Another post that will qualify for the Laziest Blogger of All Time Award.........
Several people forgot my birthday. I'm not mad about it. But, when a couple of them mentioned it to me, they blamed Facebook for not reminding them. (Incidentally, I removed my birthday from every public service several months ago when I got the word that my social security number was stolen in the hack on the idiotic State Government of South Carolina. But, that is another story for a day when I don't feel fuzzy.)
Steam blew out of her mouth and fogged her glasses against the backdrop of the night sky. Rubber-and-leather-clad feet crunched on gravel, echoing against the whip of flags in the wind, the sirens, the thrum of jet engines. Even with the ghostly pencil of stone carving a swath between a crescent moon and two planets, she sighed. The National Mall on a windy night wasn't her idea of a fun slog after a zig-zagging day of work, dashing from place to place to place around the District.
Oh, the joys of Siri. I couldn’t WAIT to meet her. For months and months and months, I steamed with envy of my friends’ Siris. I wanted my own know-it-all, a go-to girl I could call upon at any time, for any reason.
Imagine my surprise when I asked Siri a very basic question yesterday. It is a key to the success of our whole relationship.
Right now, life for me is a series of wait-and-see. Hurry-up-and-stop. Sit on my hands to keep from chewing my nails.
You get the idea.
My novel-in-progress is out with my A readers, and I’m at loose ends. It’s hard to give up a child for two weeks without wondering how she’s faring. Especially when one knows that child is far from perfect. I still have at least one more revision before giving it to my editor in January, but new eyes help my eyes work better.
So, I’ve spent this week doing all sorts of things I put off. Because the things I procrastinate tend to have to do with technology, I have been on a slow descent into hell. A sample, and you may laugh AT me, because there’s no laughing WITH me:
Updating my contacts. Now, this may sound like an easy project, but this is ME. I never, ever, EVER update my contacts. EVER. Gmail saves email addresses and lets me just enter the first few characters for a reason, right? Thousands upon thousands of email addresses, and only a milli-fraction assigned to a contact.
Aaaaaaaaand, since I’m already screaming, I decided to merge all of my ancillary contacts from other networks. I’m tired of services like Facebook changing the rules on me, and I want to have a master contact list that I control. At least, I THINK I still want that. I’m only about a tenth of the way through my friend list. By the time I’m done, I may have transmogrified into a volcanic eruption.
But hey, I already have hundreds and hundreds of pretty contacts.
AND I REALLY DON’T GIVE A #%$^#&@*#&$%^ ABOUT THAT.
But, I know I should…….
So, I decided to pile it on even thicker and upgraded my iPhone this week. I even read the freaking instruction manual word-for-word before I turned the thing on…….AND IT ARRIVED WITHOUT A FREAKING SIM CARD INSTALLED.
While I was cursing Verizon and Apple and all tech people period, MTM suggested that, since I was plugging my iPhone in for the first time in two years, I might as well upload my thousands of photos to Flickr. If anyone wants to see how that’s going, click here.
Will anyone declare it Sippy Time? Is it Five O’Clock somewhere? Have I finally learned my lesson that keeping up with this stuff a little at a time beats days-long bouts of torture??????
Especially when I do not know what the frack I am talking about.
Carnell got this bright idea that I should pitch a session to BarCampCHS, a community for sharing: “Use Scrivener to Write Your Bestseller.” I pitched it, because, in a sea of computer-literate folks, people who start conversations that I cannot even begin to follow, there was NO STATISTICAL WAY I would get selected.
That I could teach a class on a computer program is, to me, laughable. I’ve never watched a single online tutorial for Scrivener. And the instruction manual……WHAT instruction manual???? Why waste time reading all that stuff when I could just be writing, writing writing, right?
Right???
Somehow (Carnell), I ended up with a prime 3PM slot, teaching a class on a program I barely knew how to use, to a bunch of people who actually use the computer as way more than a typewriter.
Screwed. I was screwed.
I don’t really remember what happened. It’s like I went into a trance and one of my characters took over. But, my friend James came up afterwards and said I was good.
That was the only part of the language I understood. But, it was enough.
