#189 - Pizzas and Hot Honey

Another beautiful morning of sleeping in.

Robyn made us tea and brought me some sliced bananas and grapes. A perfect breakfast after yesterday’s big ham and pierogi dinner. And considering we are heading to my sister's for another Easter dinner, a light breakfast was what the fat doctor called for.

We watched an episode or two of Detective Hole on Netflix and burst out in laughter when his name kept coming up on people’s phones as “Harry Hole.”

Yes, we are six years old.

I managed to cobble together more tax receipts from my bank and investment accounts to send just before we needed to leave for my sister’s. I still have to tally my expenses and book sales from last year. The sales won’t take nearly as long as my expenses will.

We left early to pick up some dessert and to get some cash for my nephew’s birthday. Of course, we completely forgot that everything was closed. We ended up at a Shopper’s Drug Mart and bought some Nanaimo bars, cinnamon swirl cake and butter tarts.

Then we were off on the highway and surprised at the good time we were making. So much so that we were forty-five minutes early. We spied an open Baskin Robbins and headed in to see if we could get an ice cream cake. And it turns out they had plenty left, so we took a cookies and cream cake to my sisters.

We chatted for a bit and eventually my parents arrived.

My brother-in-law made us pasta alla vodka, two types of pizzas, white potato and pepperoni with jalapeños and hot honey. The hot honey one was my favourite, but everything was delicious. Then we chatted a bit more before having some tea and desserts. They sent us home with four slices of pizza and some of the pasta.

On the way home I noticed my car wasn’t driving properly. It just didn’t feel right. After assessing things, I determined it was something to do with the turbo or the intercooler.

It was making a bit of a whistling sound, and it lacked the power climbing hills and accelerating. One more thing to fix and another big expense.

The grind never ends.

We spent an hour getting Robyn’s computer and remote systems working and all connected for her first day back to work tomorrow. Mostly it involved entering passwords over and over again, but in the end, we got everything up and running.

Today marks the anniversary of the passing of my mother-in-law, Moe. I still see her cheeky little smile now and again that she gave when she was being rebellious or having a good time. Usually both at the same time. Her presence is still felt in the house even after all of these years, but particularly by my wife, on these family holidays and get togethers.

I haven’t had the time or energy to watch any of the Advanced Classes this month. I may binge watch them this week, time permitting so I can at least hear the information. My priority is going to be getting my mentor assignment completed before the Saturday deadline. And of course, this will be a challenge as Monday we have David Sedaris tickets, Wednesday we have “The Book of Mormon” tickets and Thursday is Survivor, Pizza, Hotub.

Somehow, I don’t think I will be escaping the all-day Saturday writing marathon. No rest for the wicked as they say.

I updated my computer to Windows 11 the other night in preparation for this week. The last thing I needed was to deal with any program glitches this week as the windows 10 updates were going to come to an end soon anyways.

One of my big reasons for delaying the upgrade was the fear of losing the Dragon dictiation software. When Windows 11 first came out, my version of Dragon wasn’t supported and the basic advice coming from them was to buy a new version of Dragon. Dragon is not that cheap for most people to buy. And on top of that it is now owned by Microsoft.

I was glad to see my version of Dragon seemed to be working fine after the update. It must have just been the initial versions that did not work.

Everything else seems to be fine and all my preference were imported over to the new operating system. I am still not a fan of some of the interfaces, but for now it works well enough for me. The battery might be draining a little quicker, but I adjusted the power settings to see if that would help and so far, it has.

One of my writing teachers posted about some of the odd questions he gets from people about writing and publishing. Some of them are fairly delusional. One fellow written to tell my teacher that he had finished writing a great star trek novel and wanted to know how to get it published. The fellow had presumably asked my teacher this because of his extensive expreicnce writing these novels. What the person failed to understand was that the copyright for those characters and the name were owned by someonelse and that he could not publish works owned by others. The person got mad at hom and asked him never to contact him again. And yet, my teacher had never reaced out to him, the wanna-be writer had contacted my teacher! Bunch of odd people out there in this world.

But it did illustrate how uneducated some people are about copyright and IPs. That fellow could find himself in a whole heap of trouble if he tries to go sell it. It might have been better to send a letter introducing himself and asking if they were interested in hearing about his story treatment for their property.

Likely, he wouldn’t have had to spend all that time writing something he could never sell. And why write in other people’s worlds when you could have just made up your very own and skipped all the copyright issues. But be creative and making up new things can be incredibly difficult for some people. Using other peoples IPs can feel like a short cut, but in the end it’s the long way round. Maybe better to say the road to nowhere starts there.

Another guy submitted his Kickstarter campaign to get my teacher’s opinion, something he does for free on a Friday. If he likes your campaign he helps promote iton his blog. But this fellow had created everything on his Kickstarter using A.I. and when my teacher told him, no if this is your work, the guy got mad and said of course it’s my work and wandered off into the internet. It’s very likely that Kickstarter will disqualify the campaign due to the amount of A.I. used.

Many people don’t realize that you can’t copyright things made with A.I. and in some cases you are opening up yourself to a potential lawsuit, because you’re A.I. used other peoples work for its training and extrapolations. And some the consequences are yet to be decided upon.

I’ll end this evening in my preferred way, reading. I have about forty pages left to go in the “Mythago Woods,” and if I can, I will finish it tonight. I have other books to get to on my To Be Read Pile to get to.

I’m a little less than two days behind on my word count goals for the month already. I suspect this will be all caught up by the time I get my assignment done for this coming Saturday and even more so as I start to move towards writing more fiction during the week rather than blog posts.

I’m very glad I get to sleep in an hour or two extra tomorrow as well. I can stay up as late as needed to read my book and get it finished. And I get a good chunk of my REM sleep between the hours of seven and nine AM.

So, I call it a night and end this post here.

I hope everyone had a great Easter weekend.

Night all.