Tuesday Blues

I'm not actually blue today, just a little tired. I was up late last night, mostly writing. I wrote somewhere between 1200 and 1400 words, which is a good session, but then I had to delete about 2000 words I'd previously written, so the overall wordcount on the story went down. I count it as progress anyway, because before I did that, the characters were headed somewhere completely Wrong and I had no idea how to drag them back on track. So the answer turned out to be backing up to before they made the wrong turn in the first place and trying a different approach.

So I'm feeling good about that and about the story in general, and I think I'm still on track to have it finished by the end of the month, as long as I remain diligent.

But then I sat up a bit longer to leave comments on a couple of messageboards, and when I went down to shut off my computer, I realized I'd left in the middle of a game, so I finished that out. And then I had to check my RSS feeds, and...

By the time I was done and ready to go to bed, it was closing in on 11:30. And then the damn cat "lost" us. (Every night when we go to bed, he sits downstairs, bewildered and forlorn and lonely, crying, until we coax him up the stairs and into our room. Every. Night. You'd think he'd eventually form a connection, but no.)

And of course Alex woke me up at 5:57 to tell me he needed a new pullup. Sigh. I'm honestly wondering if we should just move him to underpants at night and brace ourselves for a couple weeks of washing sheets on a daily basis.

So. Tired, but not actually blue. The post title is just because I like rhymes.

***

Kid anecdote: Alex and I were standing in line for something at Busch Gardens (probably the Elmo ride) and I was standing on one foot, with the other out in front of me a little ways -- you know, like you do when you're in a long line. And I looked down and realized that Alex was standing in exactly the same position. He wasn't looking -- his attention was all on Elmo, or a bush, or another kid, or... something else. So I switched feet, just to be silly.


A bit later, he looked down, and hurriedly switched his own feet. So I waited, then switched again.

This time, Alex glanced up at me and grinned as he matched my stance again.

The game held us for several minutes, and at odd moments again throughout the afternoon.

***

I'm in need of some tech refresh. The external hard drive I'm using for backups is too full to continue using it for backups, so I need a new one. I'm thinking of getting a hot-swappable drive dock or a mini-RAID, just to make it easier to expand the next time I fill up a hard drive. But I should probably get on that sooner rather than later -- the system warned me this morning that it's been over 2 months since my last backup, which means if I have a hard drive failure, I'm losing all my Cancun pictures that aren't uploaded to Flickr.

Speaking of hard drive failure, my computer is well out of warranty and beginning to slow down and get chunky on me. (I have a backup drive at all because a while back, my hard drive glitched -- it came back with only minor losses, but it was a nervewracking experience.) So I'm probably looking at a new laptop by the end of the year.

(Note to Matt: I'm pretty sure neither of these are covered by either the birthday or Christmas No Buy Zone.)

I'm in dire need of a system re-org, though, so I'm considering how best to go about that. Before I get the new computer, and then let the re-org copy over when I sync the new machine? Or only sync a few select things (e.g., music and photos) and move the rest by hand, reorganizing as I go? It's a dilemma.