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The promised warm front came through, it went from about 39 degrees and sleeting to 52 in a matter of about 30 minutes.

Still busy with work, but that's a good thing, if this keeps up perhaps I can re-start my emergency fund. I like to have some cash on hand for things like an unexpected vet bill or what have you, and it got drained dry due to Binky's final illness and then having to wait weeks to get paid on a job.

Ben went and volunteered over at the Asylum yesterday, nothing exciting but the lawn needed to be picked up because we've had wind and lost quite a few small branches. I've started up using the exercise bike again in the hopes of avoiding miserably sore muscles when I start the heavier yard work in a month. It's the difference between minor, easily ignored pain and several days of hobbling around, so it's well worth doing.

The bike is especially useful because it uses the same muscles I need to hike up and down the super-steep hillside. We do intend to cut some steps into that hill, but we need to finish rerouting the water runoff before we can do that, and that involves standing on said super-steep hill and trying to shovel at the same time.

We need to get a new pickaxe handle, ours broke last year. We taped it up, and while it's just fine to do minor things like chipping a bit of dirt out of the hill, it's really no good for anything more stressful.

And on that exciting note, I will end this post. :)
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Tired today. I think it's just my allergies--it's been warmer and wetter than usual, so there's no shortage of mold spores. I shudder to think of how I would sound if we didn't have the air cleaner.

It's supposed to get up to the mid-60's this week, continuing the theme of the Winter That Wasn't. This is the hardest part of the year, I think. The weather is improving so I'm itching to get outside and do stuff, but it's WAY too early yet--aside from some basic picking up of tree limbs and that kind of thing, I won't be able to do much in the yard until the end of March.

I haven't done much with the writer's group this week, I'm going to try to get another critique in tonight, and that's going to have to be it until next week because I don't like to read other people's stories when I'm working on one of my own.

My story should be up for review there in another two or three weeks, it's going to be interesting to see what people have to say. I've been looking at the critiques of some of the stories I've commented on, and it's been gratifying to see that I'm saying the same things other people are saying.

I critiqued one story and got a really nice thank-you for it, so that made me happy. I am resolved to be as gracious to the people who critique my story as that author was. I have to say, the writing for fandoms has really paid off not just in my ability to put words together in sentences, but at recognizing what makes a good story "work".

After I critique, I'll probably work on the new one for a bit. It's supposed to be humorous, so I need to really be relaxed and a little goofy when I sit down to work on it, else I'll be way too serious and the jokes will fall flat.

I'm hoping to write a story every month.
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What do you want when you are near death?

I saw a newspaper article today that mentioned that only 25% of us had talked to our loved ones about what we wanted. Coupling this with the article How Doctors Die and the recent loss of two of our cats, I can say most emphatically what I don't want.

I do not want a feeding tube unless I have a temporary condition from which I am expected to recover. By "recover", I mean that I can be expected to have at least 60% of normal function for a person of my age.

I do not want life support unless I have a temporary condition from which I am expected to recover. By "recover", I mean that I can be expected to have at least 60% of for a person of my age.

I do not want to be resuscitated unless I have a temporary condition from which I am expected to recover. By "recover", I mean that I can be expected to have at least 60% of for a person of my age.

Barring a fatal accident, I do not want to die at the hospital. I want to be at home, with the people and things that I love.

What do you want? Have you told anyone?
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Almost to the halfway mark, and I've only missed a couple of posts! We were working on that update yesterday, it just turned out to be miserable because the system had updated as well, so it was a double update, and while one worked just fine, the other.... well, it was a pain in the butt.

I had intended to take the day off and ended up spending my first hour and a half of the day on the phone, so I've abandoned the idea. I'm going to work on some code for a while after supper, I have a straightforward job to do so it will be satisfying to actually *do* something and have it DONE as soon as everything is set up. Since it's my code from beginning to end, setup is very simple and it's just a matter of catching all the details.

I was reading a story today and musing on the nature of heroes.  I have noticed in some books that the hero just needs ever-increasing powers to deal with ever-more-powerful bad guys. The Dresden Files, no insult intended as I enjoy the books very much, are a case in point.

We've had an in-house joke for years about this, originally spurred by an ad talking about the main character facing "The Ultimate Evil". So when said character defeats the Ultimate Evil and then next season again faces the Ultimate Evil, does this then mean he's really facing the second-most Ultimate Evil because he already defeated the Ultimate?

