It's Coming

It's almost here.  No, not Christmas.  2012.  I've been thinking a lot in the last few weeks about what I want to happen, what I want to do, in 2012.  The first decision I made was that I want to cut my reading way back.

I'll give you a moment to recover from that bombshell.

Right now I'm on target to read 300 books in 2011.  That's a lot of books, and I've enjoyed all that reading thoroughly.  But I want to expand a few horizons in 2012, which means I'm going to have to spend less time reading.  My goal is to cut the reading in half-- I'm aiming for 150 books in 2012.

The big reason I want to cut the reading time is that I want to significantly increase the writing time.  As in, actually do some.  My goal is a little fuzzy in this area, but I think I want to go for two completed pieces in 2012, with at least one of those stories polished up and ready for submission.  (I know that sounds massive, but I'm thinking novella length, not 80,000+ word novels.)

I really want to knit some stuff this year.  It's been fun getting back to knitting after taking off most of 2011.  (Depression and joint pain pretty much killed my interest in it for a while.)  I'm thinking about doing a 12 in 12.  That is, 12 projects completed in 2012.  But not just any projects.  I want them to be stuff for ME.  I knit things for other people all the time, but I don't remember the last project I made for myself.  I have a boat load of sock yarn, with one slow going sock on the needles.  I have a *gorgeous* beaded scarf that I started like two years ago and have never finished.  I have a wacky shawl that I started a few months ago and had to set aside for other projects.  I just want to do some stuff for myself.

I want to get into the habit of gentle, regular exercise.  I know it will help me significantly.  Exercise is one of the major recommendations for people with Fibromyalgia.  Physical activity kills me right now, and it probably will for quite a while once I get started.  But I can't use that as an excuse anymore.  I have to do it.

Part of the reason I want to improve my condition and stamina is that there is not just one, but *two* conventions I'd really like to go to in 2012.  RT (Romantic Times) is in Chicago in April.  That's too close to miss if there's any way I can make it.  If I want to do anything other than sleep in my room all week, I've got to get my body used to moving and doing again.  The other convention is Gay Rom Lit, which is in October in Albuquerque.  Getting there will be a bit of a pain in the ass.  Either I'll have to fly, which will be quick and hopefully painless.  (Minus any body cavity searches security might decide to run.)  My other option would be to take the train.  Which actually sounds fun and romantic, riding the rails and all.  But it adds at least two days of travel both directions, and that might do me in.  (If I get a room with a bed, which I would absolutely do on a trip of this length, the price will be about the same as flying first class, which I kind of need to do for the larger seat size.  So pricing isn't the issue so much as how hard each travel option is likely to be on me.)

My thought process right now is that I'll try RT and see how it goes.  If I have a major problem, well, home is only a couple of hours away.  If I make it through RT without a hitch, then I have a better idea if I'll be up to the trip to Albuquerque in October.

You didn't think I would make it all the way through a list of goals without saying something about my disaster area, did you?  I want to do a little bit of cleaning every single day.  I'm not up to big stuff.  Just the thought of tackling the whole thing is enough to make me roll over and go back to sleep.  What I'm going to do is put on some music and clean to at least one song every day.  If I clean to one 3-5 minute song a day, it adds up to 20-35 minutes of cleaning time a week.  That will make at least a small dent in the disaster every week.  There are plenty of things I can do for 3-5 minutes without even leaving my bed.  Like clearing all the accumulated junk off my nightstands.  I think clearing out the crap and clutter will make me feel better emotionally.  It will probably help physically, too, because we've gotten well beyond the "write your finger in the dust" stage in spots.  (I give the computer screen and a short set of shelves by the bed a quick swipe with a Swiffer duster when I think about it, which isn't often.  Everything else is on its own.)

Finally, this is kind of a new idea to me, and I'm a little unsure about it.  But I think I might want to try the 365 Project.  If you're unfamiliar, the idea is to take a picture every day for 365 days, and post them.  I've really enjoyed snapping pictures with my Samsung thingy, and it might be fun to challenge myself to find something interesting to take a picture of every day for a year.  The challenge would be that I rarely leave the house.  At least 320 pictures would need to be taken from inside the house.  (And that may be a slightly generous on the side of how many out-in-the-world pictures I actually manage to take.)  I feel like this might push me a little, in a good way.  So I think I'm going to do it.

