal sleeve with a tailored armscye. I believe the reason I own all these giant shirts is that normal shirts in my size are never made so that they actually fit. Usually they are too tight in the bicep and weirdly both too broad and too narrow in the shoulder--to narrow across the back and too broad across the front, even if they are too tight in the bust. That, and for a long time the dropped shoulder "big shirt" was all the rage. I think that the endurance of this style is because it doesn't matter if it doesn't fit.

What else can I complain about? I know! I can't find any more non-Company Kage Baker books! Maybe I'll give up and try the Company books again. What I want more of is stuff like The Bird of the River and the Pismo Beach sort of stories.

My computer resurrected itself somehow. I just poked the on button in passing because I needed something from the desk anyway and it turned on.

I'd been writing along on the laptop since not-poland is saved to Dropbox anyway, but the laptop is a pain in the ass. The keyboard's really worn out and the battery doesn't work, and the poor thing is afflicted with Vista so it has bad habits.

I'm thinking when I go to Prague I want something to take with me. Depending on finances and whether it's still available, I'll probably just give in and accept Emma's hand-me-down laptop even though it is a Mac. But Frank is happy with his Nexus 7 and I was thinking that since there's a new one coming out in July the price for used Nexus 7s might come down a lot in June, and you can get a case for it that has a reasonable keyboard built into it, and that and a couple other inexpensive accessories look like it becomes a decent thing to travel with . . .

I don't know.

On another front, I snagged a bunch of my friend's really old seeds and planted them today. I've had decent luck with old seeds, we'll see.

And on another front . . . I found a message on my machine which I do not know how old it is, about an interview for a teacher position with UCSC childcare. I called back and left a message, front-loading the information about being out of the country for half the summer. I applied for that job at least six months ago . . .

Yesterday I was working on the downstairs bedroom so I don't have to live in a dump for the next year and so I will eventually be able to clean up the living room too.

So I wrote one sentence.

Today I brought the word count to 1.7K+, which is better.  I'm sort of speeding throguh drummer's training camp.  Tomorrow I'll get him chosen by hsi first unit, and the next day maybe have his first battle, and probably on one of thiose two days the conversation with the older drummer about how they're already dead, so they may as well see if they can save their comrades, and by the way, we fuck around a little too.

I was looking for more about military drummers, but there's not a lot more to be found, so I'm making up a lot of stuff whole cloth, and hoping that it makes sense.

I've been poking at Frank's old laptop but it's probably a paperweight. I have some time before the surgeries anyway: I've moved back the first one to May, so I have more time to work out the finances and strengthen my legs before hand.  There's no reason not to, I'm not in much pain at all and I really am getting stronger.  Yesterday Kevin the physical therapist decided I was ready for a new set of exercises which are as he says "efficient" -- meaning they are difficult, painful, and tiring. I should be proud, but I'm sore. I mean muscle sore, not emotion sore.

Also, that cracked tooth finally shed the cracked bit off, and now I have three teeth with chunks out of them.  At my age, my mother had three teeth, though, so that's an improvement.

Also: tomato sandwiches.

Laptop appears to have well and truly died. It hasn't started in three days. This is bad because: (1)I've been using it to write the not-Poland book while sitting in bed in the morning before daylight and (2)I had hopes of sitting in the yard with it down the line and writing under the apple tree.

On the other hand, all but a handful of notes and maybe 2-3 hundred words are on googledocs. So I have lost negligible work.

On another front, I went to RAFT with a toddler teacher and got things for our classrooms. We collaborate a whole bunch, Kai and I. I got some shiny mylar, some border stickers, some yarn, some upholstery samples, and some water play items, but not the little measuring cups or pitchers or watering cans I want for out gardening project. And then we went to Ranch 99 and I got vegetables and mutant coconut sport (macapuno). Now I am home and I am sleeeepy.

Guess who, after some really magnificent disasters in the past -- including a five-way backup failure -- had not backed up her work?

I think it's just another damned update freezing the laptop. I always turn off automatic updates on the desktop, but I couldn't figure out how to on the laptop, and trhere's been a slew of insistent updates coming along and stopping everything. But there's also been some freezes where I couldn't be sure what had happened, and the logon has been failing a bunch, to where I have to take the battery out to shut the computer down thoroughly before anything can proceed (yeah, tell me never do that and then tell me what the hell else to do when you get a complete freeze and you can't even bring up the shutdown screen. Now tell me that's what I get for owning a Vista machine It's not my fault. The kindly uncle who bought the laptop wouldn't get an xp one because it was obsolete, though still being provided at the time: and there's no way I can afford to buy Seven).

So guess how much work is on that machine, hopefully not lost forever? Hopefully when I go back to it later it will be fine, Hopefully, Anyway, here's what:

I'm home today because I'm still sick. I have a voice at all this morning, but it's exhausting to talk still and I sound horrible and there's no way I could be heard across the room. So I took advantage to write nearly 4000 words before I got up. It only took a couple of hours, which is really funny because a lot of it was brand-new material -- by which I mean, not only never written before, bringing chapter three to almost 5000 words. I can't be sure of exact numbers because the freeze took place while I was performing a word count -- anyway, that's more than 1500 words total for the novel.

Seven days of writing, and two months' worth of notes, including somecharacter backgrounds, historical backgrounds, the names of the ethnicities and languages, even the bare bones of the religion which will make me snarl if I have to do that again because it's really really important to these people but not to me -- and it's only important to the stiory because it's important to them. Not to mention a 15,000 word outline.

So. If, as it is likely, the laptop is only misbehaving and not dead, my next task is to set up an offsite storage for the novel. And then maybe figure out what made the computer freeze. "Maybe" because it might not be possible. If it is dead, my nexgt task is to take it to a repair shop with the primary goal of salvaging the material on it and the secondary goal of getting it repaired. If it's impossible or too expensive to repair, I still have the desktop, and I'll be writing downstairs. But that's not ideal. Upstairs is better: all the Sims stuff and frivolous bookmarks are on the downstairs desktop, and also the experience of writing in my bed, looking out my huge back windows on the trees in my yard and the neighborhood beyond, is far more conducive to productivity, as witness that nearly 4000 words in two and a half hours I wrote this morning while too sick to work.

Anyway: accomplished: the other ponies arrive, but he one assigned to Yanek actually "belongs" to the baby for when she's big enough to ride: Yanek is punished for skiving off: Yanek discovers that the books his sister's nurse has been giving him are written by her, and that she's married to the country-house chauffeur, who she says is actually supposed to be his caregiver, not just defacto: and the Duke informs Yanek that he's going back with them to the Palace.

The surprise to me was how much more abusive Yanek's upbringing is than I originally set out to have it, without anything actually changing. I think that in the fleshing out of the events what seemed like more minor things revealed themselves to be kind of shocking. And I think this is because when I was outlining the story I was (1) determined not to write a poor-me Cinderella story and (2) able to accept the adults' version of events.

As it turns out, Yanek is sort of Cinderella. And it also turns out that the people I had put in place to be his protectors are to a surprising degree complicit in his abuse. And yet. There's nothing that happens to Yanek that isn't standard child-rearing practice of the 1900s, except for the relative neglect.