Category Archives: Words Words Words

Help Me…

… Shelfari is consuming me alive.

Last night was a bad, bad time to follow a link sent to me, to a wonderfully engrossing site that networks people via the books on their shelves and helps you look at what other people like to read in order to help you find new stuff. It wouldn’t be so bad if the Flash bits didn’t take so long to load, and if there was a straightforward way to search for one’s edition while adding one’s titles to one’s list. (At least, I think they’re Flash; it may be a simple Java application. Whatever. It takes too long.)

Or maybe it’s just that I have too many books. Or that I’m work-avoiding.

Break’s over.

Break To Gabble

Argh! Not only is this slow because I have to compare three documents, eliminate some minor differences and maintain others, but I have to dance around all these damned newly added tags and code. It slows me down dreadfully. Did I mention that I’ve been through this script or variations of it four times already, and it now bores me? Boredom makes focusing very difficult.

I’d plead for release via death, except that would preclude getting paid for finishing the work.

I will finish this first sheet tonight. I will.

I’m only halfway through.

*headdesk*

Break’s over.

(Why do I have no Walnut Whips left? Why?)

LATER, 10:49 PM: DONE! Well, the first sheet of thirteen, anyway. Now, to bed with a cup of warm milk because I”ll be damned if I’m going to wake up at 4:30 AM like I did today. Also, I have a book to finish.

Wednesday

Thank you all for your good wishes. The boy was reunited with BunBun this morning and gave him a fervent cuddle. “Liam hugging BunBun now,” he said, wrapping his arms so far around the bunny that it was gripped in the crooks of his elbows in front of him, and rocking it back and forth in a mildly violent fashion.

Meallanmouse and I met for lunch today (pasta chips at L’Etranger, how I have missed you), and while I was out I picked up a new notebook as well as doing a quick stop at Archambault to look at double bass method books (Eva’s a fretless bass, okay? Regular electric bass books keep telling me to put fingers on my non-existent frets, and double basses just happen to have the same tuning and thus fingering as an electric bass). I stopped at Indigo to get a book as well, but ended up leaving it behind after carrying it around for a while. (Gratuitous and self-serving stock check: they had one copy of my second book on their shelves, and two of my third.) When I got home there was mailbox joy in the form of the first cheque for the urgent work I did in July, which means Hydro and Bell can be paid. Also in the mailbox was my first issue of the Strings magazine to which I subscribed as a birthday gift to myself. (Of course, that was before I bought Eva as a birthday gift, so I ended up with two from me to me.)

I’d forgotten how public transport allows me to read a lot. I began Stephanie Cowell’s The Players last night, and as of now I’m something like two hundred pages in, with only fifty more to go. I’ll be finished tonight. And finish it I will, most likely in a warm bath, because I will need the break after an afternoon of reducing this script. This is the fifth time I’ve gone over a version of this story (three different versions are required for the project, let’s call them X,Y, and Z: I went over X twice, and this is the second [and significantly longer] edition of Z), and I’m already cross-eyed. And now we have the added twist of working within very specific coding tags, so I have to be extra careful of what I delete and add.

Very pleasant weather we are having. We have only had the air conditioner on for all of five days this summer so far. In fact, HRH took it out just before we left for our long weekend away, and it won’t be replaced unless absolutely necessary. I approve.

Absent Friends

Of all the days to have forgotten BunBun at daycare…

The boy is very out of sorts today (not surprising; we did two six-hour drives in four days and had lots of fun with Nana and Granddad and cats and cousins in between). After a couple of half-hearted nibbles of rice and carrots at dinner, he cried for no apparent reason as we changed him for bed (we suspect because HRH sat him on his lap to slip his pyjama shirt on — usually this is fine, just not tonight for some reason). He sort of settled down during the stories, but insisted on holding every regular toy I brought in to put in his crib (his arms got quite full) and sang snippets of the Cars soundtrack while HRH read. And then he had a little heartbreaking crisis when BunBun was not awaiting him in his crib after his stories. He didn’t have a tantrum — he whimpered BunBun’s name a bit, sat up and looked around, and said, “BunBun? BunBun in?” When I told him that BunBun had stayed to play with his caregiver, there were some big fat tears that rolled down his cheeks, a sob or two, and he lay down and pushed the little white rabbit he calls Peter away when HRH tried to give it to him. “No, no Peter,” he said, lying down and turning his head away, lower lip trembling. “Oh, BunBun, BunBun, BunBun in,” we heard him mumbling as we blew him kisses and closed the door.

