monday, july 2, 2001
not a vacation

has it really been nearly a week already? and i failed to update? i knew i had been busy, but so busy that i didn't update? i bet you all thought i was on vacation along with everyone else. while it may sound better to say i took a vacation, i swear i didn't. i have been here, being busy, the whole time, generally following my planner (yes, it is helping! thank you for asking!), although not always. you know, bumps in the road, things unplanned, and life all just like to pop in occasionally to upset things. but i wrote things down that i managed to do that weren't planned, if only to show i had gotten something done. besides, even if it was unplanned, things like formatting a computer are definitely things done. noting them down makes you less likely to feel like you did nothing. so although they weren't planned, i did things like...

wednesday i updated my drivers and software, and i had a lot of software that was updatable, even when you discount the betas and the stuff you pay for. my monitor is looking much nicer with the driver update for the graphics card, the picture is definitely sharper. i know this because one of my shortcuts has tiny little images on it that were blurry before and they aren't now. not that i can see what they are, but they are much sharper. this took most of the day.

i also spent most of that day and night getting visions of mind back online in its new domain. (go subscribe, make it worth the effort..lol).

thursday and friday i worked on the game for friday evening and got myself all caught up, so i thought. who knew the party would decide to go up before going down? as a result i was left with handing them far vaguer descriptions than i usually do as a gm. on the good side, at least for me, i had already planned for the biggest meanie to flee the tower when it first became known they were assaulting it, so there wasn't much for me to do in the way of scrambling for critters. in the aftermath i now have to come up with those descriptions and a nice list of goodies. thank goodness it's 2 weeks before the next game.

friday night i reformatted saxy's computer. after a complete hardware check (in which everything checked out) we decide to get winME off of it. we're hoping that that nasty little piece of work is what is causing all the problems. it took 3 tries and a lot of encouragement not to throw in the towel and let dear hubby call tech support and have them just restore it (complete with winME ~ a piece of software that should be buried). he is still adding software. the good news is saturday, when we were trying to finish up the device driver installations, the tech guy came by and installed my cd writer...and helped with a particularly nasty piece of hardware for free. special thanks to graphyx, panther and the tech guy! without you all, he'd be on a winME system still and screaming at the computer every 5 minutes. well, maybe not that bad, but pretty darn close.

saturday i burned disks...lots of discs. i have freed over 4% of my 20 gig hard drive by burning disks. not that i need the space, i just prefer not to fill the drive up if i can at all help it. i am still burning disks. oh yes, this part of the fun is going to take awhile. but my 200+ program files, driver and software updates, and plug ins; over 1000 tubes, over 600 textures, nearly 1100 blade pro preset files, 100 brushes and god knows how many fonts (i have yet to sort them and see what i have duplicates of...) are all safely on cd. i know i lost over 1000 fonts the last time i had a font problem...nice to know that shouldn't be a problem again. i am going to need to get some more pages for the cd album i have that holds all my computer related cds though, and very soon. because not only am i burning all this stuff to disk, i am being organized about it, which means more disks than technically necessary for all this stuff, but less work later when i do happen to fill one and need to organize it then. yes, i am a lunatic, but at least i admit it and generally don't bite. and i am VERY happy to NOT have to store all of this on my hard drive. oh, yes, i must remember to get to my god knows how many image files as well... (i don't even want to think about the mess when i get into p.i.!)

i also got my new forum up last night..i hope you all will go register and participate.

sunday i managed to get my twc project done, tinkered on visions, and set up a gm journal for a friend...and am doing more disk burning as we speak, plus have been and am helping with the final installs, etc on saxy's machine.

later today (after i get some sleep seeing how it is now almost 2 a.m.), i will go to the bank, pay rent, and probably go see a doctor about my ears.

i have managed some reading (and have a reading list as long or longer than my summer to do list) but no real writing the last week. this is perhaps the really depressing thing about my week. i know i need to write everyday, but seem to get swamped with everything else.

the other side affect of all this is my schedule. i have been to bed no earlier (or later, depending on how you look at it) than 5 a.m. every day this week. the good news: i sleep through the worst of the summer heat. the bad news: if i need to do something during the day i don't get up and when school rolls around breaking this particular habit will not be easy. i have discovered that the world does start turning before 10 a.m., but only because i am going to bed with the sunrise. it feeds my night owlishness a bit more than it needs to be fed at the moment.

sleep habits not with standing, this most definitely was not a vacation.