Work

Updates on Progress and Other Things

By / July 19, 2013 / 1 Comment

I am tentatively, and with fear of jinxing, declaring my desktop computer to be fixed. We replaced the motherboard almost two weeks ago and it has not crashed since then.

There are only 35 more coin orders to ship. They are all orders where the person who purchased the coins has not given me an address.

Pre-orders for The Body Politic have been progressing well. We’re almost two weeks in and almost sold out of sketch editions. The books were delivered yesterday and my garage smells like triumph. (Triumph is the smell of 5000 freshly printed books.)

Gleek was laid flat by a migraine today, the second she’s had in the past couple of weeks. Sadly this is likely a gift from my genes. I had periodic migraines for about a year when I was her age. I’m taking it as a sign that we need to pay more attention to healthy eating. Not that I think that will solve the problem, but it is a generally good idea.

I’ve finished up the edits on the Tub of Happiness reprint. There were over a hundred corrections to evaluate and apply. I’ve handed half a dozen image edits to Howard. Once those are done, I can upload files to the printer and call it done.

I got copies of the Jay Wake book back. I’m not entirely pleased with the print on demand cover, but the contents are exactly the way I intended. In a week I will get to deliver these copies and then work will begin on the final iteration.

Travel to the Cascade Writer’s Conference and Jay Wake has been arranged. I’m looking forward to attending a writer event and to supporting the efforts of those creating Jay Wake.

Monday will be my day for shipping things to GenCon. We need to send coins, hats, mugs, and The Body Politic. Also on the preparing for GenCon task list: Banners and flyers.

There is also a preparing for WorldCon task list. Howard has acquired new boots and the new tux will be showing up soonish. I still need to buy Howard’s plane tickets. There is math to do in order to figure out how much capitol we can spend on this event. I also need to do the math “guess how much product to send” dance. At least we’ve arranged for transportation of merchandise.

Salt Lake City ComicCon is in September. I keep forgetting about it because it is a newer addition to the schedule. I should make a list for this.

The Unofficial Anecdotal History of Challenge Coins has done some basic collection, but we haven’t yet begun significant editorial work. Once Howard and I hammer out a process, I expect it to go fairly quickly.

We need a new dentist because I don’t trust either of the two we’ve worked with in the past month. Kiki’s wisdom teeth should probably come out before she heads off to college.

My new car still does not have a name. I’ve been noodling and trying to find one that fits. I’m not sure that I’m going to though. The closest I’ve come is realizing that this new car functions as our family’s sky bison, the friendly white thing that is willing to haul all of our people and our stuff, but it can’t be Appa and none of the other sky bison have names.

Howard has been writing prose regularly and making significant progress through his writing commitments. I’m happy about this. I’m working on writing as well.

My intended push toward healthier eating did not materialize in June. I’m going to have to expend some effort and do meal planning. Because it is time for us to be cooking more, eating healthier, and eating out less. Better for our budget and us.

Tonight I cooked a meal using thyme grown in my back garden. I’m quite happy about that.

Link’s doctor has said that no more follow up appointments are necessary. We just need to continue the home treatments we’ve been applying and everything should clear up.

I finally convinced Patch to let me trim the hair around his ears and neck. He looks less scraggly now.

And it has gotten late enough that I can’t remember the other things I intended to post updates about. Time to sleep.

Computer Troubleshooting Again

By / July 8, 2013 / 1 Comment

After my last post in which I talked about my computer crashing woes. I had a couple of really helpful responses suggesting that the problem might be bad RAM. This was quite useful because I’d been thinking that everything inside the box was cleared as good, when that was not the case. The symptoms pointed to a hardware issue. So this morning I took my crash log and my computer over to Mireya at JPL Computers. She opened it up and helped me test all the RAM inside individually. This mostly consisted of putting each piece of RAM in all by itself and then seeing if the machine would boot. We found one stick of questionable RAM and one slot that was dusty. We reassembled it and checked it twice. No troubles booting.

I brought it home, plugged it in, and it crashed. I pulled out all of the old RAM, leaving only the brand new RAM. It crashed. I tried to think what could possibly be different in my house from when it worked fine in the store. Then I tipped the computer over to lay on its side. We had done all the testing with the panel open and the computer on its side. I restarted the computer and it has run without crashing since 5pm.

