Category Archives: Boring

Streaks

26 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by in Boring

≈ 1 Comment

I’m starting to feel terribly stressed by the approaching end of the year and all the things I both want to do and need to do in the very near future. I’m trying to remind myself to breathe.

Breathe, breathe, breathe, and all else will fall into place.

But it feels like I have lots of things that I’ve been putting on my list to take care of soon that have all stacked up now, not taken care of, and needing to be done.

Get my websites back up as independent domains. Format the translations for print editions. Organize my financial info for taxes and FAFSA purposes. Create a new budget for next year, based on the data from my first five months of traveling (with realistic numbers for how much my darling dogs actually cost me.) Get Serenity in for service, help my sister move, visit my brother in Fort Lauderdale, get birthday presents for Rory, do my laundry, respond to emails… you get the idea.

I’m letting the things in my to-do list start to intimidate me, even though a) most of the things have been waiting for me to do them for a while and the fact that it is the end of the year does not make them more  imperative, just makes it more obvious that I really should take care of them and stop dwelling on needing to take care of them and b) some of them are just life. Normal life that requires that we do stuff.

But I’m using an app that I found recently called Streaks, and it’s making me so much more aware of getting things done, if that makes any sense. Streaks describes itself as “a to-do list that helps you form good habits.” It’s really simple — you set 6 tasks and when they need to happen and when you want reminders and then let it go.

It can link to Apple Health, which is really nice for some types of tasks. So, for example, my first task is to walk 4000 steps and my goal is to do that every day. Apple Health tracks how many steps I’m walking and in Streaks, a circle gradually gets filled until I reach my goal. If I haven’t reached the goal by 3:30 in the afternoon, it sends me a reminder that I still want to walk. Right now, I have successfully reached the goal 21 days in a row, so yay me.

Another one of my goals is to meditate for 15 minutes every day. I use a meditation app as a timer, set the timer for 15 minutes, do my best to stay still, breathe, and listen to the universe, and when the timer goes off, the app sends my meditation info to Apple Health and Apple Health sends it to Streaks and Streaks marks my goal as successful for the day.

I also have a goal of writing Morning Words, which is basically stream-of-consciousness journaling every day; writing 2 blog posts a week; and writing 1000 words of fiction 6x/week. I gave myself one day off for fiction because sometimes it’s just not going to happen.

Since I started using Streaks, I’ve hit all those goals. The app counts the number of days in a row you succeed (that’s why I know how many days I’ve walked) and it really does work to motivate me. There was one day last week where my morning walk got cut short and my afternoon walk wasn’t enough, and I did actually take a longer-than-usual evening walk just because I didn’t want to break my streak. (I should note that 4000 steps is really not a huge amount to walk, less than 2 miles, and I should probably set it higher if I really want it to count as pushing myself. Maybe in the new year!)

But checking items off my checklist every day is making me more aware of all the things in my life that are not on my checklist and that are not getting checked off. I guess that’s a good thing? Honestly, I’m not sure it is. Today I have started laundry and exercised–a class, thirty minutes on the cross-trainer, and a mile walk with the dog!–and cleaned up Serenity and written morning words and now I’m writing a blog post and I ought to feel accomplished and like I’ve gotten a lot done. And instead I think wow, it’s noon already, and I have so much to DO.

Breathe, breathe, breathe.

I hope all your Christmases were merry! I’m hanging out at my dad’s house, parked here for one more night, and moving on tomorrow to a friend’s house. My big plan for the next few days–and maybe part of why I feel like I have so much to DO–is driveway surfing and visiting lots of local friends. But I am really hoping to get my website stuff taken care of while I’m able to use internet that doesn’t measure cost by megabytes, so that’s the plan for the afternoon. That and writing my 1000 words of fiction because right now, while I’m sorry those are not happening to be words on Grace, I am really enjoying the story I am writing and those 1000 words are turning into the best part of my day.

And that is the best result of all of my Streaks results.

