Avoiding Insanity: Not So Easy

Don't forget! I'm revealing the cover to my next romantic adventure, Acceptable Risks, next Tuesday, 2/7, at Everybody Needs a Little Romance. Make sure to come check it out!

I'm struggling to find a way to manage my time better. So I remembered an idea from a long-ago time management program that said to touch everything just once. Handle it immediately, instead of setting it aside. So I tried that yesterday.

It was a DISASTER.

It was the first of the month, therefore the deadline for submission of listings for the column I do for a trade journal. Of course, everyone waits until the day of the deadline to send me their stuff. (I tweeted yesterday with the realization that maybe they do it on purpose. Seriously, people, you can send stuff EARLY. You don't have to wait for the deadline to arrive.) I fired off a frustrated reply to an e-mail, then read the next one—and it would have completely nullified the frustration if I'd read it before replying.

So I went along, not looking at my inbox, just the next e-mail. I did proofing jobs for clients, gathered column info, jumped over to websites and back, filed electronic bills, etc. And every few seconds another e-mail clicked into my box. Let me tell you, this way was NOT more efficient.

Usually I read through all my e-mail, saving the ones I have to handle. Then I do all the column stuff at once, all the promo together, all the client work in a cluster. I've been doing it that way for years. I don't know why I decided trying something else would be better. It wasn't.

So that definition of insanity, trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results? It can go the other way, too. Trying something different and expecting the same (or better) results.

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I started watching Revenge recently, because it's been getting raves and people with similar taste to mine have been loving it. I've saved it until late evening, when it's inadvisable for me to try to work because out of two dozen words that should have been changed to UK spellings, I'll only spot one. The problem with that is that I do the "just one more episode" thing and stay up late despite my continuous good intentions.

So I'm really enjoying the show, obviously. I've got 2 more eps to watch before new eps return next week. I'm glad Tyler finally got his. I was feeling pretty violent toward him. I just wish Emily would be nicer to Nolan. I don't get her hostility, when he's the reason she has the resources to do this in the first place, AND she's always making him help her. He might actually be the most interesting character on the show, though none of them are without their twisty depth.

The other problem with liking the show so much is that I'm watching on iTunes on my iPod, and the longer I watch, the worse my eyestrain gets.

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Speaking of eyestrain, I went to the eye doctor today. It's nice to hear that part of my problem is that my sight is overcorrected, another degree past where it was last time, so my contacts are too strong. I'm not going to get new ones, though, because I think I'm doing LASIK.

o.O

I had an opportunity about 9 years ago, when my mom died and I got a small life insurance payout. I got chicken, though—it's less about the blade slicing open my cornea and more about the hydrating brush sweeping over my exposed eyeball—and bought a laptop and paid some bills instead.

But I'm tired of it. I've had seriously poor vision since I was 6. I may not be able to get full correction because of the degree of my nearsightedness, but anything is better. And I'm approaching the need for reading glasses, and I'm not ready to face bifocals or monovision and all that crap.

So I'm ready. And yet... I wear rigid gas permeable contacts, which reshape the cornea, so I knew I'd have to wear my glasses for a little while before the evaluation and the surgery. But SIX WEEKS?! Seriously, I'm going to be pretty lonely by the end. No one will be able to stand looking at me. I look RIDICULOUS in glasses, again because of the degree of correction. No matter what kind of frames I get, the thick lenses distort my face so it looks narrower behind the glasses than it really is. So I look like a funhouse mirror, but in real life.

The there are the two weeks of drops and not rubbing the eye and wearing goggles at night, not to mention the expense, and it almost sounds like it's not worth it. But being able to tell which bobbing heads in the water are my kids' when we're at the beach? Waking up and being able to see across the room? Not having lint and dust killing my eyeballs? Best of all, not having to deal putting in and taking out contacts? Oh, yeah, it will be worth it.

Have any of you had LASIK? How did it go for you?

You're Done Working. No, Seriously. Shut it Down.

I currently have a love-hate relationship with Thursdays. The chiropractor where I work is closed on Thursday, so it's my day "off." Which means most weeks—like today—I sleep in, come downstairs about 8:00 still in my jammies because I've already wasted an hour and a half, and sit at my desk working until my eyes are so strained I can't see the words on the monitor. That's when I take a lunch break, kind of panicking because it's already 1:00 and I'm only halfway through my to-do list. Yesterday's to-do list. After lunch, I work until the kids come home, do laundry and dishes while they ignore my presence, then go back to work until I'm forced to stop.

Tonight it was Maya doing the forcing. So I left 8 things undone (luckily, they weren't "important" things) and shooed her away long enough to write this post. Now, since my husband is watching the Cleveland Browns play some form of professional football (probably the bad form), I'm going upstairs to watch Tuesday's episode of Covert Affairs. It looks Auggie-centric. *sigh* Love Auggie.

