ellenmillion | Entries tagged with rants

To begin with, I'm not a big fan of pumpkins. (What they call pumpkin spice, yes, but I feel like apple cider spice got unfairly scooped in advertising when it came to naming flavors...) So every year, my daughter makes puppy eyes at me asking about getting a pumpkin to carve, and every year, I reluctantly let her do it, and every year, I'm finding pumpkin seeds stuck down with pumpkin goo to my floor and furniture for a week after the great pumpkin carving massacre.

I can see the appeal of Jack-O-Lanterns, though; it's exciting to have angry vegetables with fire in them.

But this is the last year we are doing living pumpkins, and here's why:

We bought this year's pumpkin through a fundraiser at my daughter's school. It had a little rotten spot that we carved out as part of the design. In retrospect, I should have been more wary of this pumpkin.

Because we did not get a pumpkin.

We got an X-files case.( Like X-files, it gets gross... )

Crossposts: https://ellenmillion.livejournal.com/1665554.html

So, I've spent all of July without a laptop, until just yesterday, when I got a shiny new installation of Windows and my precious, precious machine back with all its data. I've been reinstalling ALL THE THINGS. (And I keep adding more to my list of things I regularly use. Good grief.)

Not having a laptop has made for an insanely productive writing schedule, though. Using my iPad, I was able to write 22,000 words in the first ten days of the month. I finished Fire Control, wrote 10,000 words on a short story called Better Half in three days, got Scarlet and the Christmas Kittens nearly finished, and even added a dribble to Girl Nest Door, which I think I finally unblocked on and hope to finish next week.

I'm getting a late start on the month, but here are my goals.

o 10 portraits. (I had originally hoped for 15, but... things.) 1/10
o Finish GND
o Logo revisions (ASAP)
o Shifting Sands Box set 2
o 1 print book for proofs
o Finish Scarlet and the Christmas Kittens (it's really close!)
o fulfill #junicorn - and drum up more sales if possible
o Sketch Fest #100
o Patreon rewards (asap)
o TNMT edits (Deadline: July 25)
o Finish 1 shifter coloring page
o 1 thing for Torn World (not picky what it is)

Crossposts: https://ellenmillion.livejournal.com/1644898.html

On Wednesday, the nice FedEx man brought me a VERY VERY shiny new laptop, and I've been installing all my programs (and uninstalling all the bloat - which tbh, was less than I expected) and trying to get back on track with writing and such.

My next not-a-book is up to 10K, and has actual plot and character development. Go me! (I did want to have about twice that by now, but life and technology doesn't always play nice.)

I'm up to 21 on Smaugust, I think, and badly need to sit down and have some scanning time. I'm also trying to push forward on the next Alaska coloring book. Locals, you can now find Wildflowers of Alaska at the Creamer's Field visitor center! The Crane Festival is there this weekend, too.

***

I was getting out of the shower yesterday and heard Guppy come down the stairs.

"I'm drawing numbers!" she told me, a few minutes later.

"On what?" I asked suspiciously.

"Come and see!" she sang to me. (Usually this is the precursor to awful things...)

And I came out to find this:

She had gotten a workbook out of her room and was teaching herself to trace over the numbers. And doing an impressive job of it, I might add. Go, little lefty!

I also had to share this photo, which I texted to my husband and we WTFed together.

That's a grill-cleaning robot. I didn't manage to include the price in the photo, but it was $100. A Roomba, sure, I get it. A mop? Yeah, I'd do that. But a grillbot? WHO BUYS A ROBOT SPECIFICALLY TO CLEAN 3 FEET OF GRILL?? This says nothing flattering about our society. We are ripe for robot rule, clearly.

Alright, I am back to writing story-like things for a bit before bed.

If I were prone to panic attacks, I would have had at least three this week.

Why no, I do not have access to my email yet.

Why yes, I was expecting several important things this week.

And now I have to make PHONE CALLS.

