Drunken Owls and Other Delights

Sunday afternoon, a bit quieter and slower in speed today. Caught up with pretty much all our errands and whatnot, and trying not to turn this afternoon into a frenzied MUST DO EVERYTHING NOW. So rarely do I get to relax and let the afternoon drift by.

So a extending a bit from yesterday, more on the JoncWorld front:

--Still working on preparing the Angry Robot submission. I'm in a quandary in that they ask for the first five chapters. I have no problem with that--in fact, it works out nicely, because the first mini-arc of Book I is exactly five chapters long. The problem is that these chapters are a bit long. In their FAQ they suggest that if the chapters are long, "to send in the first 10,000 words or so." Which would end it somewhere a bit around Chapter 3. I'd do that, but it would kind of be like introducing this great passage and stopping it just after it crests--it's a weird place to stop, thematically. So my question is...should I send in the first five chapters anyway (it comes to just over 20,000 words), or stick with the 10,000 words? Hmm.

--As mentioned yesterday, we got rid of Dish Network, for a few reasons. The major one was that we somehow lost connection in the last week or so of October, and haven't been able to get service since then. Apparently since we live in an apartment using a shared dish, it's considered a "commercial" setup and Dish would need to farm someone out to our place to check it out, on our dime. The original service--some guy on Geary with a very bad sense of customer service--went out of business some time ago and neglected to tell anyone, including Dish, so they got someone (I think from San Jose) to come over, for a ridiculous price. He basically looked at the wires, saw nothing wrong, and suggested we get a new box--again, on our dime. New box comes, and guess what? No service! Eff that, we say, and after three years we got rid of Dish.

Suffice it to say, the service itself was pretty good--their channel selection is quite a step up from Comcast here in town--but the customer service on the other hand was laughable. We also came to the conclusion that with all the stations we received on Dish, we only watched probably about 15-20% of them, including the Sirius music channels. In the end that's a good $75 a month we don't need to spend anymore, and we have other visual entertainment available. We're looking into a separate Sirius Radio setup at this time.

To end this comedy of errors, we drove over to Best Buy yesterday and bought ourselves a TV antenna, hooked it up, and we are now getting free local TV like the good Socialists that we are! :)

--Spare Oom is slowly but surely getting cleaner and more straightened out as we speak. We had a number of things we were getting rid of which I finally dropped off at Goodwill (or sold on eBay), and hopefully within the next few weeks I can hop over to Berkeley and drop off the old spinner we've been trying to sell. I also have two boxes of cds that I need to pare down and/or rebox, and sell the unwanted titles to Amoeba. I'm hoping sometime in the next few months I'll be able to straighten out the storage boxes next to my desk and scan the various papers and whatnot that are on the shelf. Lastly, we will most likely be doing another book purge in the future. Not sure when, but we'll definitely let you know if and when it happens, as those always go down well.

--Oops! I seem to have forgotten to work on the next Blogging the Beatles post. Oh well...I'm sure I'll have time this coming weekend to catch up.


Other than that, it's been a quiet and relaxing weekend (barring one minor embarrassing hiccup, but nothing worth reporting), and I'm quite happy about that. It's Thanksgiving week, which means that work is going to be sucktastic with all the clients trying to get last minute files through before the long weekend (why yes, I will be working on Friday and doing jack, why do you ask?). And HOLY CRAP IT'LL BE DECEMBER HOW THE HELL DID THAT HAPPEN.

Hope everyone else had a good weekend! Happy Turkey Day! :)

[Safe for work, but not for those bothered by constant flashes and quick edits]

I'd be very interested to see someone do a video installation with today's media like EBN used to back in the early 90s...

My fingers are now ice-cold due to picking up iced coffee down the street at Cafe Francisco! But other than that, it's been a nice day...slept in this morning, waking up at 8am, didn't have the local yahoos making much noise last night. Been watching random stuff on the TV (currently have Discovery's Deadliest Catch marathon going on as background noise) while I do some writing and Emm does some spinning.

Which reminds me--emmalyon should be getting this spinning wheel via UPS within the next day or so. We found a sweet deal on Etsy for one (thanks to emilytheslayer's pointing it out), and this was the original wheel we wanted to get but passed on due to the cost. We came to an agreement that if she gets the Joy wheel, I get to order the Beatles remastered cds. Sounds fair to me! :p

ALSO: I will have it known that for Easter candy this year, as of now I have had exactly one Peep, and that's it.

Granted, we'll most likely raid the candy bins at Walgreen's tomorrow for whatever's on sale... ;)

Hope everyone's having a good Easter! :)

...that when I see this commercial...



...I think of this?

I am still working on Chapter 1 of Love Like Blood. I wish I was a bit further on, but Ken Burns' documentary The War, which has been playing on PBS all this week and continues next week, is distracting me. I'm not whining, though...the doc itself has me thinking about various things about the IWN. And besides, it's not often that I go out of my way to watch stuff on TV!

Anyway, I should say that I find it quite interesting just how much filling-in of stuff is being done. Perhaps delaying the rewrite was a good thing, as I feel sufficiently detached from the novel that instead of just seeing the story itself or its major faults, I'm simply going to the spots that need fixing and it's working a lot better. And Mo's suggestion of changing tense from present to past is opening up all sorts of avenues I hadn't thought of. w000t!

I will say I will most likely not be doing much work this evening, as 7pm brings the repeat of the Journeyman pilot, followed by another episode of The War. I'll keep the text open, though, on the offchance that inspiration strikes. ;)


EDIT: No doc on tonight! Which means two things--I can get some work done, and I can catch up on bedtime reading too! I WIN! :p Oh, and also, thumbs up on Journeyman--my Snooty-Mister-Continuity-Geek side found very few geographic errors, and the story was quite enjoyable!