I mean, serious, I would think that the Ultimate Evil must be getting pretty banal by now, since so many heroes have defeated it. I would think that you wouldn't have to do much to earn the title now--maybe if you jay-walked and snickered at a fat lady walking by, that would put you right up there in the Halls of Evil.

Damn, I think I just got my next short story idea. Thanks for listening.
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Oh it's the job that never ends.. it just goes on and on my friends...

Every time my client and I think this job is ready to go, we find ANOTHER problem. Hopefully this is the last one.

Not much else going on--I've been busy trying to get things prepped so I can do the update around nine tonight--these kinds of updates are best to do as late in the evening as possible simply because it's less likely that a user will get an error and freak out. Hopefully this new query I have to do will be all worked out and successfully tested.

It's annoying because I was supposedly going to be taking a few hours off and coming back to do the update. :(
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This is going to be a short post because I'm doing it while I wait for a short upload to finish.

Hanging in there. We really miss Morpheus, the house seems incredibly empty without him. Hard to believe that one small cat could leave such a huge gaping hole in our lives, but he did.

On a more positive note, I had a good chat with my main client today, and we're going to start tracking phone time to make sure we are including it in our estimates. The phone time is necessary to get the work done, we just need to make sure to allow for it in our estimates. It's astonishing how the seemingly simple question ends up being complicated more often than not. If I can't ask it on IM and get a quick answer, it's probably not that simple a question.

Hopefully I can get a better handle on my time so I don't feel like I'm always working but never making any money.
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Just about ready for my second cup of coffee this morning and I have my work up on the computer and ready to go.

I've been analyzing where I get hung up getting work done--I've mentioned before that I have a really bad time dividing up work and personal time. Funny, I started to type the sentence using the phrase "where I waste time" but as I am discovering in the course of my analysis, that's a bad word to use because it doesn't adequately describe what's happening, and indirectly suggests that if I only work harder, I won't have a problem.

This change of perspective is actually enlightening because it gets me looking for road blocks instead of berating myself. For example, given the nature of my work, really, I need fairly decent chunks of uninterrupted time. Unless it''s just a tiny code fix, I need a minimum of one hour to accomplish anything.

Read more... )
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Not much happening, which is probably only to be expected.

Obviously I'm still sad about Morpheus, but I think the hardest part was yesterday when we knew he definitely wasn't going to make it and we just had to wait.

We were the end of the line for him. I picked him up from the local humane society the day they were going to euthanize him to make space for other cats. If I hadn't said "He's much too nice to let him get put down, I'll take him," we never would have had the joy of knowing him. This definitely helps the sadness part, although of course we wish we could have had him longer.

Reality is that all of the cats we brought from Massachusetts are getting old. Reality is that even though we have already lost two in the last 60 days, we might lose more in the next 60 days. I am finding that each time we lose one, sad as it is, the next isn't quite as difficult because I have had more time to accept the reality that in five years, we probably won't have any of them, and we definitely won't have any of them in ten years. (They range in age from 13 to 17 and possibly 18).  Morpheus may have been older than 13, it was impossible to tell. He was a British Shorthair, and they take longer to mature, so the estimate of his age could have been off by as much as five years.

Ben and I are talking about possibly looking into getting a British Shorthair kitten in a few years because Morpheus's gentle temperament was typical of the breed. We would definitely enjoy another cat as sweet as he was. And in the meantime, life goes on.

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Wish I had something more positive to post.

We're just waiting, now. Unfortunately, the nearest emergency vet is 35 miles away, and we have no way of getting there. I wish Morpheus had taken sick earlier in the week, because we could have spared both him and us the last 24 hours. Normally the local vet would have been open yesterday, but he was closed this weekend.

That being said, he is as comfortable as we can make him. We have him on the couch, which has always been his favorite place to be, and we're taking turns sitting with him. We don't think he is suffering--for the most part, he's dozing. A couple of times he has meowed, but he always calms down immediately when one of us goes over to him and gives him a pat, so we think it's more he wants reassurance rather than that he's in any kind of pain.

