#366 - A Chat with the Police

Getting a good night’s sleep really helped feel better this morning.

I woke with a slightly more optimistic view of things, although the impending amount of work I need to accomplish, both personal and professional ways heavily on my mind. I can almost hear the ticking of the countdown timer in my head.

I got to my desk by nine and started in right away. There was the usual number of messages, and my lack of sleep from the night before was starting to rear its head. I found myself to be easily distracted and each message that came through on Teams or Outlook set me back.

It took a bit longer for me to organize myself, and I had to sit down and think out my plan of attack for the day.

Just before eleven I got a call from the police department asking if I could come to the station to deal with my car. I left immediately and was there in less than fifteen minutes. A female officer was waiting for me in her cruiser, and she took down my information. She left me in the parking lot and went to go get the other driver’s information so we could proceed. The man denied that he knew he’d hit my car and that he sped away running through a stop sign in the process.

I laughed on the phone when the office told me what he’d said. I got the impression she didn’t believe him either.

I came back to the house, a little later and got back to work. I’d just got my plan of attack worked out for the rest of the day and was about to sink my teeth in it when I got a text from Robyn asking if we were going for a walk.

Geared up to dig into my work, I was a little annoyed, but I recognized that I really needed the walk and that I would be better for it after some exercise.

It was nice day for a walk. The sky looked like it wanted to rain and it was humid, but the temperature was nice and cool. We both agreed that we really needed the exercise and to get up from our desks.

During the walk I got a call from the man who hit my car asking if I would be willing to settle the damage without going through our insurance companies. He repeated the lies he told the officer and I told him to stop right there. It’s one thing to lie to the police, but I wasn’t going to put up with it. I’d seen him hit the car, realize what he’d done and race away like he’d just robbed a bank.

I don’t trust this guy one bit, so I am wary of not going through the insurance companies. If he lied to me and the police, he would find a way to stiff me out of the bill or arrange for a shoddy repair job.

Either way, I need to make time to stop in at a Collision Reporting Center. I still have to talk to my insurance company and see what they advise. It’s just coming at a bad time when I have very little bandwidth to deal with these things.

I returned to work, put on some music after dealing with too many messages on Teams and got down to work. Strangely, when I checked Teams there were no more messages until the end of the day. Funny how that works sometimes.

Playing music helped me to focus and not get distracted. By the end of the day, I was able to get quite a bit done. At least I felt better about the amount of work that still needed to happen. If I wasn’t in apposition where I needed to write all day tomorrow, I might have done some overtime work instead. Who knows, if the writing goes well tomorrow, I may still have some time to work extra hours.

I suspect I won’t feel like it afterwards.

As it stands, I have tonight and all day tomorrow to write 16,500 words.

Yikes!

I’m keen to try out the Neo software as well. I’m hoping it will really help me write my novels, simply because of how easy it is to use. An IOS version would be cool to run on my phone and iPad for on the go writing. I don’t think those versions exist right now, but i think I remember there being something about being able to run Neo from thumb drive if you wanted making any computer something you could write on. That speaks to my ideal writing situation of using of free moments of time.

I’ve played with the software a little and imported some of my finished short stories into Neo’s built in bookshelf. The importing happened very fast and seemed to work well. I love that I can add my own book cover art to the bookshelf as well, making it really easy to find my work as I often associate them with the visuals.

Not that there is anything wrong with Word, but there are some things they could learn from the distraction-free software that is gaining in popularity.

It would be nice if they had a distraction-free setting that you could customize and then just hit a button. It would cancel spell checking and do all the formatting things that Neo does for you. The word count features that Neo has could be added as well, like sprint goals, total words per session or day as well as just a global word count.

But I don’t think Microsoft Words bread and butter is for writers who want an easier experience during the creation stage of a novel.

My little microwave fix needs some tweaking. Tonight, for some reason, the magnets are not holding the sliding hood back. The pressure to come forward is stronger or the magnet adhesion to the metal plates has changed some how. I think it might be improved by shifting the catches half a millimetre forward. The initial install was really just a proof of concept to see if it could even work. The catches are only held on with 3M tape, so they can be removed and repositioned if necessary.

A larger steel plate might make a bit of a difference as well, giving the magnets more to catch onto.

I listened to the last essay in my new David Sedaris audiobook and was sad it had ended so quickly. Many of the audiobooks I like are only eight hours long in most cases. Is it so wrong to want a thirty-hour Dennis. E. Taylor book or thirty hours of Sedaris essays?

A guy can dream, can’t he?

After work finished, I cut our lawn. The front was okay, but the back was getting long and I felt the new grass had enough time to handle a cutting. I needed a bit of a break, and I put on two YouTube videos and then started a movie called Pressure. It’s about the D-Day invasion and the weather guys trying to decide if it was safe to invade Normandy.

