Well, That Wasn’t Fun

I got off to a good start yesterday working on my new John Lee Quarrels mystery and kept at it pretty steadily for most of the day. By the time I knocked off late in the afternoon, I had done 5,575 words, which is a pretty good day’s writing. Or dictating, in my case.

I saved the file and then closed it, and a moment later, I went back into it to update the running word count keep after every writing session, and nothing I had done was there! It was like I hadn’t written a word all day long.

Suddenly I felt the feeling you get in your stomach when you get on an elevator and it starts dropping quickly. Then I calmed myself down enough to think about it. I always hit Save every few minutes when I am writing, and I had Autosave working, so I figured that it had to be someplace, even if it wasn’t in the file that I work on from my desktop when I’m working on a book.

I went into the other two locations on my computer where I save works in progress and opened the files there, and they were the same as what I’d ended up with the day before. I racked my brain for a while and then realized that it was saving to OneDrive, which is in the cloud. I went there, and sure enough, there was the file as I had been working on it. I thought that while it would save to OneDrive, it would also save to the computer at the same time. I thought it always had done that, but maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe it did, and I managed to change a setting somehow. At any rate, I sure was glad to get it back because that wasn’t fun at all.

For someone who makes his living with a computer, there is so much about them that I don’t know or understand.

A misty rain had fallen the night before and for most of the morning. When I went out to check our citrus trees in the early afternoon, the ground around them was pretty wet so I didn’t bother watering yesterday. One little chore I didn’t have to mess with.

While I was doing that all, Miss Terry was busy weaving, and her latest project looks pretty good to me. What do you think? It’s going to be a lap blanket. It’s the first time Terry has woven something double-width, and she was pretty nervous about it starting out, but now that she’s got the hang of it, it seems to be going fine.

As if creating something that beautiful wasn’t enough, Terry also made a delicious dinner of a type of Szechuan chicken, which she served over rice with a delicious sauce she made for me, and chili for herself. It was really amazing.

Besides thinking I had lost a day of work, something else that wasn’t fun was that while Terry was cooking dinner, I got on the treadmill to do my daily half-mile. I was plodding along nicely when suddenly I felt a sneeze coming on. Have you ever had one of those sneezes that start somewhere around your tailbone and comes through your body to leave your nose with such force that your ribs hurt and you see stars?

Yeah, never do that when you are on a treadmill. It can dump you on your butt real quick. Fortunately, I was able to hold onto the arm rails to keep from going down as my legs kept moving away from my torso, but it sure wasn’t pretty to see. Funny maybe, but not pretty. In another couple of days, I’m going to up myself to three-quarters of a mile a day and then up to a mile. Assuming I don’t sneeze and the damn treadmill eats me.

When I wrote about people who would or would not take the new coronavirus vaccine in yesterday’s blog, I thought I might hear from some people. And sure enough, I did. Among them was a fellow who I won’t name told me that he not only wouldn’t take that commie socialist vaccine but if anybody he knew did, he would be happy to come and piss on their grave because it was poison. Thank you, the grass is always going to need watering.

Someone else said that three months ago, you could not have convinced him to take the vaccine because you would never have convinced him that coronavirus is as bad as people say it is. He said that since then he has buried his brother, his mother, and his best friend. All had been stricken and died within a short time after testing positive. Yeah, folks, it’s real. I feel sorry for people who still want to deny the severity of the issue, and I have no patience for them. I have blocked more than one person on Facebook or here in the blog who think it’s nothing anybody should worry about and wants to spread misinformation.

Today is your last chance to enter our Free Drawing for an autographed copy of Toxic, the first book in Leigh Hull’s new Gamer Files series. Find out what happens when professional gamer and cosplayer Athena Dellis’ friend and teammate is murdered at the annual comic book convention. From murder to nerd love, Toxic is the perfect book for geeks who love a good story. To enter, click on this Free Drawing link or the tab at the top of this page and enter your name (first and last) in the comments section at the bottom of that page (not this one). Only one entry per person per drawing please, and you must enter with your real name. To prevent spam or multiple entries, the names of cartoon or movie characters are not allowed. The winner will be drawn this evening.

Thought For The Day – When I ask for directions, please don’t use words like “east.”