 

The loneliness of joy

08 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by in Boring, Personal, Serenity

≈ 7 Comments

I know solitary confinement is torture, but part of me thinks I’d do just fine with it. Obviously, I’d prefer it if it included my dogs and a fully-loaded ebook reader and something to write with and on, preferably keyboard-oriented, but even without all that, I think I’d be okay, at least for a longer while than most people. I’ve never been one of those people who can’t stand their own company and after almost twenty years of primarily working from home, I’m really pretty good at solitude.

Obviously, that doesn’t stop me from getting lonely–everyone is lonely sometimes–but I didn’t worry about loneliness being a problem in my traveling life. I considered it, but I thought I’d be fine. And I am. Mostly.

The interesting discovery I’ve made/am making is that loneliness is deeper, at least for me, when it comes with joy. When I’m having a bad day or something’s gone wrong, I might want someone to vent to or share with or even get help from — I spilled coffee everywhere this morning and it would be really nice if someone could have grabbed the computer while I was getting the dogs out of the way — but generally speaking, the thought doesn’t even occur to me. I grumble to myself or to the dogs and I try to take my time with problems and if I really need help, well, that’s what the phone is for. I don’t usually feel lonely because something’s gone wrong.

But when something’s gone right…when I see an incredible sunrise or a mysterious animal or have a funny story I want to share (like the text I got from my son the other day, where he said, “It is a mark of how Floridian I am that when I first started seeing icicles I thought they were decorations,” which just makes me smile every time I think of it)… that’s when I notice how alone I am. I’m still okay with it — it’s not like I’m in solitary confinement, my solitude is not breaking my spirit or driving me insane — but those are the moments when I feel lonely.

I suspect I will also notice how alone I am the first time Serenity has a major breakdown. Life happens. If I spend all my life on the road, then at some point, I will be stranded or I will have a flat tire and I’m definitely going to be wishing for company at that moment.

Anyway, I feel like I should be going somewhere profound with this thought but I’m not. It’s just an insight. I truly love my life right now. I feel incredibly lucky to be living the way I’m living, even when what I’m basically doing is sitting in a parking lot (as I am right now). My mobile tiny house life is far from perfect — I’ve got a pile of coffee-stained stuff in the middle of my floor waiting for me to solve the laundry problem and something that I haven’t been able to track down yet has made the van smell musty for a couple of days — but it is really damn good. So good, in fact, that I am lonelier than I imagined being. I’d call that ironic, but really maybe it’s just incongruous?

I’m currently in Wildwood, Florida, in a Thousand Trails campground. Yesterday, I was trying to pull a burr off Zelda and it just would not come — I finally realized it was a tick, incredibly bloated. I suspect half of it is still in her, but the internet assures me that it’ll probably come out on its own. So gross. The campground… well, I’m here because it’s a cheap place to stay while I work on Grace. I’m making a conscious effort, a quest, to find something beautiful every day. It’s harder than it should be. Fortunately, looking up almost always works.

 

sunset-at-wildwood

 

St. Augustine

03 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by in Boring, Florida, Pets, WIP

≈ 7 Comments

I am staying at a campground, a state park, on the beach. The lovely ocean with miles of sandy beach is easy walking distance away. And yet, I haven’t touched it and have only seen it once.

Traveling with dogs is totally worthwhile, but also more challenging than I expected. When I say “easy walking distance,” I mean easy walking distance for Zelda and me, not for Bartleby. It would be a long, long walk for him and an even longer walk for me if I wound up carrying him. But that’s irrelevant because dogs aren’t allowed on the beach. If I wanted to go to the beach, I’d have to leave both dogs behind in Serenity.

Want to know what else is not allowed? Leaving your dogs unaccompanied at your campsite. And actually, I’m pretty sympathetic to that one: the chance definitely exists that both dogs would bark in misery the whole time I was gone, if I wanted to leave them, which I don’t.

