Thursday, February 02, 2017

Writing: February 1st and 2nd

Okay, the first two days of the month have passed, and I've been fine with my goal of writing everyday.  The first was a little less productive than the second, but since I actually started writing everyday a week ago (to get myself going), it shouldn't be impossible to keep this up.

2/1
Words Written: 173
Total Words: 173

Tracking this stuff is hard because I've gone back to my trusty old notebook, and I have to physically count the words on the page.*


The second day was much better.  I took my notebook to lunch with me after dropping my nephew at his school, and found Taco Bell absolutely crawling with high school students.  Crawling, as in "Oh my dear god, Edith, we HAVE to call an exterminator right now!  Yes, I know it's one in the morning."  So, instead of standing in a line for half an hour with a bunch of snorting, texting, laughing, grab-assing teenagers, I went to a table in the corner (the only not-filthy one), and sat down to write until all of them ordered, ate, and went back to school.**

2/2
Words Written: 771
Total Words: 944

Well, that was fewer than I would've guessed.  But I'm still going.

Rish

*Writing on the laptop is much more efficient, since I can just drop each day's work into a Word Counter, but the laptop is a) insanely heavy (approximately the size of Kanye West's ego) and b) the total battery charge length has gone down from seven to nine minutes in the summer to . . . wait for it . . . between three and four minutes a charge.  Yeah, in the time it takes the laptop to power on, the charge drops down to fifty percent.
Oh, the many times I have considered throwing it across the room and/or kicking it into oblivion (yes, just like I did my last laptop).  But I always stop myself, knowing that a great deal of my writing, audiobooks, and podcasting only exist on that hard drive and would be gone forever if I were to give in to my rage (just like the stuff that was lost on my last laptop).  If only there were some way I could back up all that data . . . oh, the fun I'd have.

**Funny thing is, when I finally stood up to order my own food, someone spied my somewhat-clean table, and immediately took it.

2 comments:

AspiR said...

There are ways to transfer your files. They may not be fast or easy, but if you're considering getting a new laptop it would probably be worth your while. I recently upgraded and transferred my files, but I used a flash drive and I'm going to guess the amount of data you want to transfer is more than what I had to deal with. I'm not an expert or anything, but I know you can use flash drives, external harddrives, and I'm fairly sure there are some cloud-based solutions nowadays. If you're familiar with compressing files, this could also make the transfer easier.

Now if weight isn't enough of a problem to buy a new laptop outright (considering Kanye West's ego is so massive it threatens to manifest in the physical world, at which point its density will surely result in a black hole, I'd say get a new laptop), you could just replace the battery. This would cost less and solve the battery problem, which seems the greater of the two.

Just something to think about.

Rish Outfield said...

If it were that easy, it'd have been solved by now. I bought two new batteries for the craptop, and neither of them worked; it just acted as though no battery were attached. So I tossed the first one in the trash, called it a name, and ordered another one. When the second one arrived and had the exact same result, I realized that it was the laptop, not the battery that was faulty, and whoops, I had already thrown out the other battery.

I thought about buying a third/fourth one, but I figured that was just throwing good money after bad, so I just ended up buying a new laptop. I used it once, but it didn't have any of the files I needed on it, had no DVD drive, and the interface was unfamiliar to me, so it just sits, squat and mute, on top of my printer . . . unused, unloved, unremembered.