While watching the movie, kiddo #1 called out for help. She was downstairs in the kitchen preparing some food and chopping some vegetables so she could roast them. She’d sliced the side her thumb with a freshly sharpened knife all the way to the fingernail. It was a deep cut bit it wasn’t bleeding too bad. I thought she was going to faint every time she tried to look at it.

I took a look and it looked deep, but not serious enough to go to a hospital. We cleaned it up and got her a bandage and some food service gloves so she could continue. I offered to de-skin the chicken thighs for her. No one wants raw chicken near a fresh cut, nor do they want a fresh cut anywhere near their chicken!

Back upstairs, I got a little further into the movie, maybe the first third, before Robyn came home, so I turned it off to go say hello. I was just thinking about how to celebrate a year of blogging every day, and how I wanted a sweet snack when she presented me with a bag of goodies. There were Swedish Berries, Snickers and Kit Kat bars and some potato chips and apple turnovers. Take about marrying the right girl!

I think she got them for me because she knew I was having a hard couple of weeks and she wanted to do something nice for me. And she really did.

I had a lot of writing to start, but it just felt right to relax for a bit and enjoy some snacks and tv with my girl. Robyn and the kids had eaten already, I ordered a McDouble burger and cheeseburger from McDonalds. We watched the daily show followed by Seth Myers.

My writing teachers really loved the new Reacher spinoff called Neagle. They were impressed by the storytelling, so I added that to our watchlist, but Robyn was getting tired. By that time, it was eleven thirty. Robyn went to bed and I moved down to the living room to start writing. Anything I could do to knock down the number of words to be written tomorrow would be helpful.

I also got wise this time around with my tracking spread sheet. Before I logged of my work computer, I opened the google sheet and made the entries for the next three months. Usually, I do this on my laptop, but it is so much easier to accomplish this task on a full desktop machine. The copying and pasting are so much smoother and accurate.

Our friends called to check on the progress with our car, the police and the guy that hit us. They gave us some backstory on the guy, and it confirmed that my instinct not to trust him was probably correct.

The replacement rice cooker I orderd arrived today as well. I got a bit of a chuckle when I opened the package and realized how small it was. It might make enough for one person, but it wasn’t going to feed a family of four anytime!

I think the next one I get, I’ll buy from a physical store so I can see how big it is first.

Live and learn, I guess.

As much as I have a ton of writing to do tomorrow, I still plan to take some breaks. I’ll even use a bit of dictation to give my fingers a rest. Luckily, I have an episode of Slow Horses to watch tomorrow as one of my breaks. I like having a good show sitting there waiting for me to watch it.

I was just thinking about how little I used my stand up scooter this year. I think kiddo #2 got more use out of it than I did. I may have ridden in twice this season. Once at the beginning of the season to make sure it was alright and once at the cottage to go from the cottage down to the dock. It’s another sign that I have just been to busy and or tired to use it. Last year it as my way of letting off a little steam at the end of the day.

A little adventure on the weekend to explore the town for a few hours here and there.

I barely have had to take a walk after work, and sometimes at all this past summer. I definitely have to make getting my steps in a priority going forward.

One thing that keeps me motivated is the idea that next year I will be writing novels. I think it represents the next stage in my growth. I’ll likely be doing thee things for myself as well. Even I fi join one of the challenges, it still just my own motivation that will keep my on the writing chair. But, if I want this to be a career option, I think novels are the way to go. It’s where most of the income potential comes from. All those shows on Apple TV came from novels not short stories. Not that it can’t happen of course. Ted Lasso came from a SuperBowl commercial. It’s doing pretty good.

But all the other shows I watch all have the same line at the beginning: Based on the novel by….

I’d like my name to be at the end of that ellipsis one day. And the only way to make that happen is to spend time in the writing chair pumping out entertaining stories.

I am quickly running out of energy. That’s the problem with staying up until seven Am writing. It saps you of all your reserves. It’s one thirty in the morning right now, so it’s no surprise that I am hearing the call to come to bed.

As it stands right now, I have fifteen thousand words to write tomorrow. Dictation is probably the only way I am going to able to achieve that. And it’s going to take me all day. I know I have talked about getting time to practice my dictation skills, but this is a bit overkill.

I should be really good at it by the end of the day.

I’ve found myself watching videos about Cane Corso dogs ever since I looked them up for a story. It’s probably because my algorithm is feeding me videos because I looked into it one night. It’s becoming a pain in the ass to be honest. It’s like if you go into a store and an overly helpful employee follows you around. You pick up an item out of curiosity and now the helpful employee tries to show you every variation on the thing you pick up.

I think I am ready to pack it in for the night.

My goal was to get the quota down to the 15,000 mark or lower and I have ben able to do that. It still means tomorrow is going to be record making day for me. And long and maybe even a bit tedious. But once again, I am, mostly the one to blame for that!

This month was just filled with setbacks and distractions from what I wanted to do.

But that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Until tomorrow.