So, there you go.  Seven sections of goals for the new year.  (I'm also considering a book buying cap.  I have enough TBR books on the Kindle right now that I could make my 150 books goal and still have some left over.  But not buying books that I want is HARD, especially when you've got gift certificates or there's a sale on.  I'll be contemplating this one a bit more.)  Will I make them all?  Who knows.  But it feels like they're all pretty reasonable.  They're all action in a positive direction.  So I think for now they'll do.

Today Was a Good Day

I had an excellent day today.  First of all, I had the house to myself all day long.  Mom and Dad went with their Sunday School class to some sort of Jesus museum.  (It had dinosaurs.  I don't even pretend to understand that one.)  Anyway, this place was a couple hours away, so between driving there, touring, having lunch and dinner, and driving home again, I didn't see them until 9pm.  It was lovely and peaceful.

And then the thing that I'd been waiting for since Wednesday finally happened.  My brand new Kindle arrived!  It's light and little and adorable.  I spent some time loading books for the quarterly reading challenge that started at midnight, and then I started a library book that I was able to download wirelessly onto the new Kindle.

As if all of that wasn't happy making enough, my name was drawn in a contest on twitter.  I got a free advance copy of Carina Press's holiday m/m anthology!  In it is a new story by one of my very favorite authors-- Josh Lanyon.  Woo hoo!

Some craft supplies that I'd ordered were delivered, and I ate queso dip and tortilla chips for dinner.  (I'm a grown up, I can eat whatever I want for dinner.  Also, my mommy wasn't here to say no.)

After that, Mom and Dad came home, and we talked about their trip, and then we watched about half an episode of Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives, which happened to feature a place here in Indianapolis and another place in Bucks County, PA (which is where we're from originally).  And then we all retreated to our rooms, Mom and Dad to zonk out in exhaustion, and me to watch some random stuff off the dvr and write this post.

Really, it was a fantastic day!

Windows!

Today was a very busy day.  After over a week of rain outs and rescheduling, the work crew came today and replaced every window in the house.  It was noisy and weird, having a half dozen strangers traipsing in and out of the house all day.  But it was supposed to take two days, and they finished in one.  This was an inexpressible relief to me.  Also, we never got out of the 70s today, so the house stayed nice and cool while big holes were opened up all over the place.  We took Trouble to "summer camp" to keep him out from under foot, and he's still there until tomorrow.  Which means I get to sleep in the middle of the bed tonight!  Yay me!  (Trouble is a total bed hog.)

While the crew was here banging around, Mom and I went out to run errands.  Mostly I sat in the car and read while she did stuff, but still.  At least I left the house for a little while.  The one place I did go in was Target.  I needed Midol (sexy!), plus I wanted to get a sleep mask.  And I discovered that Dr. Bronner's was on sale, so I bought a bucket full of soap.  Dr. Bronner might have been... interesting, but his soap is good stuff.  I'm less rashy now that I'm using it, and less smelly.  Well, less smelly in a bad way.  I get the lavender scented kind, and while it's not heavy, the scent lingers nicely.

I'm going to have to call Amazon again tomorrow about my Kindle.  It's not doing anything horrendous, but it's not acting quite right, either.  Last night all my content disappeared for a little while, and then it didn't want to turn off or reset.  I finally got it going again, but now it's not bringing the most recently opened books to the front of the file.  Which doesn't sound like a big deal, but is annoying when you've got forty books in a file and you have to page through the whole file to find the one you're looking for every time you want to read again.  It's still not time to replace it, but every time it does something screwy like this, that time gets a little bit closer.

So, that's what's going on for me right now.  Nothing thrilling, just the every day blah, blah, blah of life.

Loss and Gain

After multiple "you really look like you've lost weight" comments from my mom this week, I dragged out the Wii and checked.  (I haven't been feeling up to getting my Wii on lately, so it's been collecting dust for a while.)  Lo and behold, I've lost another 6.6 lbs.  That's a total of 22 lbs since the end of August.  I'm not really sure where it's come from, since I don't see the difference at all.  But 22 fewer lbs crushing down on my joints can only be a good thing.

And now on a completely different subject.  If you look over to the right, under the About Me section, you'll see a little ad.  In mid-January I signed up with a site called Swagbucks.  Basically, you're letting them market to you and in exchange you earn points that can be used toward "swag".  A lot of it is stuff I wouldn't be interested in, but they do have one piece of swag I can definitely use-- Amazon gift cards.  Got to feed the Kindle somehow!  So far I've earned $25 worth of Amazon gift cards, and I'm just over half way to earning another $5 card.  There are other gift cards available too, like Barnes & Noble, Travelocity, Paypal, Target, iTunes, or Starbucks.  If Swagbucks is something you think you'd be interested in, I'd appreciate it if you'd click on that banner or use this link to sign up: http://www.swagbucks.com/refer/fibrobabe.  I can earn a few points through referrals, and there's always another book I want to buy!

