Sidenote: So, I have a tablet now.

I always figured I would be the last daily-computer-using person in the world to get a tablet. I resisted getting a touchscreen-only phone for the longest time because I can type faster and with less thought on a physical keyboard, even a tiny one, and I had very little interest in getting a tablet because by the time you attach your tablet to a keyboard, you’ve basically got a laptop and those already exist.

It seemed to me that anything I wanted a tablet for could be better done by my phone (being more portable and easier to hold) or a full computer. This is where someone pops up to say, “Oh, but a tablet’s so much easier to read,” but I’ve never had a hard time reading anything on my phone. Maybe that’ll change as I age, though oddly at the age of 35 I can read tiny print (and hear in the upper register) better than a lot of twenty-somethings I know.

I didn’t want a tablet, but Jack has wanted a tablet for a while now, so when I went Black Friday shopping with my family (by which I mean, while we all sat on the couch with our phones, laptops, and tablets looking for deals online, where we could comparison shop), I kept my eye out for a good deal. Money has been tight, as he was temporarily out of a job at that time and I hadn’t been able to work, but I found one that was well-rated by what appeared to be actual financially disinterested human beings, had excellent specs, and was marked down from well above my price range to well within it. It wasn’t a brand I’d ever heard of (there are a lot of those, making Android devices), but all the numbers were right.

So, I ordered it.

Now, as fate would have it, Sarah had also decided to get Jack a tablet when she upgraded her phone, which fell in early December. I found out when they asked my opinion on the tablet under consideration. I did some quick mental comparisons. The one I had already purchased and taken delivery on was a bit more of a beast (both physically larger and more powerful), but this one was name brand and had cellular data capability. I decided it would be better for his needs to have a more-portable tablet, since he doesn’t have as easy a time reading things on his phone, so I told them I thought it looked like a good deal and on an unrelated note I needed to get Jack a new Christmas present and also I now had a tablet, too.

They were both a little shocked that I would have bought a major electronic thingy for someone else in the household without any kind of coordination or information sharing. My defense? “Well, I didn’t think anyone would buy something as big as a tablet without saying something, so I figured it was safe.” It’s okay for me to be hypocritical. It’s only a problem when other people are.

So now I had a tablet and I wasn’t sure what I would do with it, except for maybe play games that my phone couldn’t handle well (mainly Fallout Shelter, the free Fallout spin-off/gateway game). But I had it, and I found myself oddly giddy about it. I’d never been excited about the idea of tablets, never asked to borrow Sarah’s or anyone else’s unless there was an immediate need to look a thing up online and nothing else available, but now that I had one I wanted to see what it could do.

It turns out that it can do a lot. It doesn’t really do anything that a computer or cellphone can’t, but it does a different combination of them? It gives me something closer to the desktop experience in a more portable format. The touch keyboard is even more of a problem on the tablet than it is on the phone, but I just took the little pocket bluetooth keyboard I use for my phone and synced it to the tablet. If it looks funny having a 10 inch tablet propped up on its easel stand cover while I sit a few feet away thumb-typing away on a 4 inch keyboard… it works. 90% of the stuff I posted as Things of the Day in December were written like that, and that was some of the first real writing I’d done basically since Halloween.

I haven’t done any longer writing on it yet, as it’s sort of taken me a while to take it seriously as anything other than a super fun machine, but I suspect I’ll get there.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

STATUS: Tuesday, January 5th

Still ruminating on how to do these status posts and what to do with them. For now, I’m going to be doing a general ramble and then a personal inventory.

So, I did resume Tales of MU when planned, as planned. My plan to get an eight week buffer built up before resuming did not work out. In fact, I wrote yesterday’s chapter yesterday. It was the first long writing I managed in months, though not for lack of trying. I feel like a log jam has broken up, though. I’m going to end this week with at least next week’s done (important, since I won’t be writing next week) and ideally the week after’s, and keep on keeping on until I’ve got my cushion, at which point the plan goes into effect.

I’m keeping myself on track with a “let’s see how high we can run up the score approach”. We’re in the first week of 2016 and I got an update up. We’ll see how many weeks in a row I can get. Focusing on that instead of getting hung up on how many weeks I miss should mean fewer missed weeks.

My general plan for how to proceed is the same as it was back when I announced January 4th for the resumption date. Trying to find the one even pace that I can keep writing at forever doesn’t work. If I try to write quickly all the time, I burn out. If I try to write slowly, I fizzle out. So the plan is to get up a head of steam, build up a backlog, and then coast along until the backlog falls below a certain safety margin. The coasting time will be time to reflect, recuperate, and plan what’s going to happen next, in addition to freeing me to work on other things.

As a sidenote about other things: one of the big problems I had in 2015 was what you might call “priority paralysis”… I tried to make too many things my top priority. Even when I was explicitly saying, “I need to prioritize. I’ll deal with this, and then that, and then the other thing,” my brain was still on, “But… that! And the other thing!” And so ultimately, a lot of days, I did nothing. Literally nothing of consequence. The longer I did nothing, the more crushing my failure to do the things that were so important became, and the harder it became to do anything.

I did not magically master the skill of juggling priorities and switching tasks when the clock hit 12 on New Year’s, so I’m going a bit slow and deliberate when it comes to picking up the obligations that fell. I’m sorry about that. If I could do everything, I’d… do everything. But I can’t. I’m just one person, just me, and I’ll do what I can, when I can. I wouldn’t ask anyone else to do anything more than that, but I have a hard time allowing myself to believe that it’s okay for me to do no more.

State of the Me

My sleep pattern is edging back to normal (just in time to throw it out the window next week, I suppose). I got up only a bit later than my ideal today, and expect to be back to normal tomorrow. We got our first real cold weather of the season the past couple of days. I started getting achy in my joints last week, when what was at that point “the cold front” started moving in, though it’s now much colder than that. The cold is good for my sleep, at least.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.