So I’m at the beach, but not enjoying the beach. Fortunately, I am enjoying my campsite. It’s pretty and big and quiet, tucked back in a corner of a reasonably empty campground. Two nights ago I was a little freaked out by its isolation as I listened to very loud rustling in the bushes, but I finally dug out my flashlight and shone it out on the raccoons climbing the tree about ten feet away from my window. I was then still a little freaked out — raccoons are kind of big when they’re so close and there were two of them — but hey, it wasn’t a bear or a serial killer, so I did relax enough to go to sleep eventually.

I’ve also had some really lovely walks around the campground. There’s a loop called the Ancient Dunes loop, which is supposedly a pleasant half hour walk (presumably for people who aren’t being walked by a fast-paced Jack Russell terrier), but is a fun up-and-down trek on a sandy path through the Florida forest. Lots of mosquitoes, of course, and they do love me, and a few too many spiders who built their webs across the path — sorry, spiders, for destroying all your hard work, and ick, ick, ick, spider webs on me — but it’s so primeval that you can almost imagine yourself in the Jurassic. Well, or at least a few hundred years ago. I think the trees are probably all too small to be good dinosaur territory. And the occasional signs explaining the history and the plants sort of destroy the impression. But it’s still fun to be taking our usual morning walk through such different territory.

 

I haven’t made nearly as much progress on Grace as I was hoping for — it’s been hard to get back into the rhythm that I had going so well in Vero Beach and I swear that the mere existence of NaNoWriMo now causes my writing ability to freeze solid — but I’m hoping for today to be a better day. So hi-ho, hi-ho, off to write I go.

website fail

10 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in Boring, Self-publishing

≈ 3 Comments

I’m feeling very gloomy about the state of my website today. Dreamhost told me I needed to update PHP, but when I did, my sites wouldn’t come back. I tried to restore them and the restorations failed and they sent me the most obnoxious email in response. This line in particular…

“Howevvvvver… we actually make no
guarantees about availability of backups, and highly recommend you
always keep your own copies of all important data.  Please follow the
link below for instructions with this:”

The link below sends you to instructions for backing up your data which is kind of irrelevant if your data is already gone. Rude, don’t you think? I’m going to be leaving them as a provider just for that line. The last thing I need when my sites are failing to restore is my provider being an asshole.

Fortunately, I had backed up my data: complete XML files for both sites. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out at all how to turn those backups back into my sites. Their help system was useless, they don’t respond to emails, and their customer support system kept sending automated replies to my emails explaining why they weren’t able to help me. Goodbye, Dreamhost.

My friend Lynda told me to make a wordpress site, upload my data, and redirect the Dreamhost sites to the wordpress site until I can find a better long-term solution, so that is what I’ve done. But for whatever reason, WordPress is choking on my site. Trying to get the post window open took forever and every minute, I get an error message that “Saving the draft failed.” Such a pain!

Not to mention that the menus on the site are screwed up for some reason and I can’t figure out how to do a mailing list sign up without having it be a pop-up which I seriously, seriously don’t want. I loathe those pop-ups, I do NOT want one on my site. They’re so damn rude! And that purple color in the header? Um, no. Just no, no, no.

Fortunately, I am at my dad’s house in Mount Dora, so I have internet. Unfortunately (that’s seeming like the theme of this blog post — the fortunate, unfortunate thing), this isn’t remotely what I want to write about, think about, or do. *sigh* I have so many more interesting things to write about and so many better things to do! But for the moment, this is what we’ve got. I’m going to try to post, so that I can see whether it’s working at all,  and then I’m going to go back to messing around with the behind the scenes details. And I hope — fervently! — that my next post is going to be far more fun and back to focusing on travels and writing, not website design.

Letting go of expectations

07 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by in Boring, Meditation

≈ 5 Comments

The search for happiness begins with letting go of expectations.

I can’t remember where I read that (and I probably mangled it, since I can’t find the link) but I was thinking about it this morning while I was practicing meditating. At first I really thought it was one of those bullshit philosophical sentiments that make absolutely no sense with a closer look. Like, really, one of those “you will only find the thing that you are looking for when you stop looking” ideals that may be occasionally true, but is mostly not helpful. Sure, I’ve had moments when I’ve given up on finding my keys and suddenly remembered where they might be, but most of the time I find my misplaced keys by looking for them. And not looking, while it might eventually work, does not get me out of the house on time.

