#350 - More Failure

We both slept in until noon and it was clear we both needed the rest. We’ve been burning the candles at both ends and it was starting to accumulate. I ordered some Tim Horton’s from Uber Eats and I watched some YouTube while robyn read some of her school assignments. We continued to persue those things after the food arrived and enjoyed breakfast in bed.

By two, I wanted to get out of bed and get some grass seed to over seed the lawn. I got dressed and Robyn joined me on a trip to Home Depot. There were some other odds and ends we needed to pick up there as well and we decided just o have a look around the store to see what was there.

We ended up going down the aisle for over the range microwaves and decided to get a new one. Back when we had to get a new oven, we had spotted this one that had an extendable hood fan made by LG, the same make as our new stove. The extra hood is supposed to suck up two times more than before. Our current microwave is over twenty years old, and we thought since my car engine didn’t cost me anything we would get the new microwave and have it installed.

It cost an extra two hundred dollars to have it installed and to have the old one removed from the property. Neither of us has much free time these days and any installation problems become the installers, not mine, so I was happy to pay the fee to get rid of any issues.

It will be great to have a matching set again for the oven and microwave and the online reviews I have seen all seem to positive and I suspect the fan noise of the exhaust fans will be quieter than our old one. I can’t imagine it being any louder.

Back home I spread the grass seed by hand, mostly concentrating on the backyard and just hitting a few problem spots in the front. Then I grabbed two bags of lawn soil I already had from the garage and covered the seeded area with a light covering before giving the lawn a good soak.

I got an update from Amazon regarding my new headphones, and they have shipped and will be here sometime tomorrow. I’ll be working from home so that works out great. They were originally set to arrive on the twentieth so it’s great to get them a bit earlier in the week.

While we were out, the kids went to Pet Smart and that had me worried they might come back with another pet. The last thing we need right now is a new animal in the house. Luckily, I think the kids weren’t looking at cats but just looking at options to replace the deceased hamster with a more robust model, since the last one didn’t live for very long.

Robyn worked on her schoolwork while I finally started my writing. At some point I decided to measure our current microwave and see how it compared to the new one we were getting. The depth was about the same and the width was identical. The problem was the height. The new one would be about an inch and a half taller, and I wondered if it would be too close the stove top.

My initial measurements had me sure that the new one would sit down too low. It might look odd and not be very practical. The old microwave was 15 inches high, and the new one is almost 18.

I found I could lower the height of the stove top by about ¾ inch by changing the height of the adjustable legs. That gave us some extra space.

I don’t think we’ll be able to get our largest pot there anymore with the extendable collector, but we don’t have it open to use the fan. Having those thoughts, I had to go and remeasure everything and put the biggest pot on the stove and see. It had plenty of room. Maybe we might need to be a bit more careful when taking the lid on and off. Also, our current microwave looks less tall than it is because of how the trim is put on. You don’t see the extra half an inch of the underside as easily and there is probably another half an inch hidden on top.

I went back to my writing and went through the words I had written last time, adding some details and fixing a few sentences. It’s a good way to get back into the swing of things and it’s a way to load the story back into my creative mind.

I took a break and had a bubble spa to relax and get ready for the big writing session for tonight. I really didn’t want to put myself into this position again of writing on a Sunday night well into the early morning of Monday, but here I am. I really need to crack this pushing the deadlines thing. It just isn’t working for me anymore and it creates unnecessary stress on me. And who needs more stress in their lives.

Now that I am writing the story, I am enjoying the creative process. So why don’t I do this for an hour a day throughout the week? It boggles the mind.

I’d gotten through most of the first scene by the time I took my break. By ten thirty I had completed the first scene. That was about 3200 hundred words and a bit longer than I had thought it would go. Maybe contemporary fantasy just requires more description? But in all fairness, I did have two locations to describe and three characters this time around.

One the plus side, I have made my word quota for the day already and half of it was fiction and the other was this blog. Now if only I could do that every day.

I took a short nap from eleven until eleven thirty to recharge my writing batteries. I grabbed my noise cancelling earbuds while I was at it because the house is making all kinds of noises tonight. One of the was the refrigerator, whose fan sounded like it was rubbing on an ice buildup again. I have a feeling it’s all the humidity we’ve had in the air this past month.

I set the fridge into defrost mode and tried to nap while it beeped away. Unfortunately, there is no way to silence the alarm it makes. Of course, had I been thinking I could have used those noise-canceling earbuds I had just retrieved from the bedroom.

Time to write a scene from the point of view of the baddies.

I wrote a short scene and then decided it needed to come earlier in the story. I found the best spot for it and inserted it. I had to readjust the start and stop of the other scenes to accommodate the new scene, but it all went easily.

Around three AM I knew I wasn’t going to be able to finish the story, it was going to be a longer one and I had neither the time nor the energy.

The days of me writing late into the morning are over for now, I think. I just don’t have it in me anymore to pull those long hours.

I headed to bed feeling a little defeated and mad at myself.

I must make some changes.

Until tomorrow.