eddyfate

* Electrician fixed the problem. Turns out that a screw wasn't tightened down, causing a key wire to corrode and fail, taking out a bunch of stuff with it. We got the entire thing replaced so that another portion of our house electrical system is now up to code. But, we basically paid over $900 for a screw. [insert prostitution joke here]

* Moved into my new office and unpacked. My cube is very spacious, bigger even than some of the manager's actual offices. And I have a window. There is much cube-envy in the office. However, I'm not used to having co-workers around.

* Finished up Chapter Four, so I only have one more chapter to go and then draft 2 will be done. Then it's a final rewrite, and off to the editors.

* And now, catching up on the work I had to postpone from all the packing, moving and unpacking.

(Due to my paid LJ lapsing, I don't have access to my angry icons. Sad.)

Over the past couple of days I've noticed that Jazz (my computer) is offline when I get to it. I usually leave it online in the laptop docking station to handle virus scans, software updates, stuff like that. I assumed it was just a glitch with the internet. When I noticed it again last night, I went to mention it to greebotrill, and noticed her monitor was shutting itself on and off. After some investigation, it turns out that one of our electrical circuits is fucked up: when it hits a certain point of power, it shuts down, then after a few minutes turns back on, only to shut down again. Strangely, though, the circuit breaker switches never flip. Unfortunately, the circuit handles greebotrill's workstation (including her home office workstation), the master bedroom (including our alarm clocks), the home security system and a bank of lights in the basement that happen to be right over the fuseboxes.

This is on top of having people come to install our porch light, dealing with two pug dogs, and a ton of things that were planned at our house. Now we have to squeeze an electrician into our schedule (and our budget). Oh, and my dizzy spells are coming back. I'm not worried yet, since the temperature has been waffling between "spring" and "winter" the past few days, but it still wore me out. At least I got to catch up on my TiVoed episodes of The Dresden Files.

The weekend was surprisingly good. Played Requiem Friday and Saturday locally, but skipped Forsaken so that I could get some wordcount in. We had a number of people come to visit (most of which I don't know the LJ nicks for), and Sunday we spent some time having lunch or dinner with them - 14 out-of-towners in total. It was a lot of fun, if a bit too expensive for our pocketbook (but the Scottish Arms is just so good, and they have fantastic ale). There was a lot of talk about the Requiem game (of course), but also a fair bit of enjoyable talk on other topics, and some people were nice enough to let me babble about Mage for a while. However, that did mean that I got no wordcount in last night (although I did finish Tome of the Watchtowers and jot down some notes). This week, I'm hoping to get back into the groove of hitting 2,000 - 2,500 words like I was late last week, because I'd like to get that debt close to gone so I can move some of that wordcount to working on my playtesting documents.

The kitchen also gets finished today, but it was looking really nice Friday (it's just details that need to be done today). So glad that I'm not washing dishes in our bathtub anymore, and our new microwave and dishwasher are nice -- both really good deals, and now all of the kitchen appliances are black. Our house is pretty much back in order and we won't have any more huge expenses that we need to worry about in the near future, which is a relief.

Looking forward to (and simultaneously dreading) ICC.

Power came back on early Friday evening, so the second outage wasn't nearly as major. Spent most of the weekend putting the house back together (once with the kind assistance of naamaire). There's still a fair amount of stuff in the basement, but the bookshelves are upstairs, and two of the seven bookshelves are reshelved. I'll be going through the rest of the books and reshelving the other five.

My back has been giving me minor problems again. I've been keeping heat on it and restricting my lifting to low weight (but lots of repetitions -- we have a lot of books), so we'll see how it goes. I have a workout with Alvin tonight and tomorrow. I made the mistake of getting on a scale Sunday morning -- I hadn't been on one for months -- and found out I'd gained ten pounds. It depressed me for a while, but greebotrill talked to me about it. I explained some of my frustrations with my diet and my workout, and she helped me understand some things I was confused on (and I cleared up some misperceptions she had). Now that the house is largely back in order, I'm hoping to get back into a regular pattern and diet, and hopefully either get rid of that weight or turn it into muscle.

I had planned to work on a little hard-boiled story last week, but it didn't happen. Partly because of the power situation which threw my entire life into chaos for a short time, but mostly because the initial idea I had is turning out to be a short story instead of a short-short or microfiction. I'm finding more and more often that an idea I have requires some research and thinking through of basic premises, which makes the story much richer than I originally intended, and thus adds depth. I'm going to try to keep the tone as hard-boiled as I can, but so far there's an interesting secondary conflict developing over the primary one, and the overall mood of the story just got a little darker. (I'm finding that a fair chunk of my stories are a bit on the dark side. Not quite sure just why.)

This week, after I finish sorting out the books, I'm going to either finish the first draft of my hard-boiled story (which doesn't even have a working title yet), or polish at least one of my existing stories for publication. I'm also considering polishing a few of my microfiction pieces for a couple of markets that deal in short-shorts. My hope is that by the end of August I'll have at least a few stories in the mail. I believe I had set myself a goal of six stories in consideration by the end of the year, and I think I can hit that mark.

Saw the movie pi Saturday. Very bizarre movie, but intriguing. Some of the theory seemed a bit iffy to me, and the excessive use of shaky-cam was a bit annoying, but any movie with Kabbalistic number theory is pretty cool overall.

Power is out again.

greebotrill checked the house this morning, and we have power. (We're estimating we got it back sometime late last night.) We'll be moving out of the hotel room, and probably finishing moving stuff out of the basement from getting our floors done.

And maybe we'll have a house again. Maybe.

I'm having a shitty time:

* Burst a tire on my car hitting a curb. It was my own damn fault, and the second time I burst this same time on this same curb (the one leading to our garage). I'll have to take a different route to park in the garage, but I've been pissed at myself ever since.

* The satellite internet people jerked us around, and we have to pay another $125 because we have a flat roof (something they didn't bother to tell us about earlier). So our options are stay with bad customer service and bad internet, or go with bad customer service and potentially good (and expensive) internet.

* We had to move the treadmill, couch, and other heavy shit last night. We'll have to move more tonight, either before or after we work out.

* Some of my games fell over during the moving last night, scattering cards and pieces everywhere. One I had to repack twice because I dropped it as I was putting it away again.

* IC annoyances in the Cam due to OOC frustrations that were no one's fault.

It's all petty shit, but I was really pissed at myself for the first item, which made all of the rest really annoying.

Most of the floors are done (all that's left are my office, the workout room, and the hallways and staircase this week). Sunday was lots of moving, but I now have a bedroom and living room again, and office space (although I'm sharing with the rest of the house this week). I feel a little more human, and hopefully I'll be able to catch up on things. Such as:

* Going to GenCon Indy this year.

* Progress on Sekrit Project C.

* Catching up on email (yeah, right).

* Finishing Blackpool (really good drama series that was on last year on BBC1).

* Watching a little bit of Transformers: Headmasters (the Japanese series that took up after the end of the original cartoon in America) and realizing that bad subtitling isn't just for kung-fu movies. But there was a cool fight scene between Soundwave and Blaster in episode two.

* Finishing up crap on various Cam characters.

* Finishing Jude the Obscure.

* Getting back on track with my journal writing and my workouts (both of which slipped this past week due to the strange schedule).

Tonight, however, probably won't be much productivity. We need to go shopping, both for food and materials to continue the move (like felt pads for the furniture), we need to finish at least getting everything out of the two remaining rooms and the hallways, and somewhere in there is dinner and possibly Raw.