But while I was meditating and my thoughts were roaming, as they do, I realized time and again that what I was thinking about was an expectation. Example one, things to do. I had a moment of realizing that I still didn’t manage to do a two-minute job for a friend, felt guilty, resolved to do it immediately, or at least as soon as I stopped meditating — and then realized that my plan was an expectation, an expectation for what I would be doing next. So I reminded myself to let it go. (I will still do it, of course, but I let the pressure of needing to do it immediately and the guilt of not having done it yet go.)

Next I started worrying about Serenity. The dealer called yesterday and they couldn’t find anything wrong with the air-conditioner. Not an okay answer. But worrying is just another expectation, an expectation for a future that will be the way I want it to be. There’s nothing I can do to influence either what’s wrong with Serenity or what will happen next, so what value does worry have? It is entirely contrary to my nature to try to let go of that kind of worry, but I did it anyway. I thought of it as an expectation and tried to let it go.

I went back to trying to focus on my breath and still my noisy brain, but my nose was dripping. It’s tough to be peaceful when you have a runny nose. So then I started questioning whether I was sick or allergic and running back over all the things I’ve eaten recently, trying to figure out what I could be reacting to. But that’s another expectation, in its own way. I’m expecting that something I ate might be making me sick. And really, what difference does it make? My runny nose is going to stay the same, regardless of whether it’s caused by a cold virus or injudicious dairy intake. What benefit does deciding that I’m to blame possibly give me?

At that point, I was totally into the idea. Every thought that came up, I looked at and tried to see how it could be labeled an expectation. As soon as I defined the thought as an expectation, I tried to let it go. Unexpectedly, I got happier and happier as I did so, until the bell rang and I finished my meditation on a pleasant glow.

I was talking to a parent friend a few weeks ago who’s struggling with her adolescent daughter. She’d snapped at her daughter, “Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” Her daughter’s answer, “Right, of course!” I think wanting to be right is expectation-thinking. I’m not sure I can express it better than that, but for today, I’m going to try living without expectation (to the extent that is even possible for an obsessive, controlling, perfectionist type) and see where it gets me. Because I think at this point in my life, I’m grown up enough to decide that I would rather be happy than right.

More about moving

04 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by in Boring, House, RV

≈ 12 Comments

This morning, while I was sitting out on my lanai, enjoying the early morning breeze (early-ish, it was maybe 7:30), I had a million ideas for blog posts. (<–hyperbole). Two hours later, sitting in my room, having done an assortment of organizational and internet-related tasks, all of those ideas are totally gone. What did I want to write about again? Oh, right, Serenity first.

I picked her up last Wednesday, YAY!, and when I wrote my blog post last Thursday, she was sitting in my driveway, feeling something like an overwhelming Christmas present, needing to be unwrapped but almost too scary to touch. So much to learn, so much to do, so much stuff to move in and organize and…

…that all became irrelevant Thursday evening, when in the midst of a torrential rainstorm, I discovered that it was also raining inside Serenity. I am trying to count this as fortunate in so many ways — it happened while I was here, still with a dry bed to sleep in. It happened in a big way. If the weather hadn’t been so extreme, it might have taken me weeks to realize that a few drips were a symptom of a serious problem. It happened before I’d moved much stuff into her, so she could go back to the dealer without inconveniencing me unduly. All good things. Of course, they’re sort of counter-balanced by the rather bad thing of it raining inside my future home, but hey, glass half-full. It could have been so much worse. I would have been very unhappy to learn that she leaked at 3AM when I was sleeping under the leak.

So, yeah, Serenity is back at the dealer and I’m really, really hoping to get her back sometime this week. Obviously, one of the dumb issues that I’m going to have to figure out how to deal with when my home needs repair is that she’s also my vehicle. I need to find a ride to get back to her, a ride to get home when I drop her off. It’s not so convenient.

