Squublog

Truly, I am barely here. This place is still here, for some reason, and in the spirit of nothing-much-at-all, I'm posting this very thing in this very place.

On? We need new prepositions.

I'm planning to do NaNoWriMo again this year. (I have a bit of an existentational disenfranchisement going on, focused primarily around my growing disenchantment with my "career". I work 4 days a week from my home, and some days it's all I can do to do any work at all. This ebbs and flows - depends on how much work is being sent my way. I'm bored just writing three sentences about how bored with it all I am.) Writing a draft of another book will probably do nothing for any of this -- could in fact further distract me from what I'm supposed to be doing -- but it could possibly force me to focus myself a little bit more in general, thus sort of letting the rest of the unstructured stuff sort of crystallize around it.

Family life is great, stressful, hectic. My daughter is 3 months shy of being 3, and my son is 9 months old, large, working on crawling, and babbling. They're both incredible.

My addiction to Steelers football, and the NFL in general, has increased again this year. I bought a 46" Sony Bravia sometime during the off-season, having sold my only remaining electric guitar (a PRS of some description) to my boss' son. It's great watching the Steelers on it, except for the fact that they keep losing. This season they're some horrible mirror image of last: in the 2008 season they consistently looked like they were going to lose games but then pulled them out in the last quarter; this year the opener was like that, but then against the Bears and then the Bengals they became the bizarro Steelers, starting off with a bang and then just fizzling into crap.

I've been on a diet for a little while now, maybe a couple of months. I went in for a check up with a new doctor, having not had one since before starting my family, and was told I was in dangerous high blood pressure territory, and that I weighed 245 pounds. I was shocked more by the weight than anything; I've been thinking of myself as weighing about 225 for years now, and even at that I was significantly overweight. So since then I've been trying to eat better; started off counting calories but have slipped a little into just a more ambiguous don't-pig-out-all-the-time thing. And I started running 4 or so times a week. I've lost not quite 20 pounds (by my scale I started at 240 and am down around 221 now), and am trying to keep motivated enough to get down to 200 eventually. 220 is the weight I've always had listed on my driver's license, so that's a first step I'd really like to hit ASAP.

The running has been hard on my shins. At the start it was really tough on everything, but a week or so in I was feeling pretty good and enjoying it. Another couple of weeks later and my shins were starting to sort of chronically hurt. My jogging route is basically a mile up here on our mountain, involving a lot of up-and-down stuff. I do it in about 12 minutes, and I have lately been increasing the distance (which just involves doubling parts of the route). It's not a big run, but the hills add to the workout and the time it takes fits well in a lunch-break sort of scenario. Due to the pain in my shins, this week I decided to get my bike in shape enough to ride around up here on our mountain. My first ride, yesterday, was just about a mile and a half of looping around up here, which is hardly anything on a bike, though it was enough to remind me that the leg muscles involved in biking and running are really not the same. For today's ride I went all the way down the mountain, took some pictures in the industrial park down there, and then came back up. It's a strange situation for riding; pretty much the entire beginning is all downhill, taking a few roads that wind down to the bottom, then there's however much basically flat road I choose to follow, then it's all back up a number of steep roads. Feels backwards, as it's hard to enjoy the downhill knowing the uphill's going to follow.

But even though I hadn't even touched the bike since a few rides a year or more ago, I was able to make the trip back up without any huge destruction of self. So the running has definitely improved my conditioning somewhat. I plan on continuing with biking (though fitting it in is going to be difficult; today's ride was just about exactly 30 minutes.) I assume because of the timing issue I should just keep going down and up the hill, as even though it's not really that pleasurable (currently,) it IS a good way to condition myself in a short time.

If I keep motivated to continue posting here to nobody some photos may follow.

Friday night at 11:15 was NOT the right time for me to start trying to hit my second day's NaNoWriMo word count. I think I added about 500 to my count, putting me around 2300. I need to be at around 3000 by now.

That site is strange. There's no way that I can find, in the info about author pages, to post a little blurb about intentions or goals or whatever. Some of the things I'd like to put there:

• I'm writing, at least thus far, on a 486 Dell laptop. I've had it since the 90s; I guess the early 90s. It's running Win95 (I upgraded it way back from Windows 3.11 for Workgroups!) I'm doing that because it's the best way I could come up with to avoid distractions. There's no internet on that thing because there's no network card of any kind. I've got some PCMCIA network cards around here, but chances are that thing won't have drivers. And there might be an external CD reader for it somewhere around here too, in which case I might be able to get the drivers if I really wanted, but basically it's networkless. I'm sort of hoping the floppy drive actually works so that at some point I can get the document OUT of the thing. Oh, I'm using MS Word 6.0. The "s" key and the "w" key are so fucking hard to get to work sometimes that I'm being slowed down significantly (oh, and the space bar's hard to hit sometimes, and the "end" and "home" keys require holding the "function" key to use...) But still, probably better than being on a connected machine like I am here.


• I decided to call what I'm doing "Science Fiction." That's probably the genre I picked before. It's really not that; though I don't know what it is. Maybe I could call it "literary fiction" but that makes it seem like it oughta be trying to be good.


• On the other hand, I think I AM trying to make it good, at least more so than last time. I'm writing from an idea I had years ago. Last time I did this I started with basically no plan. This time I decided I'd try to turn this idea into a book.


• I can't imagine that I'll finish this month. It really is amazingly difficult to find the time in a chunk. I have enough time if I add up all the bits-and-pieces of time I find laying around during the course of any given day, but this pursuit does not lend itself well to grabbing bits of time here and there. At least it doesn't for me. At some point I might just decide it's not going to be a NaNoWriMo novel at all. Like I said, I like the idea.


• Working title of the thing is Shreddinger, which makes it sound (to my ears) like it's something it isn't, especially when coupled with the "science fiction" genre tag. It's about a disease, if I'm going to say it's about something. I've got a feeling in more capable hands it could wrap around themes of journalism, tabloid journalism, medicine, faith, evidence, science, pseudo-science, etc. Then again, someone more capable might not try to work from this idea at all. Takes someone dumb like me to think up the central conceit. Which I won't give away here, at least not yet.

Three days from now it'll be November. Kingo and or myself is/are/am going to be NaNoWriMoing. Sort of. It's going to be just about impossible for me to find the time. I'm thinking Kingo MIGHT be able to find the time; at least he's more likely to be able to than I am.