Come on, Maya. My lap is all yours.

The 11-11-11 Singularity

I wondered what to call tomorrow, when the dates all line up, and got caught up in this page. Interesting stuff, that all comes down to essentially nothing. :)

But there is one way 11-11-11 is extremely meaningful to people in my life.

I work at a chiropractor, and the three doctors use bubble forms for each patient. You know, like students use for standardized testing? They are SO EXCITED to be able to just draw one line across for the date bubbles. They'll never be that lucky again.

The even better part is that it's a Friday, when we have the most patients. Maximization! :)

Is 11/11/11 going to be special for you in any way?

I will be blogging at Romance Junkies tomorrow, and then very late in the evening, it will be my turn to post the recap/review of Supernatural at Supernatural Sisters. I've been trying SO HARD to avoid spoilers for this episode, but I opened a Google alert for one of the boys and saw the major detail I didn't want to know. *scowl* I shall endeavor to enjoy it anyway. Come over and chat about the show and let us know what you think!

Theme: Stupidity

Here's a tip: If you put the word "Spam" in the title of a blog post, it will attract spam. Who knew spam-bots were that dumb?

Who knew I was? It took me a whole month to figure out that I should just close comments on that post. *eyeroll*

I don't really like the new Blogger interface. Part of it is just familiarity, and I know I'll get used to it. But before, all the important stuff was right there, one click away. Now it's in multiple drop-down menus and you have to hunt for it. That's not an improvement. Not thrilled with quirks in composing posts, either. Very annoyed, actually.

This morning, I woke up at 6:15ish, and thought (with a long mental groan) "Ohhhh, it's Tuesday, and I have to work a double, and train, and...wait. It's only Sunday, AND I don't have to work tomorrow!" So I went back to sleep for two-and-a-half more hours. Nice!

I used to think I had long, intense, vivid, exhausting dreams when I wasn't writing. But I've BEEN writing, nonstop for weeks and weeks. Okay, revising, but isn't that the same thing? Apparently not, or I broke my brain, or the correlation was never valid in the first place. The dreams have gotten more and more vivid lately, and I wake up physically battered and just as tired as when I went to bed.

On Friday, I told our trainee that when I first started working there, I had dreams that they'd changed the information on the fee slip and I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing anymore, or they'd moved everything around in my work area, and I'd spend hours trying to set up one patient while other patients backed up around me.

That was apparently stupid, because that night, I dreamed they'd rearranged the entire area again, in a manner that was not at all beneficial for either the patients or the staff. The difference in this dream was that I wasn't alone. The regular therapy person and the trainee were both back there with me, just as annoyed and concerned. :)

I also dreamed the other night about Stephen King trying to give me a list of his SF-romance series. I know, right?! He's so pushy. ;)

Okay, that's enough randomness today. I am now off to clean/organize my office in an attempt to unclog my brain. What are YOU up to this holiday weekend?

Winners, Whining, and Whiplash

Winners!
Cathy Pegau is generously awarding copies of Rulebreaker to both Misty and Jen B. Congratulations! She'll be in touch to make sure you get your prize.

Whining
This week has been so up and down. Monday started off fine, with the kids off to the first day of school. But then...

• You know how my iPod got stolen and I replaced the battery in my old iPod Photo? Yeah, well, it died. So I burned a few podcasts to CD. That wouldn't last long, as I don't have that many CDs and they're only CD-Rs, but it would gave me a few days of listening during my commute. Right?


• Wrong. The CD player in my car stopped working. Right about the time...
  

• That I hit the road closure on the main road between the town where I live and the town where I work. I was half an hour late looking for a way around, because they didn't set up any detour signs.


• Then my eyes went wonky. I had to keep blinking at my monitor at work to shift my contacts, but they kept sliding out of focus.


• My work plan failed. Interruptions, problems, stuff I couldn't finish because I had to chase down people to ask questions, and help out in other departments because things got so busy.

Between working late, running the kids to and from the doctor (around the road closure) and soccer practice, followed by client work that had to be done, I was wiped out and couldn't write.  

Whiplash
Tuesday was so much better by comparison. First, the CDs worked in my car! We had a decent detour in the morning, and the road was open by evening. Work was much smoother and productive. I had to work the morning shift and the evening shift, so in between I worked on Heavy Metal on my laptop. And Tuesdays are slow, so I got client editing done before I left.

But then I got home, with more soccer-practice-running-around and kids needing me for homework and dinner-making. Then I had half a dozen projects to edit, but lost e-mail access so I couldn't do those until today. Today was a longer day at work than it was supposed to be (due to training a new person), MORE chauffeuring, and more dinner-making. (Why do we have to eat, huh?)