In other things — my weekend felt bizarrely chaotic and overwhelming. The house is a mess and I’m still needing to get rid of more stuff. I’m definitely at the point where the decisions get harder and harder. I have approximately 50 shirts. This is too many shirts. In so many ways, this is too many shirts! But I’ve already said good-bye to all the ones that I didn’t really like, that didn’t really fit as well as I wanted them to or weren’t as flattering as I thought they’d be. I’ve also gotten rid of all the ones that I loved, but that were showing signs of their age. (Almost all of those, a couple are going to get worn until they’re literal shreds. I have a Lehigh University t-shirt that is probably fifty years old, maybe older, faded, with holes, and I still love it.) So, yeah, hard choices about stuff going on.

Also much trying to plan. The house closes three weeks from today. Where am I going to sleep that night? For that matter, where I am going to sleep the night before that? I will have needed to get the furniture out of the house before closing, because it’s not like I’m sticking it on a truck and moving it to the next place. But Serenity needs power to run the air-conditioner, and the guy who showed me around warned me that house power (i.e., not 30 amp) was not sufficient to run the AC. And in Florida, in July? I need the air-conditioner. I can run it on the generator, but probably shouldn’t all night. So the house closes in three weeks, but I need to be staying elsewhere before then, and elsewhere needs to be close enough that I can conveniently come to the closing. Decisions, decisions.

And yeah, somewhere along the way, I’d really like to get back to writing regularly. I’ve missed too many days in a row, because of the distractions of camper ownership, camper repair, and house chaos. But one day at a time, right?

Today’s goal: well, some words would be nice, but I need to get simpler than that. Email! I don’t know how many emails are stacked up in my inbox right now but far too many of them are real emails that deserved real replies. So today’s goal–clean out my inbox, do some more work on cleaning out my house, and remember to enjoy the moment that I’m in. Also, yoga. It’s been at least three or four days, which is too long to go for something that always makes me feel more settled and joyful.

Happy Fourth of July!

March 31st

31 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by in Boring

≈ 4 Comments

I am trying not to beat myself up about the fact that I’ve reached the end of another month and still not finished Grace. If you’d told me this would happen at the end of November, I would have given up. Quit writing, started looking for a real job… maybe I could become a paralegal. That’s always sounded sort of interesting. Or sell insurance? That’s never sounded interesting, but maybe I’d be good at it.

My friend E thinks I should quit beating myself up in general. Not just about writing but about ALL the things. I ate gluten last week at Universal because I was at that stage of sugar-crashing where I could feel myself turning mean. We were getting rained on and the lines were long and I needed to eat ASAP, so I had a chocolate muffin because it was expedient. Later, since I’d already eaten gluten and not particularly enjoyed it, I had pizza. Might as well go for broke. However, broke(n) is how I’ve felt all week. Like I’m coming down with the flu. I’ve had a load of laundry in the dryer for two days and the thought of folding it just seems so overwhelmingly exhausting. Yep, gluten-reaction. I know it’ll happen, and yet I eat the gluten anyway. And before I start being mean to myself and/or whining about that, I’ll stop. I should start feeling better tomorrow, so yay, something to look forward to.

Forty-five minutes ago, when I was walking the dogs on a truly beautiful morning — the sun was rising, the sky was streaked with gorgeous deep pink clouds and a half-moon was still brightly white in the deeper blue sky — I had so many things I wanted to write about. Packing and traveling and memories of the past, books I’m reading, choices I’m making, so many thoughts overflowing my brain. Now that I’m sitting down at the computer, not so much. So maybe I’ll open my most recent file on Grace and stare blankly at it, instead. Yesterday’s writing was definitely progress — probably not quite enough momentum to push me all the way through my rewrites, but I’m getting there, I hope.

First, though, I’ll tag this post “boring.” Sorry!

Towels

25 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Bartleby, Boring, Personal, Pets, Zelda

≈ 8 Comments

I did laundry this weekend and actually washed ALL the things. Sheets, towels, tablecloths, clothing — by the end of the weekend, all the fabric in my house was clean. Go, me!

