December 5-8: New tablet, walking in the cold, writing, and LawnGuy

Thursday, December 5

Too long ago; I don't really remember what I did on this day. I recall that my new tablet had been originally scheduled to arrive on Wednesday. Then I got an email that it was delayed until Friday. At 10PM, I checked my phone and discovered it had been delivered an hour ago. Eliyahu brought it in for me but recommended I let it warm up before playing with it. They'd actually damaged a motherboard by using a too-cold computer once, which surprised me. I've had issues with batteries being unhappy about cold weather. Regardless, I left it in the box overnight.

Oh, and I illustrated three Apothecaria entries on Thursday. One in the morning to post, and two in the evening so I'd have entries to post on Friday and Saturday. I laid out a fourth entry and made the sketch for it, but didn't finish it.

Friday, December 6

I got up around 9AM and unboxed my tablet while making breakfast. I spent some time getting it set up. As soon as I got it connected  to the internet, it went "Conducting set up, this may take a few minutes", and downloaded a ton of apps I didn't want. It also tried to convince me I wanted to copy things over from another device (I don't; I have welcomed our Cloud Overlords and don't store anything locally that isn't backed up in the cloud). Eventually it let me log in to my Google Account and install Time Princess.

I also deleted every pre-loaded and loaded-upon-connection app that it would let me uninstall, and disabled some that it wouldn't let me uninstall so I wouldn't have to look at them when I was searching for the few apps I care about. (Seriously, there's like a "Youtube Music Kids" app or something that can't be uninstalled. So much cruft taking up so much space on the apps list.) 

A little later, the tablet popped up a notification asking me to either "complete setup" or "remind me later" because "no" isn't a thing modern tech bros understand. x_x I picked "complete setup". 

It reinstalled all the cruft I had uninstalled, and re-enabled everything I'd disabled.

...

So I uninstalled it all again. It has not asked me to complete setup again, so there's some hope that I'm not just gonna spend the rest of this device's life telling it "remind me later". We'll see.

I understand why people jailbreak Android devices, though. I don't enjoy digging into the inner workings of my devices but I may yet end up being one of those people who does it.

This aside: Time Princess plays nicely on the new tablet. I had primarily gotten the tablet because my phone has two issues: 1) the battery is pretty degraded and 2) it doesn't have much storage space free.

1) is a little inconvenient but given how rarely I am away from home for any length of time, it's fine. For the rare time when it matters, I can use an external battery. 

2) is because Time Princess is enormously, ridiculously, storage-intensive. It had grown to consume 33 gigs of space on my 64-gig phone. You can tame this growth by telling it to prune individual books, or, more dramatically, prune everything. But both approaches mean that you have to re-download a bunch of stuff to access various aspects of the game and eventually it'll bloat up again and you have to prune and then re-download and bleh. Anyway, my phone is like 50% Time Princess and 40% OS and 10% everything else* at this point. From a storage perspective, I practically don't have anything else* on the phone. 

*Technically, I have installed a total of 12 apps on my phone. The Tapas app also bloats up and can only be pruned by uninstall and reinstall, but it's still under 5 gigs. The Kindle app is just over 1 gig. Everything else is tiny.

So I wanted a device that could easily handle Time Princess's bloat and -- perhaps! -- even let me install a Second App. Obviously, I could get a new phone, but I thought that a tablet would not only be significantly cheaper than a modern phone, but might be more pleasant for things like Time Princess and even some other things I do on my phone (reading comics and books). 

 

I'll probably try ArtRage on it at some point, just because, although I don't think it'll have any advantages over my Surface in running that. I also installed Learn2Speak, a gamification app for learning languages that I backed in Kickstarter ages ago and that just came out for Android. I should put some reading apps on it, too, but haven't yet. For now, I've only used it for Time Princess, but I enjoy it for that. Time Princess is a lovely game and it's nice to see the details on a larger screen.

Around 10AM, Eliyahu woke up. I asked them if they wanted to get challah for the Sabbath from the Jewish bakery. 

Eliyahu: "...well, if you have the energy for the drive." 

Me: "I wouldn't have offered if I wasn't up for it. Also, we can get bagels." I like their bagels; their onion bagels are definitely better than any other onion bagels I've tried in the city. But my favorite bagel type is asiago and they don't make that, probably because asiago is a bagel abomination in their eyes (fair). My second favorite is cinnamon crunch, also, one presumes, an abomination, and definitely not available. 