I’m not done with the trouble shooting, but my current theory involves a short or loose part. This afternoon I hurried to get my accounting done. Every momentary pause in response made me fear another crash. So I plowed through, getting as much work done in the window of time while the computer had decided to work. I didn’t get through all of it. I ran out of brain, so hopefully the computer will also work tomorrow.

As a tangential note, this whole experience has taught me not to think of a computer as a magic box, but instead as a conglomeration of bits any of which might break. I feel more competent now, but I would like to move on to the part where my magic box just does the work I ask it to do without causing me stress.

Editorial Work

By / July 7, 2013

This afternoon I carried all of the Schlock books and arranged them on a kitchen table for a photo. We’re opening pre-orders for The Body Politic tomorrow morning, which meant I had to create store items for the new book and for the nine book bundle.

I left the books where they were while I edited the photo and created the store item. Howard wandered through and looked at the array. “These are all the books you made.” I looked up from my laptop, confused for a moment. Then I realized he was right. Howard drew the comics, but I did the design and editorial work on all nine of the books. Howard is the author and creator, but the finished books are mine as well.

I’ve been pondering editorial work as I work on assembling the Jay Wake Book. My job is to create a framework and to remain as invisible as possible. That book must belong to the contributors, not to me. Yet I care deeply about the project. Many of the submissions have brought me to tears. If I didn’t I could not do a good job with it. An editor must be objective enough to see how a thing could be better and passionate enough about the work to understand what it needs and to put in the hours necessary to help it get there. I care very much about the Jay Wake Book, yet my emotions are not so raw that the process of creation hurts at every step. Mostly though, I feel honored to be able to be a part of such a creation.

I like making books.

Observations

By / July 6, 2013

I had to call customer support because the postage printing program would not load. The tech person listened to my description and started on his list of “customer’s firewall is blocking our program” trouble shooting steps. Except that every step showed that I’d already unblocked and allowed. He decided that there must be something wrong with my router and that I should consult with my “IT department” to get it fixed. Except I’d already told him twice that I am the IT department. By then I was tired and half convinced that computers did not work they way I thought they did. After I got off the phone I made some additional notes on the problem, like the fact that I was perfectly able to use their program and reach their servers to install an update, but not to log in. This was not a firewall problem. And in fact, the next morning my “firewall problem” had magically vanished. I was brutally honest on the survey they sent me a day later. No their tech was not helpful. It was their problem and he was either clueless or not willing to admit it.

The kids had an argument in the backyard. This time it was Patch in the center of the conflict instead of Gleek who is usually the one who buts heads with this particular neighbor child. In fact Patch has been more volatile lately, almost certainly because of the randomness of our summer schedule. It is time for me to step back up and put more structure into our days. I will primarily accomplish this by serving meals on a regular schedule.

My computer has been freezing and crashing lately. I trip to our local computer store shows that all the components pass diagnostic tests with flying colors. They were not able to replicate the crashes. So I brought it home and it worked without error for several days. Then it began crashing again. I’ve been taking notes, what programs were running, what I was doing. What I changed. All of these things go into the crash log. So far the only consistent element is that the computer was on while it crashed. I’ll have a full day running InDesign, firefox, photoshop, and USB drives without trouble. Then it crashes when only firefox is running. Sometimes it crashes when nothing is running. I’ll just return to my desk and it will have crashed while I was gone. Once it crashed while trying to restart. I keep making notes and hoping that a fix will become apparent. In between I try to get work done and hope that this will be one of the days when it works as it should. I watch and I try not to flinch any time a program pauses for a moment.

Many of my online and in person friends are writers. Lately I’ve been watching what they post about word counts. I don’t care to compare the numbers, but I’m definitely seeing a pattern. My friends who complete books are the ones who write or think about writing every day. That is not the kind of person I’ve been during the last years. I’ve written a book’s worth of blog entries each year. One year I also wrote/revised an essay book in addition to the ongoing blog entries. This week it hit home to me that if I want Amelia (my book in progress) to be complete, I need to put in the time. I haven’t been. Not for a long time. I’m not going to make any sort of vow or promise. I don’t intend to create a goal or resolution. But I worked on the outline yesterday and again today. I need that outline so that when I have days where I can’t see very far, I have some instructions to follow.