Except it turned out to be a terrible idea. I was also freezing all weekend long, wondering whether my heater was broken. I didn’t have two feet of snow, but the temperature was down in the 30’s and 40’s, which for us is cold. It was only on my last load of laundry that I realized that my thermostat is on the wall outside the laundry room. With the dryer running all weekend, the thermostat thought the house was lovely and warm. In my bedroom, I thought socks under the covers were barely enough to get by. Grr… or maybe I should be saying Brr…?

Post all the laundry, I needed fresh towels in my bathroom. I went looking for my favorites, the ones that belong in there. They’re blue, soft and thick, and big. Bath sheets, really, not towels. I’ve got plenty of towels, of course, but those two are the best. I couldn’t find them. I checked all the places towels might remotely hide. The other bathroom, the cupboard, the linen closet, my closet… no towels. I hadn’t seen them for a while but I’d just been assuming that they were somewhere — in a laundry basket or in the laundry room — but no.

And then I remembered — before R went back to school, he asked if he could take towels with him.

I told him, sure, of course.

He asked whether it mattered which ones he took.

I told him to take whichever ones he liked.

He pushed, said, “Are you sure? Any of them?”

I said, “Yeah, we’ve got plenty of towels. Take the ones you want.”

He started explaining to me how he really didn’t like the towels he had, because they weren’t absorbent enough and they didn’t dry fast enough and he liked softer towels, and I, frankly, tuned him out, because a) towels, not the most interesting subject, and b) I was in the middle of getting ready to have people over and thinking about food and cleaning.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have paid more attention.

There’s a part of me that’s annoyed — if I had not thought that MY towels were safely in my bathroom or laundry, I would not have told him he could take whichever towels he wanted. But mostly, I feel a mix of pleasure — I have raised a boy who is aware of the importance of quality linens, ha — and amusement — that teaches me to not pay attention when R is talking! He might even have specifically asked about the blue towels when he was telling me why the towels he had at school were not good enough. Oh, well. I do have plenty of towels, so I’ll survive.

Have I mentioned how much B loves the blow dryer? I don’t usually use a blow dryer but I’d gotten it out recently when I had to leave the house and it was cold and my hair was wet. B danced with delight. Up on his back legs, which he does not usually do, to tell me how excited he was. He knew exactly what it was and he loves it. Since then, I’ve been blowing him dry after his bath. It’s his favorite thing. Z watches us from two feet away, a little jealous of the doting attention that B’s getting but also really reluctant to come near the thing that makes noise. She’s not fond of noisemakers that might be vacuum cleaners.

Anyway, the other day we went for a walk in the rain. Typically, B refuses to walk in the rain. That day, he thought about it at the door and decided to come with us. I was surprised, but when we got home, he went straight to the spot where I’ve blown him dry (a floor outlet) and sat down. It was a very clear demand. My dogs have me so well trained.

Filing

21 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by in Boring, Personal, Randomness

≈ 5 Comments

I decided today that it was time to tackle the filing that I have let pile up for… ahem. A while. (I have no idea how long, but if I ever make it to the bottom of the pile, I will probably be embarrassed by the answer.)

It was a strategic decision: when everything needs to be done and cleaning is feeling overwhelming, start with one corner, then move on.

I got maybe halfway through. Maybe. Could be closer to 1/3 through. Then I decided that I needed to go do something else for a while, because it was causing sensations of impending doom. Do you have ever that feeling that life is completely out of your control and that your feeble attempt to keep track of stuff is throwing rocks at the incoming tide? Yeah, not my favorite feeling. And the reality is, who cares if the filing is done? I could take that entire pile of stuff and pitch it in the trash right now, today, and nobody would ever notice or care. Except maybe me when it came time to do my taxes and I didn’t have any receipts.

I just wrote a long ramble about things that pile up and then deleted it because it was possibly the most boring thing I have ever written. That’s a tough bar to reach, frankly, because I have written some boring stuff in my day. I used to write press releases and while one tries, of course, to make every word scintillating, a press release is only interesting if you have some intrinsic reason to care about the topic. For most people, they’re barely skimmable. My thoughts on dog hair (as a substance that really piles up amazingly) were about the same. But writing a blog post is my current justification for not returning to that pile of filing.