So here I am, nearly 9:00 p.m., with hours of client work ahead of me. I must work on both Heavy Metal and TBWNN tonight, too.

I'm thinking all-nighter.

The Back-from-Vacation Slam

I don't need to explain it to you, right? Most of you have taken a week-long vacation (mine was in Williamsburg last week, so I had a good excuse for the blog silence—for once :) ) and come back to have all of the tension you've relaxed away hit you harder than ever. If you're lucky, it's only ten-fold. If not, it's a hundred.

I've been cranked up to a thousand.

The good news: I finished line edits on Under the Moon and sent those to my editor, and submitted a requested manuscript elsewhere. I have a cover for Behind the Scenes, and should soon get the final JPGs so I can post it.

The challenge: Juggling writing one manuscript and revising another with working extra hours and keeping up with client work. While handling soccer practices, the start of school in a week, and half a dozen appointments for the kids and myself. Head down, keep going until everything is done, on time. Ready set go.

But you're not here to listen to me whine about good things! Deadlines and client work and extra hours are good things! They sure beat rejections and unemployment, for pete's sake.

Unfortunately, deadlines and extra hours leave me precious little to talk about here. *thinks*

Okay, some of the usual fallbacks:

We saw Captain America on vacation. I was so happy the timing worked out so I didn't have to go to the Glee movie with the kids. I like Glee, but I don't need Gleemersion. The kids liked it more than they expected.

I loved Captain America. Well, I found the overly skinny CGI distracting. Ditto with the overly buff CGI. Once they padded Chris up instead of sticking his head on another body, it all worked a lot better. But other than that, I liked the story a lot, and loved Howard Stark and the Red Skull. The ending wasn't what you'd expect or even want if the movie were stand alone, but knowing it's all setup for The Avengers made it okay.

And hey, if you haven't seen it yet, stay after the credits. We were the only ones in the theater who did. I was all, "seriously?" They were obviously not even semi-dedicated fans. All these movies have a quick scene at the end. Maybe they didn't like those. Maybe they thought finding Thor's hammer at the end of Iron Man 2 was lame, or that Loki being alive at the end of Thor wasn't worth the wait. But this one was so worth it. They had a trailer for The Avengers, and OhMyGod, I don't know if I can actually handle watching that. All those superheroes in one room? Tony Stark and Thor and Captain America? *shiver*

Many of my summer shows are done already. I miss Auggie. Like, a lot. But I'm loving Haven, even though, really, all of my enjoyment is wrapped up in the anticipation of something happening between Nathan and Audrey. I just want to see that look on his face when she touches him. And she's so oblivious! It's not just that, of course, the mystery is intriguing, and the Troubles they come up with are clever. This show will hold me into the fall. Especially since I won't have any time for TV!

I can't say I'm liking Torchwood as much as I have in the past. There's way too little emphasis on Torchwood itself, and too much on the horrors of no one dying. I'm two episodes behind, so I don't know if that changes. I hope so. That's a lot of money for a show we don't like.

So that's pretty much all I've got! What about you? Comments on these things, or other entertainment that's been filling your summer? How was your vacation?

Aggravations

I had a mild migraine last night. I'm very grateful it was mild, of course, but the symptoms I did have are worse than the actual pain: vibrating lightning bolt obscuring my vision, head feeling like it's made out of lead crystal (heavy and hard), neck corded with the cables from the Golden Gate Bridge, and general malaise that lasts 24 hours.

THEN I was getting ready for bed, and my contact slipped out of the cleaning clip thingy into the sink. Of course, I always stopper the drain because I have hard contacts that bounce and are very small. Also of course, the stopper lifted on its own just after the contact fell, and bye bye contact.

This morning, in the shower, my brain started to formulate a couple of really awesome query letter paragraphs for Hummingbird. Ten minutes later, when I was dry enough to use the Alphasmart, they'd rearranged themselves into junk.

I had a plan for this afternoon, and determination to get everything on my to-do list done. Necessary errands and a little unexpected chauffeuring got in the way, so I only did half, and now I'm too wiped to do the rest. One of which was the 2010 year in review I told you I'd do.

I'm definitely ready to say goodbye to this decade.

I Love My Schedule, Except When I Don't

Reasons I love my schedule:

1. I don't have to leave for work too early, so the morning's not a stressful mess.

2. The half hour drive to work and home again allows me to keep up with the Patriots and NFL podcasts I listen to.

3. If I go straight home, I have two hours of time before the kids come home, time I can designate for fiction or freelance work.

