Quote of the Moment

"It's never wrong to hope, Byx," said my mother. "Unless the truth says otherwise."
- from Endling #1: The Last, by Katherine Applegate

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Thanksgiving Interlude with Frosted Mushroom

Just a quick American Turkey Day post hoping everyone had a good holiday.

For the curious:

- Yes, as the sidebar mentions, I "won" NaNoWriMo again. That's my fifth official win out of five tries. I had a secondary project I wanted to work on for the rest of the month, but other things keep interfering, so another two-story year isn't happening.
- Yes, I finally signed up for official health care. Bottom of the barrel glorified Medicaid, but it's better than nothing. (Especially considering that the last time I tried for Medicaid I was denied.) At least I'm legal, now.
- And, yes, I did finally finish that project for relatives, but still haven't started my ornaments because they want another project along the same lines. (Pay projects always trump personal.) I want the thing done by December 1. Or next Tuesday.
-The above photo was taken a couple of weeks ago. I'd never seen a frost-encrusted mushroom before.

Let the holiday season officially commence!

Thursday, November 07, 2013

The November Procrastination Post

Just thought I'd check in while waiting for the disruption of returning relatives to break my concentration. (This is why I'm not working on my NaNoWriMo novel at the moment - it's hard immersing in my inner world of words when I'm expecting an interruption. That's not the same thing as procrastination, no matter what the post title says.)

My sister's adventures in health care continue. Apparently, nobody talks to anyone else in this outfit, and they barely communicate with her. She's been given three contradictory plans by two different "professionals." (Yes, math whizzes, that means that one person handed her two incompatible outlines for where to go from here.) And I still think she's having that pain in her side that made her seek out help to begin with; nobody seems to care anymore, so she's given up mentioning it. Today, she's seeing someone else - I'm losing track of who - for no apparent reason other than that they said to do so. I'd say they're racking up referral fees, but she's still on the hospital's charity program. My current suspicion is that it's some sort of peculiar game being played by bored health care professionals, using patients as pieces. "Ah, I see you've referred Patient X to me again, Doctor Smith. Interesting strategy. But you didn't count on me sending you Patient Y via radiology. Check."

This makes me reluctant to sign up for health care myself. The state website's supposed to be easy to use and fairly reliable (unlike the national site), but it's hard to shake the feeling that I'll find myself in a similar game of health care ping-pong should I venture into a doctor's office. I know I have to do it, though, so I've told myself I'll get to it this weekend.

We still remain nearly petless. (There's Malarkey, but he's not the same as a cat. Or even a dog.) Various household and yard projects need completing before we can contemplate rebuilding the animal population, and November's soggy weather has effectively delayed most of those until spring.

Work continues to be persistently and willfully worklike, save an unusual level of turnover as a number of people head to greener pastures... one with barely a day's notice, according to what I've heard. We're also having various issues with machinery and software. It's job security.

I have various projects in various stages of completion languishing in my workshed. My holiday ornaments need attention, and I have a side project that I need to figure out how to finish. (They're for a relative, of course, so I don't have the option of sticking them in a drawer and forgetting about them.) I need some time to fool with them, and thus far I haven't managed to find it. I want them done by Turkey Day at the latest, though, so I have to hustle.

And, of course, November means National Novel Writing Month, or 50,000 words of raw rough draftage. (I'm aware that doesn't even come close to making sense. I'm also aware that noboby aside from myself and, maybe, my family reads this thing. So I'll just apologize to any poor fool who happens by and keep rambling.) I'm off to a decent start, if I do say so myself, even if I only have the vaguest idea of where I'm going with this thing. One of these days, I need to learn how to sit down and do a proper outline before diving into a draft. All this flailing around in the dark, groping blindly for a story thread that doesn't disintegrate after a chapter or two, wastes a lot of time and word count. But danged if it isn't fun!

I suppose I've procrastinated about as much as I can procrastinate. (Yes, I recall my earlier premise that this wasn't a procrastination post. I've decided to change the storyline. It's NaNoWriMo month, which makes anything I write a first draft, so I can get away with inconsistencies. Or maybe I'm such a lousy liar I can't even convince myself I'm not procrastinating by writing this.) It's time to wander off and do Something Else with my evening.