Almost Month-End

[rowyn]

I should be writing The Jewel-Strewn Night. I've made some progress on the draft this month; it's at 29% complete and started at 20%. But my goal was 40%. So you'd think "well, it's the 28th, you're not gonna make as much progress in the next 2.5 days as you did in the entire rest of the month. May as well give it up." But the book is projected to be short, around 80,000 words, so 11% is less than 3000 words per day. Which is a totally normal pace for me during Nanowrimo and honestly not ridiculous for a three-day weekend (all my weekends are three days: the joys of working part time). It's not a matter of possible: it's a matter of "I don't feel like it." It's been a struggle all month to get myself to work on it. It's not writer's block, or even more resistance than I usually have to writing my next draft. It's that, this time, I have some things I actually do feel like doing, so it's competing against them instead of "what else you gonna do? You're already current on your fediverse feed. Checkmate, procrastination."

My Friday started out a little weird. I've been waking up at around 5AM the last three days, which is normal, and then failing to get back to sleep and instead getting out of bed around 6-6:30AM, which is not normal. Today, I woke up at 3:30AM, checked my phone out of habit, and saw that I had a text from my credit card company. "We declined a transaction from amazon.com.br because it looks super fishy. Was this you? Respond 'yes' if it was, though you'll still have to place the order again because we already declined it. Respond 'no' and we'll cancel your card."

Me: (This seems weird but maybe Lut did it? I'll ask in the morning.)
Me, waking again at 5AM: (well, Lut came back to bed a few minutes ago, I'll ask him.)
Me to Lut: "Did you place this $$$ order from British Amazon?"
Lut, half-asleep: "yes?"
Me: "Really? What was it? Chase declined it so if you really want it you'll have to place it again."
Lut: "paint."
Me: "But you already have a ton of paint and you backed a kickstarter for yet more paint, why would you order EVEN MOAR?"
Lut: sleepily gets back out of bed to figure out what happened
Me: thinking he got up to place the order again (Well, he said 'yes', I guess he placed the order.) texts 'yes' to Chase.
Lut: "Can you send me the message?"
Me: copies the text to Lut
Lut: comes back to bed 15 minutes later "Okay, no, this wasn't me. Also, this is Amazon Brazil, not Britain."
Me: "...oh."

Lut initially thought it might be him because the Kickstarter he backed in February had just shipped the first installment of its fulfillment process, and he'd bought some add-ons through the KS's fulfillment process. But this was (a) the wrong amount and (b) would not go through Amazon of any nation and (c) KS had taken most of the payment back in February. No relationship.

Me: gives up on sleep and gets up to log in to my Chase account, where the card in question no longer exists. Not 'is closed' but 'has no record of any sort'.
Me: "????"
Me: calls Chase

So it turns out that sometime between 2:30 and 5:30AM, Chase decided "if this was her, she'd have responded by now." So they automatically cancelled and reissued the card. The old card number vanished from my account after the cancellation, but the transaction history will reappear under the new number when they're done processing the new card issue.

Me: "So it turns out I actually misplaced my other Chase card so can you cancel and reissue it too?"

That one had not had the numbers stolen: I'd lost the physical card. The one which had its numbers stolen wasn't missing: Lut and I still have our copies of the physical cards (we're both on that account, which is why I had to ask him if he'd made the suspicious charge.) Anyway, the upshot is that I have zero working credit cards at the moment. Oops. No online purchases for me for a while.

By now, the sun was almost up, so I went outside for a bit. A sleep article I read on Tuesday suggested getting some sunlight when you wake up. I am not sure this has done any particular good for me, so far? But it doesn't do any harm. On Wednesday and Thursday morning, I went for a long walk, but on Thursday I was starting to develop a blister so I thought I'd just sit on the porch today. Maybe I'll do something else for exercise later.

I ate breakfast, played a little Race for the Galaxy, and then discovered Veo Corva had cancelled their stream. So I decided to go back to bed for a nap. I may take another nap this afternoon, too. No guarantees.

After napping for an hour or so, I got up and started this entry by way of putting off anything more productive. I think I will illustrate an Apothecaria entry. I've been trying to make at least one each day and haven't done one yet for today. I've done extra ones on a few days, so I have entries to post for Saturday and Sunday already, though. But if I want to keep my buffer, I have to keep doing a new one each time I post one.

(Why do I want to keep a buffer for the story I am writing and illustrating for fun? Why am I keeping to a 7-days-a-week posting schedule for it? Why aren't I posting it to Dreamwidth at all? I don't know any of these things. Looking at all the illustrated entries does make me happy, though.)