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rowynSunday, March 16
It's been a while since I wrote about my day. For a while, I was writing about my day to warm up for writing something else. Lately. I've been going straight to writing fiction instead, or working on edits or drawing..
Not that I've been writing lots of anything. A few hundred words of The Secret Dragon on most days, and that's about it.
Today, I woke around 8:45AM and lazed in bed for an hour playing Time Princess before I got up. I made pancakes for breakfast, because on Friday I'd made a batch of pancake batter and had been putting the leftover batter in the fridge after making the morning's pancakes. So this morning I used up the last of it. Tomorrow, I'll either have to make more or eat something else for breakfast. I could make more fried eggs-in-a-hole; those are easy and tasty.
I may conserve my cooking energy tomorrow to make pasta sauce. I got ingredients to make it on Wednesday, I think, but I've been too lazy to spend the time cooking. Tonight I wanted to have some to eat but not enough to make it. Maybe tomorrow.
I ran out of energy around noon and went back to bed to nap at 1PM. Got up around 3PM, ate lunch, and then coaxed myself out for a walk. I've been walking around the neighborhood, which is very tiring because it's so hilly. The last two days I've done 2.5 miles and turned back because I didn't want to run out of energy before I got home. I thought about driving to the trail so I could walk on a flat area and get bubble tea afterwards, but I decided the neighborhood was fine. It's nice not to drive.
Several days ago -- Wednesday, maybe? -- I saw a meme about ice cream and caved to the sudden urge to go to the frozen custard place. I got my usual small triple-chocolate concrete and actually finished the whole thing in one sitting (yes they call it a "small" but it's an enormous amount of dessert nonetheless). But they hadd "gooey butter cake frozen custard" by the pint this time, and I bought a pint of that. Which I then ate over the next four days, mostly in very small amounts at a time. Yesterday I kept getting a little more every few hours, instead of having a few spoonfuls for the day, though. So there wasn't much left today.
On Thursday, I finally decided to try playing "Reincarnated as the Unlovable Villainess", the romance soloRPG I picked up back in January, I rolled up the characters, wrote down a little background, and rolled for the results of the first day. I've written out part of the first day. In my usual long-winded fashion, I haven't gotten to any of the material from the prompts yet. I like what I've seen of the game prompts. The mechanics might be too random for me and I may end up cheating to get the story I want. There's an optional rule for "go back in time a 2d6 days if you hit a bad end" so I might use that instead of cheating. Or I might get lucky and not need to cheat? I'll see how it goes. I'm not actually worried about playing by the rules in a solo game.
I wrote a little more of the soloRPG today, but only a few paragraphs. It was not coming along easily. I wrote a few paragraphs of The Secret Dragon since I was struggling anyway. Writing The Secret Dragon was not easy either. After that, I worked on the wrap cover for Be That Way. I've been working on the background that will go on the back cover and it is very tedious, especially for something that only a few people will ever see. I mean, I'll probably post the wrap cover on social media at some point so I guess people will see it that way? But it's quite possible the only person to buy a physical copy of it will be me. My books don't sell many physical copies.
Anyway, I'll do a little editing next just so I can check off the last habit. I've been editing The Jewel-Strewn Night. Ironically, it only has eleven items on the editing list. One of those items is Extremely Hard and I'm not sure how to tackle it, but I've been completing the others because what the heck, they all have to get done. I read through it several days ago and decided I do not want to leave it trunked.
Monday, March 17
After my usual morning routine of breakfast and games, I decided I didn't really want to do anything else, and got up to go for a walk. Then I remembered that I'd planned to clean the kitchen instead of going outside for a walk. "But if I go out, I can drive to the trail and then get a bubble tea and also more gooey butter frozen custard on the way home," I told myself.
And then I remembered that the good bubble tea place is closed on Mondays.
I could go to the park in midtown and get bubble tea from the other bubble tea place. But the drive is twice as long, it's in the opposite direction so the frozen custard shop isn't on the way, and, most importantly, I really don't like it as much. The customer experience at the closer place is much better.
So I went into the kitchen and did some cleaning. Mostly this was decluttering plus putting away dishes and loading the dishwasher, but I wiped down the stove, table, and counters, too. My dishwasher isn't good at some types of dirt so I prewash most of the dishes, making loading the dishwasher more of a chore than it would be otherwise. I've been thinking "I should replace the dishwasher" for years, but I'm moving soon and my parents' dishwasher works fine. So like everything else wrong with the house, this can be Someone Else's Problem soon enough.
After cleaning the kitchen, I finally made pasta sauce and had that with angel hair and parmesan for lunch.
Around 3PM, I lay down for a nap, but instead of sleeping, I read comics on my phone. I am still reading a novel, Feathers of Dawn; it's 50% through now so I'll probably finish it. I've been reading it so slowly that Google Play's "estimated time left to finish the book" is only slightly shorter than when I started it. I've mostly been reading it at my computer instead of on my phone, though.
As it neared 4PM, I still wanted more gooey butter frozen custard. While "rush hour" in my city is really nothing--oh no it takes a few extra minutes to get somewhere--traffic between my house and the frozen custard place does become noticeable between 4PM and 6:30PM. At first, I told myself to nap for a bit and then go later in the evening. Then I realized that traffic would not really be better until it was almost time for CoffeeQuills' stream. I aborted my nap plans, got dressed, and went out for frozen custard.
