October Sweeps - Day 263

I know I've said this before, but I keep talking to people who love the fall, and who love the winter, and one who loves all the seasons and everything in the world except me.  And I have tried, I've tried to have a better attitude about the changing of the seasons and the promise of winter.  My mom complains about it just as much if not more than I do, and I wonder if that irritated my dad.  Seems like it would have . . . but everything irritated my dad.

Maybe I shouldn't be so thrilled I haven't lost my hair yet.

The thing is, I hate to be cold.  And I hate to be reminded that soon, the snows will come and I won't be able to come up here--one of literally three things I look forward to each week (or four if you count my mad obsession with going running, which always sucks for the first half mile anyway, and doesn't become enjoyable until I've suffered through that)--and the roads will get dangerous, and I'll have to scrape my windshield before I go somewhere, and the bastards will start playing Christmas music again.

November is usually pretty grim, but at least we always had Thanksgiving and Black Friday to look forward to.  Now, it seems unlikely I'll participate in any floods of consumers waiting outside Target or Best Buy or Walmart (a couple of years ago, I went the day before Thanksgiving, and they had their Black Friday deals out, but you couldn't buy them, so I took two and hid them in the bicycle department, so I could come on Black Friday and there would still be two there for me to snag), and my mom just told me we're not doing a big get-together for Thanksgiving this year, but it'll just be like a regular Sunday dinner.

And that's too bad.  I always enjoy getting together with my cousin and his family, even though he has to alternate between his side and his wife's side of the family each year, but because of COVID fears, we're not doing that in 2020.  And who knows, maybe the prognosticators will be right, and the virus will be so bad this winter that nobody would want to get together.

Oh, so I was complaining about the onset of winter.  Yeah, I am trying to be more positive, and know that some of my sadness about the unpleasant half of the year is just psychological.  When it starts getting dark at four and you can't just take the trash out in your bare feet or there's that smoggy smell in the air when the clouds roll and we get what they call an inversion here . . . well, it's hard for me to see that as anything but a negative.  

But I'm going to try not to be sad about winter this year.  I'm going to try to keep the spirit of summer within my soul, and keep exercising, keep doing outdoors things, and make it through with the strength to bear whatever comes my way.  

This is the second time I'm writing this blog post, so forgive me if it's not all that eloquent.

At one point, I was finishing the "Delusions of Grandeur" episode for this month, saving it, but everything had gotten unforgivably sluggish.  Like you'd press the Save or Open button and nothing would happen, and you'd press it three more times, then all at once it would try to open four or five times and the laptop would make an angry sound.

The music I was listening to started to lag too, and my Task Manager said my disc usage was at 100% (whereas normally, it's between 1 and 3%, sometimes right at zero).  I tried closing a couple of open files, but they didn't want to close, and then suddenly, nothing happened at all.  The music stopped, the mouse wouldn't move, nothing.

And a minute later, the laptop made an error beep, and the beep just kept going.  And going.  And going.  It was a steady hum that I knew was bad, but I figured the CPU would catch up and fix, so I went upstairs to do sit-ups, hearing the beep continue as the seconds became minutes. 

I was super hesitant to restart my computer, because I didn't want to lose all the writing I had done today--not that it was a ton, but it was close enough to "the end" on the third Lara/Holcomb story that I could, if I continued for but ten minutes or so from that point, be done with it.

Well, after a few minutes of the laptop still frozen, still bugging, I went ahead and restarted.  Just like with human beings, restarting can solve a lot of problems.  And when everything booted back up, I re-opened my text file with baited breath . . .

. . . and found nothing missing whatsoever.  I must have saved it the last time I worked on it, about ninety minutes ago.

However, the blog post I was writing about coming to the cabin again, getting older, and wishing I could appreciate the changing of the seasons like certain people do was completely wiped out.

A bit irritating, but not that big a deal.

Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In October: 3287

Push-ups Today: 75
Push-ups In October: 1358

Before I left, I re-recorded Chapter 5 (maybe I blogged about this already).  The original file (with the crappy sound) was 20:33, and the new recording (with better sound) was 21:44.  I'll edit it now, and it'll be sad how much shorter the finished chapter will be.  But I'm trying to get in good, semi-professional shape, and that's what I have to do.  I did discover one reference to the main character as "Lara" once in Chapter 5, instead of Brielle, and I know I wouldn't have caught that mistake the first time through.

8:37, Chapter 5 ended up being, after the editing.  Hmm.

Words Today: 1299
Words In October: 18,200

*I checked, and it's about sixteen thousand words, which is fine.  I feel like I might have skipped writing the scene where Lara first meets cute with Scott, the boyfriend character, so I'm not technically finished (plus, I have to plug in the scenes from my gmail document that I work on at the library), but I imagine when it's done it's about twenty thousand words.  And that feels, if not too long, then just about right.