Solving Weird Little Problems, Goal-Thoughts, and Apothecaria

When I started working 20-hour weeks, my usual schedule was Monday-Tuesday for 8 hours each and Thursday for 4 hours. After I switched to working from home, I changed to Monday-Tuesday 7 hours each and Thursday for 6, because our beleaguered remote network was hardest hit between 8-9AM and 4-5PM, and that schedule allowed me to log in between those windows. I called Wednesday my "mini-weekend" while Fri-Sun was "maxi-weekend."

After I finished work today, I told Lut, "I'm off work. Mega-Maximum Weekend Time!" My weekends are now six days: from Thursday night until Thursday morning. 7 hours a week for work, and 161 hours for weekend.

It's a good feeling.

My semi-retirement plans are "do the same things I do now but EVEN MOAR". I hope to visit my parents some time in the next two months but have to actually make plans and pick a time when Lut won't have any appointments. Mostly, I just want to write and play games and draw. Like I do already. But more.

There are parts of my day job that I enjoy. I like tackling weird little SQL problems. Today's was "we need to join these two tables on the tax id number, but one of the tables stores it as numeric and the other table stores it as a string and includes the hyphens." Not hard to solve and I'm sure there are few different ways to do it (I made two different ones myself) . But it makes me feel useful and it's fun to do quick solutions.

My boss asked me to mentor one specific co-worker, so I've been doing that for an hour each week. This part I do not like, because it's like "teach someone everything you know" and I don't even know what I know that other people don't already. It's a lot more fun to walk someone through solving a specific problem on their own, and seeing what parts they get stuck on. Thinking up problems that they might run into, or problem-solving techniques, is much harder.

I usually exercise after work, but today I took a nap instead. I've been really good about exercise in general this month; I've only skipped three days so far. I am using an extremely generous definition of "exercise" here. It's mostly things like "10 minute aerobics video plus a little stretching" and "cleaning for 1+ hours" and "pacing quickly around the house for 30+ minutes." Nothing like the hour-long bike rides and walks I used to do before Lut was diagnosed with cancer. The diagnosis dropped my activity level some, and then my bike was stolen, and then the pandemic made me not want to leave the house, so it's just been a long slide into oblivion.

Writing about exercising has made me want to do a little exercise. It's 9PM and I'm not gonna do even a 10 minute video this late. But I think I'll do a little stretching and some push-ups.

There, stretched and did 5 push-ups. (I haven't regularly done push-ups in more than 10 years so that I can still do 5 real push-ups in a row surprises me.) I'm not counting that as exercise for today, I gotta have SOME standards.

Since it's the end of the year, I've been thinking about what my goals for next year should be. I want to do a "publish 2 books" goal like I've done for the last few years. This should be a reasonable goal: I have three complete book drafts. But _A Dragonling's Family_ is the only one I feel comfortable saying "it won't take that long to edit this". And I thought it wouldn't take that long to edit _Alien Peacelords_ but it still took a year. Ugh. Maybe I'll put "publish 2 books down and Apothecaria can count as 1 even though you're publishing it to, like, Google Drive and people can get it for free because you can't sell it." That sounds pretty good, actually.

On a related note, I decided I wanted to re-read my Apothecaria game because I haven't read most of it since I posted it.

And I *really* wanted to be able to read it in bed on my phone like a regular book, and the illustrated version not the google docs version.

Which meant I needed it to be an ebook.

So I looked for good tools to make the illustrated one an ebook and didn't find anything very heartening. I tested out doing it in Atticus, which was tedious but worked. More or less. The more images I loaded, the slower it ran. BUT! I got through it! I have an epub of the book! It is too large to load into Google Play Books! I don't care, I downloaded a copy to my phone and found a different e-reader to read it. It works! I can read it on my phone! It was ridiculously too much work.

But I put it up on Google Drive, here: Cassie, Witch of High Rannoc: Spring. I have not only done no editing, but I've made literally no changes to the image files, not even typo corrections. Because fixing typos in an image file is super-annoying. So it's exactly the same stuff that's available on Flickr. But if you wanted to read it on e-reader too, there you go.

I may start building the Summer epub now, since it'll be much less annoying if I don't have to do all 250+ images at once.  We'll see. I think Summer is going to have more of the kinds of scenes I like to re-read.