Lip Balm Flavor of the Day: Shamrock Shake

Happy Days Are Here Again!

Another round of good news on the medication front.  My doctor's office called this morning.  The makers of Savella (my other Fibro medication) approved my patient assistance, and there was 3 months worth of free meds waiting for me at the office!  Yay!  My Fibro meds are the only ones I take that are too new to have a generic, which means they are the most expensive.  Now that I'm getting both of them for free, my monthly med costs have gone down by about 3/4.  That's huge-- a significant line item in the monthly budget slashed.

In other news, I've got the Kindle down to 724 items.  So far it hasn't made a bit of difference.  In fact, the battery is dying even faster.  But that might be because of all the clicking around to delete stuff.  I'll go back to more normal usage for the next couple of days and see if there's any improvement.

And more good news-- I have a solid story idea to work on.  Last night I was thinking about a story I started almost 15 years ago and abandoned.  The actual pages are long gone at this point (trust me, it's no loss), but the idea lingered.  As I was falling asleep last night it fused with another scrap of an idea, and suddenly I have a viable story idea.  In the next few days I'm going to work on Kelley Armstrong's Outlining 101, and then I want to start writing March 1st.  I'm not going to push myself to NaNo it.  I'm afraid I'll flame out in a couple of days at that kind of pace.  But I'd definitely like to finish March with a nice chunk of pages.  I've also had a little bit of a brain wave about the story I was working on last fall during Discovery.  So I think I may end up outlining both at the same time.  We'll see how confused I get.

Lip Balm Flavor of the Day: Gingerale

Cleaning Up My Act

I've noticed lately that my Kindle is chewing through its charge at an alarming rate.  I don't leave the wireless on, so ideally it should be good for 10 days or so.  At a minimum it should last for 7 days.  My most recent charge lasted 4 days.

So today I called Amazon customer service.  Apparently, I have an astonishing number of files on my Kindle, more than almost anyone the rep has seen in the 3 years he's worked for Amazon.  There were only 837 files on my Kindle at the time, almost half of them samples.  And the K2 (the version I have) is supposed to hold 1,500 books.  So even if a sample takes up as much space as an entire ebook, I'm still only a little over half full.

I didn't really understand all the tech-speak, but I guess the problem isn't the number of files on my Kindle per se.  The problem is with one of the 837 files.  There's a glitch in one of them, and it's making the Kindle continuously try to index itself, which is eating up power.  Supposedly there's no way to figure out which file it is, so the only thing to do is delete as many excess files as possible.  Either the bad file will be deleted and the problem will stop, or with fewer files it will spend less time indexing.  As the number of files goes down, hopefully the battery life will go up.

I accept that there's probably no way to know for sure which file is causing the problem, but this still annoys me.  I barely ever leave my room, let alone the house, so it's not like I'm ever in great danger of being Kindle-less.  But the charge really should last longer, and I don't want to have to clear that much stuff off my Kindle!

It kind of boggles me that the customer service guy was so surprised by the number of samples I have.  I can't be the only weirdo who uses her Kindle the way I do.  I find shopping directly from the Kindle to be a bit of a pain.  Also, I spend a lot of time cruising around reading websites, so I probably hear about another 2-3 books I want to check out every day.  I pop on over to Amazon, download the sample, and move on with my day.  When I want a new book I go through the samples until I find something interesting, and then with a couple of clicks I can purchase directly from the Kindle.  I can be anywhere to do this, including a doctor's office or the bathroom (prime book buying locations for me, btw).  As far as I know, the Kindle can't tap in to your Amazon wishlist, so adding all those books I'm interested in to my wishlist just won't work as well for me.  (I do wishlist books that haven't been released yet, since there are no samples for those.  Then, I check the wishlist every once in a while, and anything I'm still interested in I'll sample.)

I spent a good bit of my reading time today working my way through samples and deleting books that I didn't love and won't be reading again.  But the rest of my day was spent trolling Goodreads and adding more samples.  So I'm only down to 829 items-- a net decrease of 8 files.  Unless I got really lucky and deleted the problem file, I'm pretty sure that's not going to make a difference to my battery life.  I guess I'm going to have to spend the next couple of days reading samples.  That's fun in its own way, I guess, but I'd rather do it on my own schedule!