I am too grumpy to blog.

My email is not so much buggy right now as it is completely non-functioning. The timing is VERY VERY poor, as I am expecting several important things this week and I WOULD LIKE IT NOT TO BE BROKEN.

*weeps*

Wordwar friends, please come keep me focused. I can still write words.

Have a photo from happier times yesterday:

It's been three days without Internet.

Construction down the road cut our phone line, and (long story omitted) they aren't even trying to fix it until Monday. Or maybe Tuesday.

I am a twitchy little addict in the throes of withdrawal, as you might imagine, clinging to my phone.

I am still planning to hit go on my Kickstarter Tuesday morning, from the tea house, but this is NOT how I imagined working up to it.

If my communication is slow for any reason, please forgive me. I'm probably in the corner gnawing my fingernails off.

So, I sent out a pile of packages on Wednesday. IMPORTANT packages. Crazy, risk-taking, new-things, world-domination packages. And when I took them to the post office, they scanned them all, as they often do. They are supposed to scan them IN. They unfortunately, managed to scan them all as DELIVERED. As in, delivered right there to the post office in Fairbanks.

I have NO IDEA what this means. When they try to scan them at their real destination, will it throw an error and return them to me? Will the scan get corrected when they check in at their next points along the way? Will they be circular filed as LOST FOREVER because the computer can't figure out what to do with them?!

GUH. Of all the piles of packages that this could have happened to.

NO COOKIE, Post Office. NO COOKIE.

...

In the NO COOKIE category, voles have eaten one of my lettuce plants. I am enraged. There are traps out. BRING IT, RODENTS. You took my strawberries, but you won't take my salads!!

...

I am sketching for Sketch Fest right now! http://www.ellenmilliongraphics.com/sketchfest/

I have finished FIVE ACEO sketches, and am very pleased with myself.

Here is my favorite, so far:

So I bought a movie on Amazon and downloaded it to my ipad, so I could watch it on the TV, because that's how I stream Netflix, and it's the easiest thing to do. Problem? Amazon videos won't export to external devices. They claim it's a rights thing.

FINE. I'll buy a movie on iTunes. I've watched iTunes episodes on the TV without problems. Oh, but not PROTECTED movies. Those won't go out, via my Apple-brand HDMI converter, to the TV. Because rights.

Seriously, I just want to watch the stupid movie that I've legally bought on the stupid TV from my iPad. WHY SO HARD?!

It was an awesome morning! I was very productive, and I blew threw most of my household chores. Guppy was happy, fire was nice, even did a little sketching...

Then, there was a poop incident, and I broke the blender making hummus, and I tried to sit down to work on a coding thing that SHOULDN'T BE THIS HARD, and I just feel stupid. Seriously, Google. I consider myself bright and capable of self-teaching, but your API documentation is crap. What I'm trying to do is VERY basic, and your site just leads me around in circles and dead-ends me in depreciated pages. All I want to do is add a simple calendar event with php. That's all. It shouldn't be rocket science. And yes, I had a perfectly good script that did this until two weeks before my vacation, when you decided to depreciate the Zenlibrary I was using. Thanks for that.

Also, the back-facing camera on my phone isn't working. I need to take it apart and see if I can fix it, but it's VERY INCONVENIENT.

Urgh. URGH.

Here's The Hermit for my Sketch Tarot project, finished yesterday. Not linking to the project page this time, because I haven't updated it with new pricing. (If you find it anyway [not rocket science], I will honor the old prices. They will be going up SIGNIFICANTLY.)

I'm also working on another tarot thing, unrelated, that will be a big piece. A REALLY big piece. It's exciting.

I will do more travel-log when I am in an improved mood. It may take chocolate.

I sat behind a truck at the water fill last night that had a bumper sticker you've probably seen: If you aren't outraged, you aren't paying attention.

There's truth there. If you look around, there are a gazillion things to feel outraged about. On my friendslist, or my Facebook feed, every few minutes something will show up that is horrific or enraging or just plain wrong.