4. Even after the kids come home, their homework time is still work time for me.

5. I can focus on soccer practices, school stuff, and my kids' needs without guilt.

Reasons I don't love my schedule:

1. I still have to get up at 6:30 because Number One leaves at 6:40. She doesn't need me, but I'm not letting her go without saying goodbye.

2. The half hour one-way commute carves an hour of wasted time out of my day.

3. I rarely get to go straight home. I always have errands to run. Even when I don't, two hours is never enough time to eat lunch, catch up on e-mail, address whatever volunteer stuff I have to do, do any freelance work that came in or was pending, and work on my fiction.

4. "Homework" time is also "tell Mom about my day" time, essential and only precluded by an intense deadline.

5. HA! Guilt will never be banished.

So on paper, my schedule looks perfect. In execution, though, I think I need to do some tweaking. This is the first full week of school, so I've cut myself some slack so far.

That's going to have to end.

Random Bliss

I don't work Thursdays. This makes me so happy I could roll in it (to borrow a line from the last Sookie book :) ).

I got a new mouse recently, because even though I loved the shape of my old one, it dragged, which made my hand cramp. I love my new mouse. I especially love some of the programmability of it. One feature is Smart Move, where the pointer jumps to the default button in a dialogue box. I can't get used to it! I love the feature, but I automatically move the mouse to where I know the box is going to be, which of course moves the cursor OFF the button I want. Ugh.

We finally got Number Two out of her loft bed:

BEFORE

AFTER

What's pictured is the temp setup while waiting for her new mattresses, which were delivered today. They called this morning to schedule delivery between 10-1. Not a bad range of time, but I had to pick up Number Two at school at 12:30 (she was in a Step Up to the Middle School program that apparently was boring and unnecessary). I told the guy this. He said he could wait for 15 minutes if I was gone, but I didn't trust that. I was discussing with Number One whether or not I should let her have them come in and set things up, when the truck pulled up. At 12:17. I made it to the school almost on time—she wasn't the last one to be picked up. So phew. :)

I got something really awesome this morning that I'm jonesing to show you, but can't yet. Soon, I hope. It's the topper on my blissful day, though. :)

Number Two moving her room around inspired Number One to do the same. She wasn't willing to wait until the weekend, so Tuesday I helped her move every piece of furniture in her room. It only took about half an hour, amazingly, because she'd already cleared out the small stuff. She got everything mostly set back up yesterday. So now I have two happy kids.

And I have one happy cat.


BG, on the bottom, loves that we still have half of the loft base (which is going to go in my office) and the bed part in the living room. Number Two kept the dresser part, which was easiest, and I love the shelf part, so we'll have this bed part (including ladder) that is pretty useless without the rest. I have no idea what to do with it.

I just finished watching all of the new incarnation of Doctor Who. I knew I'd like it, but it took me a while to get around to it. Which is good, because I got to watch season 5 all the way through. Thoughts:

1. I like David Tennant best, but it's a slight preference. I loved Christopher Eccleston, too (especially when he got serious), and Matt Smith is awesome (especially when he gets intense). I'm glad he gets another season, because this one felt way too short.

2. Order of preference for companions: Martha, Amy, Rose, Donna. But I have to admit, Martha and Amy are very close, and I like the current combo's chemistry best. I was very surprised to like Donna as much as I did, because I really didn't like her much in the Christmas special.

3. They really know how to do finales! My favorite has to be season 4, when they brought in Sarah and her son, Cardiff Torchwood, Rose, Martha, and Mickey.

4. The whole first few episodes were kind of goofy, especially Mickey, but I loved how his character developed over the seasons. I'm a little confused at his marriage to Martha because she was engaged to Tom, but *shrug*. I like it.

5. I hate that I have to wait until next spring for a new season, but I love the tradition of the Christmas specials so it's a) not quite so long, and b) something to look forward to in the dark days of hiatus winter 2010. :)

Okay. That's enough for now. I'm home, I have an hour and a half before I have to go to the vet, I am actually going to write for a while! :)

That Week Was at Least Two Weeks Long

Reasons (both good and bad) why this week felt like two:

1. Started new job on Monday morning.

2. Number One also started biology lab at school on Monday morning.

3. #2 necessitated Number Two going to a friend's house every morning.

4. Soccer practice for Number Two on Tuesday and Thursday.

5. Multiple editing projects sent to me daily, including a heavy project with a new client.

6. Soccer game in MD on Wednesday night, 3-hour round trip.

7. Editing that had to be done when we got home from the soccer game at 11:30 p.m.

8. Jason Manns in Philly Thursday night, another 3-hour+ round trip, didn't leave the city until close to midnight (albeit earlier than we usually do! :) ).

9. Record heat levels with no reprieve.

10. There really isn't a ten, but I had couldn't leave it at nine.