4/18 Week In Review

4/15

I'll admit two things.  One: I quite enjoy doing the daily blogging again.  And two, I haven't remembered to do it each and every day.

I thought I'd be pretty tired today, after the late night anoche, but it was really only an hour or ninety minutes less sleep than I'd normally get, but I was fine. 

I worked on the audiobook ("Almost there," as Red Leader said), and then, feeling like editing something, I opened up the reading I did of a short story called "The Gold Bug," a couple years ago for a contest Marshal Latham was doing.*  I recorded it a few months ago and never did anything with it, because I felt like it was super weak and lame.  But in editing it this afternoon, I surprised myself by kind of liking it.  

It's written from the point of view of an eleven year old boy who misinterprets something that happens while on a family vacation, and was based on an experience I had on a family trip back in the Eighties, where I saw a car in Redlands, California, then saw that same car the next day in Santa Monica, over an hour away (79 miles, according to Yahoo!).  

I also incorporated a time when somebody put beer bottles behind the back tires of my Uncle John's car, so they would slash the tires when he backed out (a memory that amused me, damn my very eyes).  The story is still not a great one, but I'll happily put it in the next collection as a sort of bonus.

I'm at the library now, and there are eight other patrons up here with me (that I see).  I predict that by the time I leave, it will be just me, as it always is every Friday.

I finished that Joe Hill story "Late Returns" that I was reading, and sent it to Jeff, who always wanted to work in a library.  He loved it . . . and told me he already had a copy.

4/16

Usually, I go to the library on Saturday afternoons, but we were pretty busy today.  There was a big toy trade in the capital that was starting at noon, but people began setting up at nine in the morning (or earlier), and customers started showing up at ten (or earlier).  I heard about this online, not knowing that it was supposed to rain in the afternoon, so they'd moved it to earlier in an attempt to avoid that.

On Facebook, collectors were already posting that they'd bought up all sorts of great junk, so I loaded my two older nephews into the car, and we took off.  The teenaged nephew has his own debit card, which he'd lost for several months, and we stopped off at his bank so he could withdraw some cash.  Only once we were standing in front of the ATM did he reveal that he didn't remember his PIN.

I texted his mother, my mother, and his father, hoping one of them would know the number, but they didn't respond.  So, we left empty-handed, with me pretty frustrated.  Then, just as we were approaching the parking lot sale, my nephew called his mom for the third time, and she picked up.  She knew his PIN, but we had left the bank ten minutes before.  We drove around, looking for another bank, and this time, the boy was able to withdraw plenty of cash.

Still, by the time we did arrive at the toy trade, it was surprisingly busy. There were, at a guess, thirty vendor booths in a parking lot, and there were many, many tempting items for sale, some for bargain prices.  I spent less money than I brought, but still way more than a sane person would spend.  But hey, that's cool.

Ironically, though, my nephew didn't end up buying much of anything, despite us arriving a half hour late to get him money (he bought some Pokemon cards and one action figure, but spent most of the time sitting in the car, looking at his phone and drinking my soda).  There was one guy who was selling Star Wars Black figures for five dollars each (they retailed, until 2022, for twenty bucks), and I bought a handful of them.  Then, when he was packing up, he said I could have all that were left for $25.00.

The wind began to blow, hard and cold, and boxes full of inventory started flying, as well as canopies and displays, so the toy show ended more abruptly than it was supposed to.  My eleven year old nephew bought a few figures, and we found a vendor who had a box of free items we pilfered to bring to the four year old.

I have, over the years, developed a sick fixation with Dewbacks (Star Wars lizards from the first movie).  I ended up buying five more, which I'll probably never do anything with.  

Oh, and speaking of fixations, Big Anklevich recently became obsessed with creating a spaceport display, complete with various droids and aliens, and I thought it would be fun to buy a bunch of R2-D2s and C-3POs, then paint them to look like different robots, so I was pleased to find a couple vendors selling Artoos and Threepios for a buck apiece (one vendor had 'em for fifty cents).  I'm not sure if I'll end up painting all of them, but it would be fun to try.

Because Big has been so interested in getting aliens and spacemen for his display, I should have been a real friend and picked up some toys to send him.  But everything was a bit too hectic, and in my defense, I did buy him the Star Wars toy he's been wanting for years and years now.**

4/17

Today is Sunday, and Easter, and this morning, I gave myself one hour to edit audio, then twenty minutes to blog, setting my phone alarm both times.  And both times, when the alarm went off, I jumped and exclaimed "Jesus!"  I'd like to think it counts as part of the Easter celebration.

I finally got all the files uploaded and approved for my audio collection.  The total was eight hours and two minutes.  Now all I have to do is upload a five minute sample (figure I'll just do part of the story "Who Can It Be Now?"), and it will be ready to submit.  And yes, it was a gigantic pain in the ass, comparable to the time I tried to do sit-ups with a hemorrhoid, but I suppose it's worth it, if just one person buys it.

Okay, eff that.  I hope a lot more than one person buys it.

As I mentioned yesterday, I grabbed some cheap Star Wars figures, and thought I'd start with the easiest project: turn C-3PO into the evil droid Nobot.  

I had an oversized kiddie toy I got for a buck, and I sprayed it over with primer (which looked pretty good, since it turned out the primer was black instead of the usual grey):

But Nobot is a beat-up grey robot, so I painted over it quick and messily, figuring the worse it looked, the better.***

Well, it ended up looking pretty darn bad, but that's okay, since this was just a practice.  The other paintjobs should be more painstaking and detailed.

4/18

I got my audio collection all uploaded to Audible, and we'll see what they say.  Since the last audiobook I put up for sale (in 2020), they now tell you to expect your title to go up for sale within ten days, barring any errors or inconsistencies they flag beforehand.  I remember them saying that they had hired a bunch of new employees during the pandemic, because people were suddenly listening to audiobooks more than ever before, and this is probably a result of that.

I didn't really feel like writing today, but I did get "Balms & Sears" to the 31K mark.  Just think, if I made a penny for every hundred words in the book . . . well, that's more than I'll actually make for it.  But ah well.

*Basically, the contest rules were, Write a short story with the same name as an Edgar Allan Poe story or poem.  I wrote mine, about a gold Volkswagen Beetle, and started on a second story about a pretty girl a lonely guy meets at a college party, named Anabelle Lee.  Never finished that second one, though (maybe one day Marshal will do the contest again and I will write it--it's the sort of story you could write from start to finish in a single sitting).

**Yes, it was that disgusting toy where it's Jar Jar's mouth, and there's a lollypop in the shape of his tongue that little kids were supposed to suck on.  They wouldn't even allow that thing at the Hustler store on Sunset Boulevard (believe me, I looked).

***I was just going to use it for a quick shot in a video, right?