I could spend a lot of energy every day correcting people, bringing attention to wrong-doing, sharing the latest and greatest offense, writing angry letters under my bare lightbulb... but you know what? I only have >>this<< much energy and outrage is a big suck of said energy. And I'd rather use it in other ways!

I'm paying attention. But I'm also looking for rainbows after the rain, and choosing to share the good news, and picking my battles. There are things that are bad out there! There always have been and always will be. But I am not a bad person for choosing not to dwell on them. I cannot save every puppy or correct every misconception. I am not a soulless or self-centered monster because I read these things and do not rise to the uncountable causes. I think a lot of people carry guilt because - given the nature of media and social network - they are inundated with All These Terrible Things, and feel that they are expected to be outraged about all of them! I used to feel guilty about that, too! These are things that deserve outrage! But I realized something recently, and I think it's worth sharing:

It is more useful to the world that I am cheerful, live creatively, and am responsible for myself.

So that's what I try to do, whenever I start to feel outraged. And you know what? I'm a lot happier for it.

On that note, have a picture of a baby eating a banana.

Sketch Fest has been intensely frustrating this month - yesterday afternoon I did two pieces I REALLY like, one that may turn out, and one that is no more than a few idea lines... and today I have accomplished nothing artistic, only administrative hand-holding, polite-but-firm fix-it emails to my host (whyyyy must server problems always occur during Sketch Fest?!) and a lot of damage control. (Note for self - have put in check for 0% donation, isolated prompt-adding script [non-problematic!], isolated non-member prompts [still remains to be seen if they are a problem, but definitely not the ONLY problem])

Many people groused about the (really not) draconian new password requirements, but my empathy for that is on the low side. Until you have had your customer database hacked and all of their emails and passwords spread about the Internet, until you have had an admin account brute-cracked because of a too-easy password and woken up to a series of emails letting you know that all of your members' account have been deleted - including your own! - I do not think you will understand how powerless and violated being hacked actually feels, nor would you feel that requiring people to read and follow a few stupid instructions to protect everyone's data is asking too much.

The ice-cream topping on my cake? I'm not reliably getting emails from my shopping cart service. Paypal, yes, so I get HALF the verification for sales, but not the half that tells me what actually sold. *facepalm*

For sprinkles, my Facebook messages are currently not loading.

Ahem.

But, if I was in any way short or brief with you, or anything less than helpful and kind, I apologize. The security stuff is clearly a tender point with me, and I spent my entire day feeling like I was running from one crisis to another, on-line and off. Most people were awesome and understanding. Many fabulous sketches were sketched.

And on the plus side, it was an intensely productive day. We worked on tubing in the basement, I got part of my studio space greatly consolidated (in preparation for more tubing), and I worked off some of my negative energy digging drainage channels because today was Day of Thaw. Our driveway went from soft snowpack and slush with a few spots of dirt showing to mostly mud with a few thin, lonely pieces of ice. Thanks to drainage channels (which the engineer in me loves working on!), most of the melt has gone harmlessly off the side of the embankment, and I'm hopeful that the mud will be short-lived if we continue to have warm days. On the downside, unknown troves of dog poop are appearing above the snow and will need to be dealt with in short order (before they stop freezing in the morning, preferably!).

(sometime later)

It's taken me most of the day to compose this, and Guppy decided my evening needed a little more poop, so she kindly produced one in her bathtub for me. And oh, she looked so pleased about it!

You can only laugh, really!

And for all the foibles of the day, I wouldn't have traded it for anyone else's. There were many moments of cuddles with baby and husband, there was delicious food and good music, there were moments of triumph (mostly Guppy's), lots and lots of laughter, and it's actually, honestly, finally spring. The window beside me is open, and it smells all fresh and melty, though it is just cold enough that I should probably get up and close it.

I'll do that now. I'm ready for bed!