That's all I have today. I'll post a picture of him later.
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Morpheus is hanging in there, but it doesn't look promising. If he doesn't pass naturally over the weekend, unless we see drastic improvement, we'll be making the last trip to the vet with him on Monday.

This is really hard. He's a rescue, so we *think* he's about 13. It's possible he's older, and the vet said that the average lifespan for cats is 14-16. I picked him up from the humane society a couple of hours before he was scheduled to be put down--no one had claimed him or wanted to adopt him.

So we have had him for 12 good years, years that he wouldn't have had at all if we hadn't taken him. But it's not enough time. I suppose if he had been one of the rare 20 year old cats, we still wouldn't feel like it was enough time.

We're keeping him comfortable, that's all we can do.
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Long day today. Morpheus is sick, he has some kind of stomach bug. As you can well imagine, having just lost Binky, I was really worried when I didn't see improvement within 24 hours.

We brought him to the vet, my neighbor was working and the vet had to close up promptly at 5 tonight, so we ended up walking to the office. It wasn't too bad of a walk, about a mile and a half, but it was nasty out because it started snowing fairly heavily. Happily, by the time we were done with the appointment, my neighbor was on the way home so he came and picked us up so we didn't have to walk all the way back.

The vet found that Morpheus was somewhat dehydrated but was treatable at home. He's on Gatorade of all things just because the vet was out of hydrating liquid and we can't get to the grocery store until tomorrow. There is nothing horrible going on, no signs of kidney failure nor intestinal trouble, so likely it's an illness or even worms. He wasn't so sick that he couldn't be wormed, and we've been giving him about 20ml of Gatorade every 20 to 30 minutes. It's kind of a pain, but we don't want to upset his stomach further. He tolerated his antibiotic just fine.

So far so good, and in a nice piece of irony, he's starting to protest being made to drink yucky Gatorade. He of course doesn't understand that the whole reason he's feeling well enough to complain is because we've been giving him said yucky Gatorade, but that's okay. He has perked up enough that he came out and got on the couch so he could curl up with Ben--he wasn't so ill he was hiding or anything, but he had spent most of the morning in the bedroom where it's peaceful and quiet.

What I'm hoping is that we'll hit a point with the rehydration process that he'll start drinking on his own again, but realistically, that may not happen until tomorrow. If he starts drinking on his own again, we can start him on some baby food chicken, which is very gentle on the digestive tract. I'll be picking that up tomorrow.

Now I have to try to get some actual WORK done...
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Another day, another dollar. Well, another day at least. A check that was supposed to be mailed out "early this week" will now be mailed "next Monday".

I'm also waiting for a transfer that probably won't clear until Monday.

Not sure what the hell I'm going to do in the meantime. Keep my fingers crossed that the cat food holds out, I guess.

This is the part that absolutely sucks about having your own business. I don't think I'm going to really feel confident that things are on an even keel until I have a couple of month's reserve set aside, which at this rate has a snowball's chance of hell in happening. The minute I manage to build up a small reserve, it gets wiped out. The last reserve was wiped out for food and putting Binky to sleep, so now there's nothing. I am really getting too old for this genteel poverty shit.

I need to hit the lottery or something.
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This is going to be a short post because it's late and I'm tired.

Got quite a bit of work done today, and gearing up to do another fairly major project. If I could only get *paid* for some of this effort I'm expending, things would be much better.

Usually it isn't that much of a problem, but in this case, one of the people I work for has been experiencing a delay in getting payment so it's the trickle-down effect.

New stories got released on the writer's group today, I've critiqued one and am halfway through my critique on another. Some good stories go through the group, if I see any of the good ones get listed as published, I will definitely recommend them.
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Ben had his interview today. I guess we'll hear back in a couple of weeks... maybe.

Another long day today. It's really good to be busy, but I'm getting worn out. I only have myself to blame--I was almost done with a job and I was just SO determined to finish it tonight so all I have to do is finish testing and update a couple of files tomorrow, and suddenly it's past 11 and I'm done, but any plans I had to relax a little bit have gone right out the window.

That's exactly the kind of thing I have to stop doing--I have to treat this more like a regular job that when it's time to leave, it's time to leave and lock the doors. It wouldn't be so bad if I just did it now and then, but I do this all the time and then wonder why I feel burned out most of the time.

Tomorrow should at least be a straightforward day, so hopefully I'll do a little better. New stories to critique come out tomorrow as well, which is something to look forward to.
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Feeling hopeful today.