In my other writing, I seem to have gone colon and semi-colon crazy lately. I’m blaming Uprooted — I noticed on my third reading that Naomi Novik was quite profligate with her punctuation and it did not in any way impair my reading enjoyment, so I guess maybe it rubbed off. My run-on sentences are all my own fault, though.

*sigh. This is the kind of post that involves much staring into space and the eventual realization that I’m just procrastinating. There are so many useful things that I need to be doing — laundry and dog walking and yes, filing — that I might as well get on with them. But I think I need to reward myself. No food rewards and nothing healthy pretending to be a reward … Ah, I know. But I need help!

What movie/television show, preferably on Netflix or Amazon Prime, should I watch as deserved entertainment when I finish the filing?

 

 

Chromebook progress

05 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by in Boring, Randomness, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

The abuse of the last couple days of NaNo — hours banging away on the computer to get those last 12,000 words — was a little too much for my laptop’s keyboard. The 8 key had already been sticking, but the i key and the n key stopped working regularly. Argh. Trying to write and having every sentence turn into “tryng to wrte” is disconcerting.

I’m hard on my keyboards, I’ve discovered. Back in the day when I used Apple machines most of the time for work I didn’t have problems, but when I quit my job and switched to cheap Windows PCs, I started needing a new keyboard every year or so. And not because I spilled stuff on them, just because steady typing takes its toll.

This one, though, left me with a dilemma. I’d promised myself that when it bit the dust, I would go back to a Mac, figuring that the quality was worth the investment. A computer that didn’t need a new keyboard every year and that had some operating system stability (don’t get me started on Windows — I hated 8 but my problems with 10 never ended) would be a bargain in the long run. Not to mention the time I’d save by not fighting with it all the time. But I’d hoped to at least finish a book on it first. Maybe two! In other words, I needed it to last long enough for me to earn some money on it before I could make that decision and yet, there it was — it’s tough to earn money from writing when your I and your N are only optional.

Enter… drum roll…. a Chromebook. It’s the other anti-Windows option. I have no idea (yet) whether it will suit me long-term, but when I started looking, I managed to find a deal on Amazon that basically cost me $122 with free same-day delivery. It’s a working keyboard, software that I can use to write on, and for the investment, all I need is for it to last for a few months. And it is so, so, so cute.

Unfortunately, it does have typical Google interface problems. They are so remarkably bad at design. The people there may be incredible coders, but even reading the instructions doesn’t help me figure out how to do things that ought to be obvious. Example: opening up a hangout so I can chat with a friend. It took me probably ten minutes to figure out that I needed to go to the Chrome Web store and download an extension. The things that looked like links on the search results page just didn’t work at all. And figuring out how to use the trackpad is going to take me forever. I may need to put a cheat sheet next to me while I work to remind myself to use three fingers for… well, something or other. I remember reading in the instructions that I could do something by swiping with three fingers but I no longer remember what the something was (proof of the need for a cheat sheet.)

But every time I get impatient, I will remind myself: working keyboard, ability to keep writing without going insane, I key and N key and 8 key… and for basically the price of a single CostCo grocery run. I have to admit, too, it really makes me want to head off to Starbucks and write at a coffee shop, just because it’s so usably light. I could seriously tuck this machine into my purse and not even notice that I was carrying it around, but it still has a usable keyboard. I can also put my iPad in my purse, of course, but writing on that keyboard doesn’t work at all for me.

Anyway, enough rambling about my new device. I’m going to have to experiment with google docs and see if I can set it up to be functional for me without a huge learning curve, and I don’t think this is going to be a complete replacement for a computer — for one thing, I don’t know how I’d create an ebook using only Chrome-capatible software — but first things first. Until I finish writing Grace, I really don’t have to worry about creating an ebook, so time to get started with the writing! Thanks for the good wishes on my last post — I didn’t answer comments because I’ve been very computer frustrated with everything taking longer than usual, but I appreciate them!