It's been warm for the last few days and the frozen custard shop was busy both times I went. I opted for the walk-up window rather than the drive-thru both times, because there were so many cars lined up for the drive-thru. The last time, I placed my order right away but had to wait a while for them to make it. This time, I had to wait to place my order -- I got two pints instead of one, and skipped the concrete -- but they had some pints already packed so it was ready almost at once.
I like their concretes but even the "small" is ginormous and it has the same problem as a milkshake: you can't store it for later. Pints of frozen custard keep just fine, though. :9
I didn't do multiplayer during CoffeeQuills' stream. Mostly, I edited The Jewel-Strewn Night. I basically finished the wrap cover illustration for Be That Way; I'll touch it up a bit and adjust some things for the text layout, but it won't change significantly. I put a coffee-shop blackboard in the background and I think I'll put the "Now with 200% more lesbians!" part of the tagline on it. I haven't done the text layout because I'm still hoping I'll come up with a title I like better.
After finishing the cover, I started another illustration for Be That Way. There are four protagonists, none of whom are fully human. I'd kind of wanted to put them all on the cover but my only ideas for fitting all four in would require drawing a significant portion of each figure and make them all relatively small on already-tiny cover and this seemed like (a) way too much work and (b) unlikely to be something I could pull off, since I couldn't crib from a stock photo for it. The cover I finished is mostly just a close-up of the catgirl's face and hands while she's drinking coffee; I painted over a stock photo for her and then a different one for the coffee shop.
Anyway, I figured maybe I could do portraits of each other character in a similar minimalistic style. We'll see if I like them well enough to use them. I've drawn all the characters at least once so far, but the catgirl illo for the cover is the only one I like.
I also did a token amount of writing on both The Secret Dragon and the new soloRPG. Lately I've been pretty consistent about doing at least a token amount of everything, so that I can check it off on my tracker.
Tuesday, March 18
The bubble tea shop was open! So around 11:30, I got ready to leave. While pulling on leggings, my back spasmed, which I guess is a reminder that I need to start doing core workouts again. -_- When Eliyahu was visiting, we always went for walks to exercise because they would wak with me but the aerobics videos intimidated them. My back continued to give me occasional little pain twinges but I finished dressing and drove out to the trail anyway.
For the first time since the gallbladder attack in mid-January, I did a normal-length walk on the trail. Google Fit says it was only 2.5 miles; I am not convinced that Google Fit is right about this, especially since it measured Saturday's walk, where I turned back sooner, as longer. So Google Fit definitely has one or both of these walks at the wrong length. Google Fit puts the time of Tuesday's walk at 69 minutes, which is about right. Pretty sure I am slower than ever.
After the walk, I went to the bubble tea shop. Another customer was there, chatting with the bobaristas while they made orders. As the owner finished my order but before adding the ice, he asked me to try it. "I was distracted by the other customer and I'm not positive I counted the right number of pumps."
Without getting a straw, I took a sip. "Hm, it's the right amount of sweetness and tea, but it tastes thin? Like maybe the creamer didn't get added?"
He considered this with a perplexed expression, and then made another one from the beginning. As I watched him make the new one (not realizing at first that's what he was doing), I realized why he'd been confused by my feedback: leaving out the creamer would've made the liquid level significantly lower unless he also added too much of something else, and it's unlikely he was so distracted that he got two different steps wrong.
He gave me the new one, then put a lid on the original: "Here, you might as well take this one too."
On the drive home, I realized the more probable culprit for why it tasted thinner: I drink bubble tea with a straw and get a few boba with virtually every mouthful of milk tea. The boba doesn't change the actual consistency of the milk tea, but it does affect my perception of its consistency. So I feel like the tea itself is thicker because it's paired with the density of the boba. Taking a sip without any boba left me going "something's missing about the texture" without correctly identifying why.
I drank both of them at home and I'm pretty sure this was the only issue. Oops.
I didn't nap Tuesday, because All The Thai Milk Tea. This was another day of "token amounts of everything": a little editing, a little writing on both novel and game, a little drawing.
I woke up around 6:30AM and struggled to get back to sleep without success before finally getting up a little after 8AM. I had breakfast and managed to stay awake until the end of Vicorva's stream at 10:30AM (V's stream is temporarily a little later in my timezone, because the USA is already in DST but the UK isn't yet; in a week and half, this'll change back). Then I went back to bed and napped until noon.
I got up and made pasta for lunch. After eating lunch, I was tired and didn't want to do anything. I caught up on my Dreamwidth feed, then still didn't want to do anything. Read a few pages of Feathers of Dawn. I opened The Jewel-Strewn Night and made myself replace the last of the placeholder names, woohoo. I also added another two editing points to the list. So there's nine that I've finished and four left, at present.
Since my back is still annoyed at me, I decided to skip exercise today. I started writing about the last few days to see if that would get me interested in doing anything else. Not really? Around 4:30PM, I decided to take another nap.
After waking up, I chatted a bit on Discord, finished off a pint of frozen custard, and played some games. I made a late dinner during CoffeeQuills' stream, and have poked at soloRPG for a bit. Now I will post this and then write a token amount of The Secret Dragon before I do a token amount of drawing to finish out my day.
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Date: 2025-03-23 02:05 am (UTC)Oops re: accidentally getting an extra tea but it's probably fine, I suspect the customer service part is the more expensive part of the drink compared to the ingredients. ^.^
Mm, I kind of want some ice cream now. o.o