July Sweeps - Day 152

Happy first of July, kids!

I was up pretty late last night, for how tired I was (I started dozing around eleven, while we were watching a movie, but drank an extra Cherry Coke to wake up), then I forced myself to stay up until after three to get my stuff packed for the next morning.

At seven-fifteen this morning, the workers arrived and started pounding on the roof above my head.  It was the kind of pounding you do when you're trying to break down a door, rather than get someone to open it for you.  It was hellish, but hey, mornings always are.

So I got up, finished up my work (well ahead of time), packed up my suitcase (which was already packed from two weeks ago, so that's easy), and went to the cabin.  I nearly got out the door before my alarm went off to wake me up.

It's a new month, so I have this tradition of setting some goals, and telling my Patreon supporters about them, then looking back on last month's goals and seeing how well/poorly I did.  It amazes me how fast the months go by (you too?), and there will be projects I feel like I just worked on, that I haven't touched since April or March.  In July, I will continue to write everyday, but I'm not even going to try for a thousand words a day anymore.  If I get them, great, if not, no tears will be shed.  I HAVE to get "Three-Time Visitor" published, though, and then I'll move on to one of the two big projects that were part of my goal for the year.

I'm also going to exercise every day, and that has been quite easy for me lately.  I did a pretty impressive amount of sit-ups in June, and instead of raising my goal to an unreachable number, I'm setting the goal for 3333 sit-ups in July (my goal for June was 3000).

In July, I'm going to finish either "Podcatcher" or the Halloween decoration story . . . or preferably both.*

But as far as writing goes, I was not very productive.  I was just too tired, I fear, and one of the first things I did after unloading the car was to lay down on the couch . . . and then, hours evaporated.  I had recorded a podcast during the drive up, and I spent a couple of hours editing it, and I really needed my sleep, because there were bits of me just drifting off while recording behind the wheel, then saying, "Oh, I think I might have been sleeping just now.  Whoops."

Even now, I'm tempted to get another nap in, which is probably terrible, but what can you do?

Gosh, the mountains are pretty right now.  It was about sixty-five degrees on Wednesday, and seventy-two the next day, and everything is green and alive . . . although the waterline at the lake is already way below where it was in August last year.

Something I thought would be fun to do last time I went to the cabin was make a checklist of activities, and then mark them off each time I did them.  For example, I put stuff like Write, Edit, Sleep, Blog, Record, Read, and Sit-ups on the list, and while it's not going to entertain you to hear that I did Sit-ups the most (at 9 sessions) and Read the least (at 3 sessions), it was fun to see the results.

One of my traditions (well, three times in a row now) has been to go to the lake during the magic hour and record myself singing a song.  It went spectacularly well the first time, was stunningly beautiful the second, and I forgot the words on a third song (so I did it again the next week, but the two takes may not edit together).  This time, I went out in the muddy grass that had been completely submerged when I was there two weeks ago, and thought I'd found an interesting angle.

However, there were two people in a boat out on the lake fishing, and I worried that they would start making noise/fun of me.  They didn't say a word, but in the middle of my song, a white truck pulled up right alongside the water, and the two people inside it (who I fully believe were there to watch the sun set and make out, but when they saw some dorky skinnyfat guy singing at the water's edge, decided to watch him instead, culminating in a spectacular break-up).  It made me nervous, and I wasn't willing to sing quite as hard as I had the last two times I was out there (three, technically).

I only did the one take**, because it's a song I've known all the words to since 1991, and then took my tripod up on the dam again to take some still pictures.  I love the sunset, and I love taking pictures, and just today (7-2), along the side of the road, I saw some dude taking photos of a pretty young thing
as the sun was setting.  That guy's living the dream, kids.

I managed to include myself in a picture or two, and like noticing how bad my hair was two weeks ago (not that I got it cut), I discovered just how awful the back of my pants looked when I saw the picture.  Now, it could well be that I damaged my butt in a threshing machine accident when I was younger (and have no memory of it), or it could be time to throw out that pair of pants and start wearing a new one.

There was an unbelievable number of fish jumping as I recorded and took pictures.  You can see the ripples of one in this pic taken of the dam (see how the rocks are all piled up on the right there?):

And in this one I took of the little boat in the water, you can actually see three splashes in a row.

I also took a couple of the sun going down, but it wasn't spectacular or anything.  Except it is the sun, and that's pretty spectacular.

I finally found a picture of me I can look at without pain!

I took two pictures in a row, one with the sun in the distance and one with me in front of the sun.  I vaguely remembered how to turn them into an animated gif, though the image of me appearing and disappearing wasn't as neat as I wanted it to be (too seizure-inducing).

But then I remembered that you could make one image fade into the next, so I did that, and now . . .

"Erased . . . from existence!"

Much better.

In looking over my June Goals, the only didn't achieve were publishing "Three Time Visitor" and finishing writing "Podcatcher."  But the rest I managed well (including the 3000 sit-ups I had vowed to do), and hey, there's always next week.

Sit-ups Today: 115

Words Today: 511 (which, creepily, is a reverse of the sit-up number).

*Of course, if these goals interest you and you'd like to hear me talk about them, along with meandering stories, feel more-than-free to support me on Patreon AT THIS LINK.  It's greatly appreciated.

**This was not at all wise, for part of the song includes my head going out of frame, since I didn't rewatch it to make sure everything was okay.