My house is cleaner than it was a month ago. When life is less full of things I find the time to do things like rallying the children to organize the garage. It was a cluttered accumulation of garbage and misplaced items. We sorted and swept. It looks worlds better. Now I can see where to begin with the major reorganization that it needs. We should finally admit that we are not camping people and let go some of the odds and ends that have been taking up space in our lives for years. I love quiet open spaces and I create them when I have enough space in my head to realize that I want them.

It is strange to have a car that I really love. I’ve always driven a vehicle which was chosen to meet our family needs rather than according to my preferences. This new car, which is still seeking a name, keeps making me happy.

It is late, I should probably start making good on my intention to get to bed earlier as part of resetting the family schedule.

Goodbye Kaspersky, I’m Going Back to Norton

By / July 3, 2013 / 1 Comment

The tech folks at Best Buy told my that Kaspersky was the preferred anti virus protection for computers. It was rated much better than Norton they said. So when I bought my new desktop machine two years ago, I put Kaspersky on it. When I bought a laptop a year later, I put Kaspersky on that as well. Today I removed Kaspersky from both machines and paid to put Norton on them instead. I did this even though I only renewed Kaspersky a few months ago. In the past eight or more years of running Norton on various machines, the number of times I’ve had to troubleshoot is zero. The list of troubles with Kaspersky is below.

It installed easily and registered without trouble. Life was fine for 335 days. Then Kaspersky started popping open windows reminding me to renew. I followed the instructions to renew. Kaspersky continued to remind me over and over again that I should renew, not recognizing I’d already done it. Once the deadline passed, I had to call customer support and they walked me through a click-chain to get the program to recognize the renewal.

I bought the laptop and put Kaspersky on it, figuring the renewal problem was just a glitch.

Then my desktop machine started losing hard drive space. A hidden file was eating up all the space. WinDirStat showed me that Kaspersky was saving giant log files of doom. Some of them were over 50GB. I deleted the files and meant to call customer support about it, but got too busy. The problem was solved a year later when my hard drive died and I had to re-install from scratch. It is possible that the Kaspersky log files contributed to that crash.

Yet at this point I was still ready to defend Kaspersky as a good program. I don’t know why.

Some update taught Kaspersky to send me continual pop-ups telling me that a newer version was available. I didn’t want to upgrade at that time. No toggle would tell the program to stop doing it. So I lived with near constant pop-up notifications for over a year on two different machines.

The renewals for both Kaspersky installations came up again. They both reminded me endlessly to renew, even though I’d already done it. After the deadline, I went through the click chain to make the program recognize that it had been renewed. It did…for about three days. Then it claimed that my account was expired again. Repeat for several weeks. I tried upgrading in the hope that it would fix the renewal recognition and make the pop ups go away. Two birds, one stone. Then it complained of database mis-matching. I deleted and re-installed the old version. Then Kaspersky took to sending me a warning that I was unprotected every time the machine started up, only to realize that maybe I was protected after all.

I suppose I could have placed customer support calls on these issues, but I don’t think that I should have to place regular customer support calls to figure out how to make a program behave like it should.

Kaspersky on the laptop was broken in some way that seriously slowed down the machine’s restart process. Sometimes it took ten minutes for the computer to be ready to work. I timed it. With Norton installed and Kaspersky removed, the restart time is under a minute.

Last week my desktop machine crashed multiple times. Diagnostics show there is nothing wrong with the hardware. I suspect that the broken Kaspersky installation was conflicting with some other piece of software.

I don’t imagine that everyone has this much trouble with Kaspersky. It wouldn’t be so highly recommended if they did, but I’m done. Norton sends me a polite email telling me when to renew. Then it emails me a receipt. The program itself just runs and updates. I know it won’t be smooth sailing from here out, because for some reason my postage program won’t connect, and I’m going to have to solve that. (But that is a different customer support failure entirely. One that involves a tech on the phone continually asking me if my IT department has done something to my machine and telling me to give a list to my IT department, when I’ve repeatedly made clear, I AM the IT department.) Yet I’m hopeful that I won’t have to think about virus software for at least a year.

Now I just need to re-group and figure out how to re-work my schedule around the fact that I spent four hours of today dealing with computer issues instead of working on the Jay Wake book.

