Trick or Treat
Happy Halloween all.
The twelve hour NaNo countdown begins. I'm as eager to start typing as that kitty is to grab that candy and I'm as antsy about being slapped back by my candy dispenser ie my muses. Such teases they are at times.
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teh read-a-thon b over 2 daiz but ebrting still b topsee turvee |
Josh and Emily Dickens of Vancourver, Washington were married on September 12 and went to Hawaii for their honeymoon. They returned about a week ago. This past Sunday they were on their way to Emily's parent's home near Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula to celebrate her mother's birthday when another vehicle crossed the center line and...
The dr.s (there were a bout 10 of them on the team the day they life-flighted her to Harborview in Seattle. Most of them felt that she couldn't be saved but one, Dr. Joseph, said lets give her a fighting chance. Her internal injuries were very severe. There was a leaking vein to her vena cava that had been repaired and then leaked again somewhere else. Her heart stopped on the operating table during the night 2 times.
They kept her open in case they had to do more surgery but she remained stable so they were going to close her up but her chest is still too swollen so we are PRAYING that she doesn't develop any infections and the swelling will go down.
Josh has a broken nose and the bones around one eye are shattered, the eye is ok but there is a thin bone behind the eye that is broke that causes him to have double vision when he looks up. They have had three specialists look at it. They have a 14 day window to decide to do surgery to fix. It may be permanent. Also he has a deflated lung which is getting better but is having a hard time due to what ever had to be done when he was a premie.
The results of the eye exam today were great and I was given the go ahead to order new lenses which we will do on Friday (payday) and best news of all: it should only take four working days before they are ready so I have an excellent chance of having them in time for Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon on the 24th.
When I sat down here after dinner and dishes I was pleased at the early start I was getting, at how ambitious and energetic I still felt even after the stress and energy expended today to get ready for and then go to my third post-op eye exam. I was planning to prepare a book review for one of the books I had finished and which had to go back to the library this morning. I'd spent last night's session taking notes on two of those books and know that if I'm going to prepare a review without the book beside me it had better be within the next 20-50 hours or so for the longer I wait the less reliable my memory will be.
I'd spent the hour of kitchen clean-up thinking about and composing sentences and paragraphs and outlines in my head. I was eager to proceed. I have too many barely begun book reviews in my files as is, sitting there waiting for me to re-order the books and when they wait too long the chances are I'll have to practically re-read the book. And they often wait and wait and wait because my library card is full to bursting most of the time with 40-60 items checked out and 20-40 lined up in my requests queues.
So I was motivated and eager and had the energy and my eyes weren't fatigued (partly because I hadn't already spent hours and hours reading because of the eye doctor appointment) so I opened a draft in Blogger. But then decided to first finish dealing with my email inbox which project had been interrupted when I was called to dinner. This involved opening a PDF file linked in one email. Which took endless minutes to open and then crashed the browser. After which I was sent to a Microsoft error report page which recommended I download the latest version of Adobe which had addressed the bug that caused the crash.
During the download I was informed that I needed to give Firefox permission to install add-ons from the Adobe site and that took me a good fifteen minutes to figure out how to do. And just as I got the website added to the permissions list the Adobe program proper alerted me that it had a download ready to install. I thought it was the same one I thought I'd begun from the Microsoft error report page but I'd not looked at the edition numbers closely enough as the download the Adobe program was asking to install was 8 point something while the one recommended by the error report was 9 point something but I didn't realize this until after clicking install.
So I waited patiently through the install of 8 point something, following its directions which included closing all open PDF files and all Adobe windows other than the download/install window which meant I had to close Firefox with all tabs including email, blogger post draft and several others relating to tasks I had lined up for this work session.
Then when the install was complete I was informed that there was another update available (9) and highly recommended so I started the download (over 40 MB) and waited patiently for it to complete and then install.
After the install I was informed that Adobe need to restart my system to complete the install. I do feel lucky that it at least asked first. Because that gave me a chance to close the other programs I had open properly. Especially WhizFolder which when not closed by its protocol will not remember which windows (files) were open and their positions on the desktop and when that happens it can take me up to 30 minutes to recreate my preferred arrangement.
And then there was iTunes which had a video podcast on pause which if I had not been able to mark it as new before closing the program might have been auto-deleted during the shutdown or reloading of the program.
Luckily I didn't have a Free Cell game in progress so I could just close that along with Live Messenger and the Onscreen Keyboard which I keep up sometimes for the convenience of being able to mouse keystrokes when editing or surfing or using keyboard shortcuts.
So. Once I had all programs closed properly I clicked 'restart' on the download dialog that I'd left sitting there and waited patiently through the shutdown and then waited patiently through the reloading of my desktop. And by the time I was free to open Whiz (where the notes for the reviews are stored) and the browser again I'd lost 90 minutes and all my oomph. I heard the echoes of a wailed 'Arrrggh!!!' in my head which reminded me of the picture I'd recently seen on art.com (click the pic to see its catalog page) and I decided to go with a flat out whine post for tonight.
Twenty days to GO.
Actually, as I write this it is nineteen and one-twelfth days. But I've been thinking 'twenty days' all day.
50K words of fiction in 30 days. I'm champing at the bit. Ever since I decided to do something in my FOS storyworld instead of start from scratch with a new one I stopped stressing. There is plenty of room among the cast of more than a dozen major characters and on the timeline of some 120 years for me to find a fresh story to focus on.
I finally headed over to the NaNoWriMo site to make my participation for this year official but my profile page already shows me as an official participant. I don't remember doing anything specific to make it so but I might have. Or maybe they are assuming it because I've participated every year since 2004.
At any rate, I picked up my web badge while I was there. I'll get around to sticking the small version on my side bar soon I hope. Or maybe I'll wait until I get my new prescription glasses before I mess with the side bar code. I'm still limiting use of the laptop for close reading as the contortions I have to put my neck through to see through the bifocal lenses cause significant discomfort and the right lens isn't ideal anyway since it was made for a near-sighted, asitgmatic, eye with a cataract just encroaching upon the center visual field. Now, post-op, I'm no longer near-sighted and the cataract is gone. Only a mild astigmatism remains. But my ideal range is 4-6 feet. But not for regular size fonts. Only headlines and such.
I can work with very large fonts--14 to 20 depending on the font--and will do so for NaNo if my new glasses haven't arrived yet. But I'm still holding out hope. I go in for my third post-op exam tomorrow afternoon. The doctor will decide then if the eye has settled down enough to warrant prescribing the new lens. No sense in doing so too soon as my vision could continue to change and my insurance won't cover a second prescription inside a year's time. So this patient must be patient.
At approximately 4:30 a.m. PDT tomorrow morning NASA's LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite)
mission will conclude with the dramatic impact into Cabeus crater near the moon’s south pole of first, the LCROSS Centaur upper stage rocket followed in four minutes with that of the LCROSS Shepherding Spacecraft.
The purpose of this exercise is to check for the possible existence of water which, if it exists and in enough quantity, would ease the logistics of establishing a human occupied base on the moon. Which really turns the crank of this veteran Trekker and avid consumer of Science Fiction stories.
NASA TV will be broadcasting the show live and it can be viewed online as well.
I'm fairly sure I'll be staying up to watch since, as I wrap this up, it's just under five hours away. I've been listening to NASA TV online as I worked which made putting this post together slower since I kept ducking over to the other tab to check out the video.
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