He fell asleep in five minutes anyhow. But a bad day to have left BunBun behind.

Also: this morning I found that the tiny chip in his left lateral incisor at some point got chipped again, and is now a huge chip. Argh.

Ping!

Guess what just landed in my inbox? The first of the two revised files to edit! And I get to start all over again! This isn’t a simple cut and paste; this is a full-version reworking.

I am so very glad this complete reworking is through no fault of mine; it appears the translators only did a portion of the full file at first. The work I did before on the original version of these two files isn’t completely useless, it’s just… a small fraction of the larger file. The original file isn’t a unified chunk of the larger file, either; it’s fragmented and scattered all the way through the file as a whole. It will take a week to edit, and the only reason it’s a week instead of two is because I have the first full file to refer to (which took me two weeks on its own back at the beginning of July).

Well, a week for this file and a week for the one that will soon follow. It’s all money for my time. One must cog in order to buy kibble and Cheerios, after all.

That Writing Thing

Last week I found myself writing down interesting words that I came across in order to spur writing at a future date, ending up with a page of completely unrelated but fascinating and mysterious words. This was generally as close to writing as I got. One of those days I wrote a new paragraph in Wings & Ashes, the story I’ve been trying to work out this month. Then we were visiting family for four days, and I never get writing done there.

Today, however, upon hearing some news, I found myself handwriting a 700-word scene. Like W&A I’m not going to transcribe it to computer immediately, and if I did I wouldn’t share it because it’s very triggery for people with/who have family members with fatal illnesses. It’s just a scene to tuck away somewhere. The last page needs reworking because I said the same thing three different ways — basically because the narrator needs to work it out and restate it three different ways in order to understand it, but still, what’s sauce for the character is not necessarily sauce for the reader.

Am writing. Go me. (Cautiously, of course, because one mustn’t scare the idea pigeons away.)

Also done today: laundry, sweeping, finishing Jasper Fforde’s latest, First Among Sequels (O how I love Fforde with much love!), and picking up that parcel (two of the four used books in it are slim and I have basically already gone through them as they are NF/reference-type books that I now may never read again, sigh). Huh. When I write it all out it sounds more impressive.

Home Again

We’re home from the wilds of southern Ontario, tired, achy, trying to settle back into daily life. The cats were thrilled to see us in their own ways, Maggie following us around and Cricket hiding behind the TV; Nixie was being ill and very sorry for herself, but it serves her right from climbing up onto the kitchen counter and stretching to nibble the lowest shoots of the spider plant. I came home with a pile of historical fiction and non-fiction from my mother and Liam came home with new trains. As usual we didn’t get to do half of the things we’d planned to do, which is sigh-inducing as some of it has been put off over the past couple of trips as it is. We did get to spend time with my cousin and his family, which was really great, as was the food (as always). The weather was lovely, and the drive down was excellent (only one stop! not too hot!), with the drive back feeling twice as long and cranky, as usual.

We’re catching up on phone messages and e-mail, so please be patient with us. I see Liam’s monthly post didn’t go up as I thought it had, so I’ve manually published that too. Some of the news waiting for us has not been so good, and our thoughts are with certain friends in hospital themselves or with family members there instead.

Naturally, the postman attempted delivery of a box of books hours after we left on Friday and is now languishing at the post office. Although that cheque I’m waiting for hasn’t arrived, and is now a week later than when cheques arrived on average when I was working in-house. Hmph.

I met Charlize this morning, and oh my goodness, I had forgotten that a six week old baby is very tiny. Such wee feet! Such feathery eyebrows!