Promises to Keep and Miles to Go Before We Sleep

By / June 18, 2013 / 1 Comment

Howard came home tired, so tired that he did not have the energy to feel despair over all the writing he intended to do during the retreat but then didn’t. He noted the existence of that emotion as one might note a pasture full of cows while driving past it on the freeway. Fortunately being at home, and watching a silly action movie, restored him long enough that he and I were able to hammer out a list of things. It is all the major things we need to do between now and mid-August when Howard departs for conventions. We’ve divided all the things into roughly equal parts. And I have saved the list under the title Oppressively Long List of Things To Do. Tomorrow we will do some of the things. The day after we’ll do the same. Piece by piece we will turn things to do into things done.

#1 on my to do list for every day between now and the end of August is to prevent anything from getting added to the list.

Clearing Clutter and A Day in the Life

By / June 17, 2013

Almost the first thing that I did when I got home on Saturday was to pick up the garbage off of the kitchen counter. The kids had been living on packaged foods and they tended to drop those packages wherever. They are much more focused on the food than on proper disposal. Without intending to clean up the kitchen, I did, because in the spaces between fixing myself a snack my hands moved dishes to the sink and trash to the garbage can. That was only the beginning. For the past two days I have moved through my house clearing away clutter. I finally have the time to notice it and space in my brain to realize that this item actually belongs over there. Then I put it where it goes. In some ways it is like geological research, the study of how long life has been too busy by examining the collections. I hope I can continue this calm approach to clearing away the clutter for at least a week. That will do much to improve life around here.

This morning I got up early and set to work. I knew I needed to keep myself on track, so I decided to record my work day. Perhaps in some future year this will be an interesting record, a snapshot of my work life now.

7:30 am on Monday. This is the day when I return things back to normal. I begin by mailing all the packages and answering all the email.

8:45 am, answered all the emails and printed all the invoices. Up next: assemble all the packages. (Already behind my hoped for schedule.)

9:15 Postage printed. Next I assemble packages, but I probably ought to pause for breakfast before it has to be lunch instead.

Breakfast consumed. 22 packages set out for the postman. 10:32 am, time to make the kids get out of bed and do their chores.

11:30 most of family room cleaned up and vacuumed. Still need to sort through the mess on the game table, the mess on the fireplace, the mess on the video cabinet, and at some point in the future I need to completely re-sort the game closets. There are things in there that need to be evicted.

12:00 pause for lunch and noodling.

1:00 back to work. Part of my work process has been clearing and organizing odd corners of the house where things have accumulated. It seems like during coin shipping we were always asking Where is a sharpie? Where is a box cutter? Well I found them all. Now my pencil drawer overfloweth. Sometimes I don’t realize how crazy life has been until I start cleaning up and finding the oddest things accumulated in corners.

1:20 Accounting. Ready set go.

Sorted and found some financial documents hiding in the piles on my desk. Nothing overdue, just things to record. I have reached the bottom of the sedimentary layers and exposed desk surface. On one hand I feel bad that I lost track of some things. On the other hand I feel good that my system did not permanently lose them. They just waited until I had time to attend.

2:20 Still accounting. Moving into personal accounts.

Running laundry in parallel to accounting is theoretically efficient, but sometimes it just gives me points where I lose focus and can get distracted.

2:50 Pause for a snack.

3:30 back to accounting. Still having to do extra work because of the data loss post-hard-drive crash. The one accounting session that was lost happened to be one where I reconciled the checking account, so I had to do that over again.

5:39 pm done with the accounting. It does not usually take this long. I had to pause for kid stuff multiple times and there was extra post-shipping accumulation and accounting clean up. Time to go make dinner for kids. And me. I should get to eat dinner too.

8 pm The next hour is for writing. Kind of amazing that I can spare an hour for it.

8:50 pm I can hear quarreling downstairs. Time to go enforce bedtime.

Doing the Job that Needs to be Done

By / June 15, 2013 / 2 Comments

When Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard first started talking about doing a Writing Excuses retreat, I loved the idea. I wanted to be an integral part of all the planning. I wanted to be useful and essential. But much of the retreat discussion took place during recording sessions when I was not there. Task after task was handled and there was little for me to do other than to listen to the plans and make suggestions about implementation. I was of great help during the crazy days of registration and customer support. I’m good at answering emails and helping people. So I did that.