We drove the 20 minutes to the Jewish bakery and acquired challah, six bagels, and a tub of rosemary-garlic cream cheese. 

Me: "So, do you want to go for a walk while we're already out or do you want to go home and enjoy our bagels?"

Eliyahu: "Will going out for a walk later be an option or...?" 

Me: "Probably not. I mean, I might have the enthusiasm later? But I definitely have it now. When we're already in motion."

Eliyahu: "We'd better do it now, then."

So we drove to the park. It's 20 minutes to get to the bagel place from home, and then 20 minutes to get to our usual park from the bagel place, and then 20 minutes from park to home. They're not all equidistant; the park is physically closer to both home and the bagel place than home and bagel place are to each other. But the park is in midtown and there's no highway near it, so getting their takes longer for the distance. The drive time was another reason I didn't want to go back out later, especially if we were going to the park.

It was high 40s Fahrenheit out; Eliyahu wore their jacket and leather hat. I wore a sweater. After two laps, Eliyahu tapped out of the third because they were too cold. This was partly my fault -- if I'd mentioned the possibility of walking before we left, they'd've brought their mittens/scarf/toque. In any event, we returned to the car, stopped for Reward Bubble Tea, and went home.

During the Coffee's stream in the evening, I made good progress on The Secret Dragon outline, resolving most of the remaining plot issues.

Saturday, December 7

I gave up on sleep relatively early, at around 8:15AM, I think. I heard LawnGuy outside raking leaves. I don't usually do anything with the leaves because there's only a few places where the leaf cover is dense enough to impede plant growth, and also I don't care about the yard beyond making sure nature is not going to eat my house and the city is not going to fine me. However, I plan to sell the house next spring, so having the lawn look less awful would be helpful. Plus, LawnGuy's wife passed away from cancer a month or two ago, and I wanted to help him out. He's messaged several times asking for work, so he's clearly having a bad time of things. 

I first hired a lawn service back in 2017: LawnWoman, as mentioned here: https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/615832.html and here: https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/616357.html. LawnWoman never ran the business in a very formal way. I've always paid in cash on the day of service, and she seldom bothered with receipts or invoices. She often had people working for or with her, though. At some point, a year or three in, LawnGuy became one of those people. Then LawnWoman and LawnGuy got married. At some point, LawnGuy more-or-less took over the business; I stopped seeing or hearing from Diane. The reason for this became clear later, when we found out LawnWoman had cancer. x_x She outlived Lut, but not by much. I will never forget her kindness in taking on my much-neglected lawn and doing an incredible job with it (she charged for much more than a mow but did SO MUCH MORE than mow it, ZOMG.)

LawnGuy asked me to give him half after he'd done most of the work, so that he could pay for his room. And then he'd come back to finish up. I gave him the full amount and a little extra and then he didn't come back. o_o;;; But he came by while I was out the next day and finished the job, so that was fine.

In the morning and early afternoon, I struggled to start writing. The outline for The Secret Dragon was mostly complete, but still needed some denoument scenes. Eventually, I started to poke at those. Around noon, Lyric stopped lying on my feet in the loveseat, so I was able to get up, feed the cat, and make lunch. 

Eliyahu got up in time to eat lunch with me. After lunch, I poked a little more at the outline, then gave up and took a nap. Which meant we didn't go for a walk today, alas. Though after the cold walk on Friday, Eliyahu was kind of relieved to be absolved from walking Saturday.

I got up from the nap about an hour before Coffee's stream, and poked at the outline a little more. 

During Coffee's stream, I spent three hours in multiplayer, working much more diligently at the outline. I outlined the denoument scenes and made some adjustments to earlier parts of the outline to reflect material I'd come up with later. I also started writing this entry. In the last hour of stream, I took a break and spent most of it playing Time Princess on my new tablet.

After stream, I started reading through the outline, making adjustments as I saw issues or remembered things I need to reference earlier. And also reading my favorite bits aloud to Eliyahu. Eliyahu commented that it was nice that I enjoyed my own outline so much because it'd be sad if, having put so much work into it, I found it tedious and unpleasant to go through. I know some authors don't like their own books very much, but I have no idea how they keep themselves motivated to stay at it. 