Ben has an interview down at the feed store. They tend to have problems keeping help in the mill room because it's hard physical labor. Ben doesn't mind that--he'd rather physical labor than dealing with cranky customers.

If he gets the job, it will start out part-time. Even part-time would be a help, it's been a long haul without a job.

*crosses fingers*
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Not much going on today. Went grocery shopping. Didn't end up doing a critique on anyone, I read another story I wasn't too happy with and I just didn't have the mental energy to a) review it anyway or b) read another story.

I formatted my own story and added it to the queue, it will likely be up for review in about a month, unless of course people already on the list drop below the mandated critique count or by some chance I win the MVR (Most Valued Reviewer) award. I already decided that I wanted to concentrate on doing useful reviews before I try to crank out a quantity of them.

I only worked one day and I'm already looking forward to next weekend.

Is that a bad sign?
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As promised, today was a day off.

It was amazing how cheerful I felt when I got up knowing I didn't have to accomplish anything whatsoever today.

Of course, since I was so relaxed and cheerful, I took care of a bunch of little things that I've been neglecting forever, such as not setting up my voice mail when it got changed from Verizon to Frontier. That's all set up now and all cleaned out and ready to go.

I did another critique and reviewed my story for minor changes and officially submitted it. Probably it won't get critiqued for four weeks, but in the meantime, I'm doing critiques and thinking about what's involved in truly good writing.

Got my first real stinker of a story. I was tempted not to say anything, but then I thought to myself that if it was really a stinker, the writer needed to know that.

One of the things I found was that it was *really* difficult not to pepper the critique with sarcastic zingers a la MST3K. This wasn't all bad because I did share them with Ben and we had a good laugh over the whole thing.

I was much more sedate and sober in my review, and contented myself with a little bit of sarcasm in the opening remarks--nothing that would make the author feel badly, but merely stating the actions of the character in a slightly humorous way. If he sees the joke, it will make him chuckle, if he doesn't see it, he'll just think I used an odd choice of words to restate the plot.

I was really careful to put the review into the review checker to catch anything that might have been less than diplomatic, and I had Ben read it as well. (Ben said that I was far kinder than he would have been.)

The other unexpected result was I had a worst opening line (NOT the story's opening line, something entirely different) pop into my head which was so putrid it was worthy of submission to the Bulwer-Lytton annual contest. It was duly submitted.

Now I'm going to kick back and play my game for an hour or so, enjoy the Saturday evening treat and sulk that Bleach isn't on because AS is showing some Star Wars thing.

*sighs*
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Another busy day. I was going to play my game for a little while, but I got finished too late.

Still, I have *promised* myself a day off tomorrow, in which I intend (mostly) to lounge around and watch television or something suitably indolent. I may do a little yard work if the weather is nice, I really do need to prune those grapevines.

Any web work I do will be on my own stuff, I have a few adjustments I'd like to make to my home-worker.org site.

That's the excitement for today.
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No post yesterday but it's just because I got sucked into trying to finish something. By the time I realized I hadn't posted, it was time to get the hell off the computer and get some sleep.

Still trying to finish up jobs at the moment, I actually have quite a few hours out but very few checks coming in, which is always frustrating. I wish I could have several good months in a row, it would do wonders for my being able to get a little bit of a reserve so that if there were a delay in payment I wouldn't get behind.

So far so good on the writer's group, with any luck I'll be able to go over my story and get it submitted.
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Tired today.

I have gotten some work done but I want to get some more done, and it's hard when I feel all sleepy like this.

I'm thinking of walking up and down the driveway a few times just to try to clear my head and get the blood moving--it's really too late for more coffee.

In other news, I have joined a writer's group. I've been having a problem getting sufficient critiques for my story, and rather than nag people, I figured it was more to the point to join a group where people are actively writing and critiquing.

This has a good setup for insuring that everyone gets critiqued--you have to have a certain ratio of critiques to stories in order to get your critiqued. This month is already ending but I've been able to submit two critiques. I'll probably go over my story this weekend and then submit it.

So far I like the group. Yesterday I read a story that I truly hope the author follows through on because it's refreshingly original and quite funny. I find it good to be looking at stories again, I haven't done it for a while.
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