I found my hat & other musings

I found my hat the other day… it was … well, I wouldn’t have been physically capable of locating it had I not moved several of the large pieces of furniture in my room around the other day. How it found its way there, I know not. Anyway, it had been missing for a few weeks and I’m glad to have found it.

Today while I was working on clearing off my table (it is very nearly clear) and then on Betty (I got about half the crust done, I need to do the other half still, and then on the actual Betty…), I watched Monsters Inc, The Mexican, Kung Pow, and Being John Malkovich. The first three with Director’s Commentary on, and the third without because… well, for some reason Spike didn’t do a commentary track.

I was having some instability issues with Jaguar, and I know I should probably have done a ‘clean’ install of Panther, formatting the HD and installing Panther on a fresh drive, but … that’s so much work. Backing up all my data, finding all the originals to re-install all my software… finding my serial numbers, etc… making sure I have everything I need… it could take days, and I wanted Panther installed right away. And Panther … well, I wasn’t tracking my problems in Jaguar, so I don’t know if it’s the same or more, but at least every time something crashes in Panther it reports it to Apple. Anyway, if it keeps it up, I’m going to get to work on moving things around and locating originals and serials so I can format and reinstall. My computer is coming up on its second birthday in January, so I figure it’s due for some work.

There are so many things I’m supposed to be doing… I’ve just been so out of it lately… I’ve got these two books (so far two; two more ‘in transit’ to my library, arriving any day now) on screen printing, but I keep setting other things on them so they stay out of sight. Every time I see them I think about screen printing and I start to get stressed out again. Every time I actually force myself to read more of them, it just makes me more informed and more stressed about the whole process. Every time I think about it all I remember that there are still zero pre-orders, zero actual interest in the shirts, and maybe it’s the economy, and maybe it’s the designs I’ve started with, and maybe … I don’t know, maybe my readers really don’t have any money. What if I offered the ‘Need Head’ design in white on black shirts? Or ringers? What about … Modern Evil logo’d black shirts? How about a black shirt with the stick-figure guy from A Stick Figure Comic on it in white, and some nihilist phrase? What if I developed a process to silk-screen images from my paintings onto shirts? Or whole paintings? Would you buy silk-screened, low-cost copies of my paintings? Or here’s an idea that Iain had a while back: A green shirt with white lettering, on the front “Make 7” and on the back “Fuck Yourself To Hell”. How about that?

Nevermind. I’ll just keep trying, anyway.

After watching The Mexican with commentary by the director (and others), Gore Verbinski, I popped in The Ring, thinking I might be able to get through it in broad daylight with commentary running instead of the normal soundtrack, considering I rarely look up at the screen while listening to the commentaries. Alas, there does not appear to be a commentary track on The Ring. Worse, just the images and sounds that passed before my eyes to get to the menu, and while I was looking through the menu to try to find the commentary, in the middle of the day in broad daylight, scared the bejeezus out of me. I keep getting the creeps, even hours later. Fuck. Which reminds me. Zoe: have you watched the copy of the ‘video’ I made for you yet? Good luck with that. Be sure to copy it yourself. Heck, pass the one I gave you on to someone unsuspecting. It’ll be fun.

NaNoWriMo coming up in a couple of days. Angela: the answer is paper. Write on paper when you’re at work, and type it up some other time, say … December or later. This causes a problem only when you go to try to get an accurate wordcount… but maybe you can get someone to type your pages up for you. How fast does Heath type? Maybe he’ll do it in exchange for … A trip to sooty San Diego! Or … something. Heck, if I get my novel done ahead of schedule (possible, considering I wrote the last one’s first draft in 8 days) I’d be glad to type your pages up for you.
As far as my own novel goes… I don’t know. I’m writing so much here every day, I know I could ‘keep up’ with a reasonable word count per day… but … What am I going to write about? I have two really good ideas for novels sortof queued up, and I could write a first draft or beginning draft for either of them right now and fill in the technical details later … or I could try starting from scratch on something off the top of my head and see where I end up… which was what worked for me last year. The ideas I had ahead of time or that I had any idea about structure for just… became stuck. I want to get this done again; last year I finished just under “the wire”, this year I’d like to get done ahead of time. Last year I was the Municipal Liaison for Tempe, AZ (and really for all of Central Arizona) – this year I’m over 100 miles from there and about an hour from the nearest fellow NaNoWriter, with no way to meet them if I wanted to (since I have no car of my own). Phoenix NaNoWriters are struggling right now because they have no ML, no leadership, they keep calling out, but no one has volunteered yet (last I checked) and no matter how much I want to help them out, I realize it would be fairly difficult from my vantage here in the hills. Worse, this year they’re restricting ML’ing to people who have done NaNoWriMo before, so they have people who understand how hard NaNoWriMo is without the extra responsibilities of trying to help out other writers and keep things together. I was an ML my first year in, and managed to arrange weekly-and-more meetings in Tempe despite my own multiple difficulties getting a novel written. This year I theoretically have more time available to work on either, but I’m hours away from the bigger part of the puzzle.
So I guess it’s just me and my novel. Which … I guess it’ll be two more days before I know where I’ll start, and 32 more days before I know where I’ll end up. I don’t have a laptop anymore, so I’ll just … take pads of paper with me to PHX/San Diego, and maybe work on the novel on paper, like I advised Angela to. Of course, I’ll type my own up … likely doing some re-writing as I go, unfortunately. I say unfortunately because while it’s more time consuming to write things twice, it’s moreso to think them out twice. But I’ll do whatever it takes. Some of my favorite bits of Lost and Not Found are the pages I was forced to write on paper because my laptop was dead.

I’ve finally got around to begin naming the days, weeks and months of my calendar. They are subject to change, but here you go:

Months:
1 – ichiember
2 – remember
3 – triober
4 – catember
5 – pentumber
6 – exober
7 – september
8 – october
9 – november
10 – december

Weeks:
1 – ichgo
2 – nigo
3 – songo
4 – chigo
5 – gogo
6 – rogo

Days:
1 – Sunday
2 – Monday
3 – Wensday*
4 – Thursday
5 – Friday

*Yes, I took that stupid ‘d’ and ‘e’ out of Wednesday, making it the easier ‘Wensday’, which is much closer to what people say, anyway.

I’ve just noticed that this is post eight hundred and one. I missed noticing 800. Oh well. Maybe I’ll notice one thousand. I’m doing some work on FYTH as I write this; I think there’s some problems with the Db for FYTH specifically – I get a lot of trouble adding new posts. Probably just something corrupted somewhere. I’m extracting all the data from the old one, scrubbing it, creating a new Db location for it, inserting it, and I’ll see what happens. I’ll probably go to bed soon though, so this post will be pre-fix, actually. I’ll take some time to do the fix tomorrow. Tonight I’m going to focus on staying warm.

I forgot to bring wood up to build a fire with, so tomorrow morning when I wake up and it’s forty-five degrees in my room, I won’t be able to do anything about it, at least until the sun comes up. Maybe I’ll ‘sleep in’ and stay in bed until it’s light enough outside to gather some wood. Bah. I’ll probably just put on some warm clothes (I wonder how they’ll stay warm in my dresser; the dresser will be the same 45degrees as the room) and ignore it. Or something. I’m so dumb. Tomorrow, on my list of things to do, should be to bring up some wood.

I’ve been writing here for over an hour now. I should probably go lay down and try to get some sleep before I write a fifty-thousand word post. Night.