It's getting near bedtime now, so I'm working a bit more on this entry before I play more Time Princess near reset. The new tablet's battery is perfectly healthy and capable of making it through an entire day of my playing Time Princess on and off, which is nice after getting used to plugging my phone in often throughout the day.

Sunday, December 8

I got up early, around 8:15 AM, but didn't do much in the morning beyond finish the Apothecaria entry I'd started Thursday night, so that I could post it now. Because I'd forgotten to finish it at any point in the last two days. 

Around 11AM, I lay down for a nap. When I got up around 1PM, Eliyahu was making food. We waited for the food to finish cooking and then I ate some for lunch (Eliyahu had already eaten and had made it to have ready for their dinner in the early evening). Afterwards, we went out for another walk at the park. The weather was very nice for December: mid-50s Fahrenheit, albeit breezy. We each dressed as we considered appropriate for the weather.

Eliyahu, who I feel compelled to note is from Canada and grew up in central British Columbia, wore two pairs of slacks, two scarfs, a toque, mittens, and a jacket over a long-sleeved shirt.

I wore a t-shirt and leggings.  I brought a sweatshirt in case I got cold, but left it in the car.

90% of the other people walking at the park: pants and a hoodie/sweater/sweatshirt.

Over the course of three laps, I didn't add any layers and Eliyahu didn't remove any. (Honesty compels me to admit that I was chilly during the windier stretches, but it didn't bother me enough to get the sweatshirt out either time we passed the car.) 

We saw a few people in shorts and hoodies but no one else in a t-shirt. So basically, we were both freaks. 

I have always been a heat-tolerant person: I keep my house at 78-81F in the summer because I am quite comfortable at those temperatures as long as the humidity is low. (The outside humidity is high in my area, but AC does a great job of keeping it low inside my house.) Eliyahu is the only healthy person who's ever made me feel like I'm cold-tolerant, though. They walk all the time in Canada -- they don't drive so they've always considered it unremarkable to walk several miles in a day, just for things like groceries or appointment -- and they manage winter weather via Many Layers and warm clothes.

After three laps, we picked up bubble tea (Eliyahu got malted hot chocolate with crystal boba, and thereby discovered the difference between crystal boba and popping boba) and went home.

I showered, drank my bubble tea, worked on this entry some more, and played Time Princess. My tablet started bonging at me, as if it had some important notifications. It had many irrelevant notifications. I couldn't even tell which notification it thought was important enough to bong over. I have taken away its Making Noises privileges. (Its speakers were already muted but apparently that is not enough to keep it from making notification sounds.

I am down to 13,600 words and 2.5 days left for the "250k in 44 days" challenge. I haven't done any dictation in the last two days. I should really do some tonight because I haven't written much else today, either, and there's only two hours left until my bed time. 

It'd be reasonable for me to start writing The Secret Dragon now, but I'd like to finish looking over the outline first. The outline is Very Long -- over 20,000 words! -- because I've gotten in the habit of making very detailed outlines. To the point where I wonder if they qualify as zero drafts now. Anyway. some of that is me talking to myself as I try to work out a solution for a plot problem. You would think that there'd be no difference between me thinking "the characters need to come up with a clever solution here. Which unfortunately means I need to come up with a clever solution." "..." "clever solutions sure are hard, aren't they?" and me writing those exact thoughts down. But it's much easier to keep myself focused on Resolving This Issue if I force myself to write about it. Talking about it is almost as good. I solved some of my plot issues during dictation this time around. But writing about it is somewhat better.

If I'm just thinking about it while staring at a blank screen or into space, I'm more likely to let my attention drift to something more interesting and immediately rewarding. I have occassionally managed to focus on plotting entirely in my head, but it's rare. (One notable incident was when I accidentally locked my phone in a rental car after returning it after hours. I spent the four-mile walk home plotting out the climactic scenes of Golden Coils in my head instead of on my phone, as I'd planned. But doing it in my head actually worked for a change and I was able to write out the outline of the stuff I'd worked out when I got home.)

Anyway, I want to make sure I've got all the details in the right places in the outline before I start writing it. Even if it's unlikely that any changes to the outline will affect the first few scenes.