Monday, September 16th

The Daily Report

Today begins THE HOLLOWING, which is how I've decided to refer to the act of packing up my attic and getting things ready to move, on the grounds that I am far more likely to finish something called THE HOLLOWING. There are less than three weeks remaining before M-day. After losing another week, my new goal is to be done by next Friday. I've divided my room into tenths and each week day I'm going to tackle one, until everything in it has been boxed, trashed, or deemed immediately necessary and moved to a central location.

I've got a couple of new toys... one is my bike-less exercise bike, which I actually got last week. The other is an app called Remote Droid that turns an Android phone into a handheld wireless keyboard. Why would I want that? Because I can turn my computer chair into an exercise bike, but I can't do that with a keyboard on my lap.

Remote Droid has some small issues that seem to stem from the fact that the designer evidently anticipates people will either use the virtual keyboard or have a full QWERTY keyboard with separate number keys, but it gets the job done. I can do letters and common punctuation on the foldout keyboard and slide it shut when I need something fancier. The one thing I can't get it to do is a colon, but I've set Word up to change two semicolons in a row to a colon.

The State of the Me

Doing well. The heat might spike as high as 88 on Wednesday but other than that it seems like it's going to be a great week for THE HOLLOWING.

Last night was the first night since I've been back in the attic that I had a really good night's sleep.

Also, my fears that the house might be more crowded than ever during my final weeks in Nebraska have proven to be false. It is, in fact, emptier. There's even a vacant bedroom at the bottom of my stairs where I can move things once they've been HOLLOWED.

Plans For Today

Well, it is Day 1 of THE HOLLOWING. There's also a full bank for the bonus story on TOMU. Part of why I'm doing a ten day plan is because then packing will never be anything like an all-day job.

I'm getting near the end of what I have roughed out for Kegan's story... I don't really have anything in mind to say/show about her actual school year. So unless I get a bolt of inspiration there, we're probably nearing the end of her run as a continuous backup feature.

End of day report.

Day one of THE HOLLOWING went better than expected in some ways, worse in others. They're all the same way, though: I did more than I'd planned/expected.

See, I realized that tomorrow I'm taking my cat to the vet for his annual shots and a pre-moving consultation, and this and other errands are likely to eat up a lot of the time I would spend on THE HOLLOWING.

The smart thing to do would have been to realize that I didn't even include weekends in my plan/estimate so there are four days between now and when I move where I could be making up for missed HOLLortunities during the week.

But when today's part of THE HOLLOWING went well... well, I thought, "Let's get two days knocked out at once."

I didn't completely wipe myself out, but I did hit the kind of energy deficit that reminded me why I plan on doing this over the course of 8-10 days in the first place. And then when write o'clock rolled around, I thought, "Let's go see where I left off with Alea and Kegan," and of course it turned out I'd ended on a steamy cliffhanger... and I'd done that to make up for that chapter being a bit of a tease because of a similar life circumstance.

Well, I took a shot at it, but it's hard to write sexy when you're not feeling it. So rather than have another teaser or anti-climax, I decided to circle around and try again later in the week. I like the set-up I've written today, I just don't have it in me to carry things past it.

(Also, it's not a priority compared to simply being packed and ready, but I'm going to be looking for smaller boxes to repack a lot of my boxes of books in. I'm amazed that some of these made it up to the attic in the first place. Tree trunks don't get any lighter when they're pulped and compressed, apparently.)

In other news...

I've tried a bunch of different wifi keyboard and remote apps, and... yeah. As glitchy as it can be, Remote Droid fits my needs the best. I don't know why so many people who design these apps figure that people will want to have to switch between screens/modes to type on a physical keyboard or use a mouse. Like, when you're allowing input from the physical keyboard to begin with, why disable that when the mouse is in operation? Others only have their own virtual keyboard *or* your phone's physical keyboard, not both, and still others don't do a life transfer of typing, but make you type things out and then send it as a batch. And some don't recognize alt characters at all.

RemoteDroid is one of the simplest ones, but it also does more than some of the ones that have more bells and whistles. And glitches aside, it's the one app that seems to be designed with exactly what I'm looking for in mind. So I think I'm going to stick with it.

(Now to uninstall all these remote servers I had to install on my desktop.)