Then I figured that I would be most useful during the actual week of the retreat. I would arrive early and help with the hundred preparatory tasks both expected and not expected. I would stay late and help evaluate how everything went. Everyone thought this was a fantastic plan. But then responsible parenting required me to choose. It was no longer a matter of just finding someone to care for the kids in my absence, that someone would have to coordinate sending a girl off to camp and then dealing with her coming home. I checked and all the people in my life who I felt would handle that without being too stressed were unavailable. So the plan changed. I would come late to the retreat and I would leave early. This made me sad, because I’d wanted to be useful and essential. Instead they would arrange it without me and I would be a visitor at the retreat instead of integral.

I expected to arrive and be at loose ends. I expected to fill the odd task. Instead I got there and all the staff breathed relief. I spent most of my days working, helping, arranging, facilitating. It was obvious that I was needed. There were a hundred invisible jobs, the kind of thing that I do at home without thinking, but which enable all the other things. I did far more dish washing than writing and I’m okay with that because I was helping create something larger. I was doing the jobs that needed to be done so that the retreat could exist. Thins like retreats are always a group creation and my role was quiet but critical. Then, before I was done, my time was up. My early departure arrived.

I wanted to stay, so very much. There were needs at home and needs at the retreat. I pondered changing my ticket and figuring out child care via long distance. I weighed my choices. And I didn’t know the right answer. Perhaps there was no right answer, nor wrong one. I conferred with Howard and with the kids at home. Brandon, Dan, and Mary all understood and supported whatever choice I made. I left. I am sad that I had to choose between these things, that there was not some way to rearrange and allow me to be the professional, reliable, helper that I wanted to be. I’m even sadder because it seems like I always have to choose because things land on top of each other. It feels arbitrary and unfair, because everything would fit just fine if only they would land in different weeks.

So my role this past week both was and was not what I had hoped for. The retreat was excellent and exhausting. I was just beginning to feel part of it when I had to leave. Most of it can be summed up by me doing the job that was in front of me because it was the job that needed doing, even if there was a different job I would have preferred.

I’ll be home soon doing more of the same, only different.

Not Really Missing that Data

By / June 8, 2013 / 1 Comment

A month ago my hard drive crashed. It kindly waited until the optimal moment, I’d just finished uploading a book to the printer, but had not yet begun work on another project. I’d backed up my files recently, so data loss was minimal. The only thing I lost which I have not been able to recover is my bookmarks. I had a huge list of them and now my list is tiny because I can’t remember what most of them were. I’m actually finding this liberating, as if I’d cast off a burden. I’m certain there are internet places that I use to frequent regularly where I’m no longer going, but now I realize that I was going some of those places out of habit rather than active enjoyment. So I’m being cautious about putting bookmarks back. Fewer distractions is a good thing right now.

At the Beginning of a Busy June

By / June 5, 2013

Yesterday I closed the door behind my last shipping helper and breathed a big sigh of relief. The shipping was done. 2400 packages, 20,000 coins, 270 work hours. We did it all in two work weeks. Before the shipping was complete, people began reporting the coins arrival. Over and again we hear that the coins are even better than expected. We feel the same way. I love them. This is good because I spent most of this morning working with Janci to rearrange my shipping room to make space for the coins. There are a lot of them still here. The mass shipping is done, but I’ll be shipping out Kickstarter coin orders for another few weeks. There are problems to resolve and addresses to chase down.

Because life is never simple, I have not been able to focus on just coins and shipping. Yesterday morning Howard’s aching tooth proved to need a root canal, so we took care of that. This afternoon Link had an appointment with a specialist for a minor issue and we’ve been referred to a follow-up specialist. That appointment is tomorrow. In theory this is the week when we’re starting to establish family patterns for the summer, but everything is going to get disrupted again because Howard flies out on Friday for the Writing Excuses retreat. There are lots of preparations involved. It has been awhile since Howard was gone for so extended a trip.

My family came into town for Kiki’s graduation and then departed again. They’ll be back for family reunions in another couple of weeks. I’ll likely wave to them as they pass through. I have so much clean up and organization to do after the past three months. I’m beginning to make progress, but I think it will be the end of June before I truly feel like I’ve got things managed.

Yet, I’m happy. I’m running from thing to thing. I’m often tired and losing track of what comes next, but I’m happy instead of scared. This is good.