Challenge #01777-D316: Worth Living Well

Sometimes, someone with a life-threatening condition decides, “What the heck! I’m going to have Fun!” – Anon Guest

The prognosis sucked. The good news, according to the doctors, was that with expensive drugs and even more expensive therapy, Jeremy could stretch his painful last days by maybe three months.

Six months in increasing pain versus nine in absolute agony. What a fun choice.

“You know what?” said Jeremy. “Fuck it. I’m not going to spend my last days in medical agony. I’m going to live what’s left.”

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Lurgi has struck

The entire household is at some stage of fighting off the dreaded Lurgi, so I won’t be spending as much time on my writing for the meanwhile.

Chaos is the last to fall/youngest/most needy of the family, so most of my time will be sopped up by caring for an ailing little lass.

I’ll still be trying to do the daily instants, but progress on my trilogy has tanked.

Thanks to everyone for their patience with me.

Danger smells like pancakes, apparently…

I just noticed that my (2nd hand) Macbook Air is smelling of slightly-burned pancakes.

This may be a a danger sign of impending doom.

And since my novels are all in Pages Format, all the saving on the Cloud will not help when this, my last useful mac, goes kablooey.

So. FYI - I still have my Windoze tower. I will not stop writing my instant stories until I literally have no alternatives to write them. I still have my iPad, though that doesn’t have the storage capacity for a novel in progress (sigh). I will not surrender easily.

I may, however, bitch about it more.

This has been your regular news update from Planet MyLifeIsFuckedUp.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

[Thus go the way of all things, for those who know less Latin than I]

My lunchbox Mac Mini up and died an entire year before its expected expiry date, and now all my fictions are locked up safely in a portable drive until such time as it can be connected to a computer that can handle it.

I’m starting to get really, really pissed off at Apple. $2K minimum for a computer that works fabulously… but when it dies it DIES, and lasts like a meringue umbrella 9_9

Do the Monitor-Macs last longer than the lunchboxes? Am I in a cardboard boots situation by repeatedly getting something that’s destined to fail and [IMHO] overpriced at that life expectancy?

Or can I just blame Captain Useless for repeatedly turning off the AC and allowing my poor, dead, machine to perish from overheating?

Or am I just an old fart who remembers when computers were a lot less frail?

Anyway, since my main computer is down, the fic you saw yesterday is the last fic I’m going to post for a while. Sorry about that. The best laid plans of mice, men and InterNutters gang aft agley.

What you can do about it is share my works with your friends, find peeps willing to pay for their own copies of same, and otherwise generate income so I can buttonhole a Macspert about value and longevity vis a vis their product and then purchase something with a lifespan not measured in months, minutes or microseconds.

What I’m doing about it is working harder on my trilogy in the hopes that this actually generates a real income and I won’t have to bitch about disposable computers ever again.

Not that I’m planning on buying any more of those suckers.

And I will still be doing instants until something stops me. One a day.

Plus, if anyone wants to work with me on Misfits, Flotsam or X-Wars, I will give you the link the instant I figure out how to get Google Drive working on displaying my fics again.

…yeah, I have bad luck with technology. The Google Drive thing is probably an auto-login problem, because somehow I’ve wound up with three different Google+ accounts… And possibly a fourth linked to Facebook. Which I hardly ever use now.

TLDR: My compy died, I have backups, and everything is SNAFU’d to shit. Monetary help is appreciated, but not necessary. I have ways of fighting back.

The ficcage will return. Sometime. Eventually.

AIGH!

Does this happen to anyone else?

• Parents: Grammar! Spelling! Punctuation! Paragraphs! You can't make a sentence without using sense! YOU NEED TO USE THESE TO SURVIVE!
• Parents' emails: Wall-of-text word salad with little to no coherence and typos in every single word.

I’m in trouble now.

You marvellous, marvellous peeps have downloaded almost one HUNDRED copies of my short story, Scavenger.

The price must be right, I guess.

And lots of you have downloaded samples of my other books, too. That’s great. It is. No sarcasm here.

It’s just… I wish y'all’d BUY something. I need an income, blobdammit! I have expensive tastes and I have yet to get my first $10 out of Smashwords.

To give you an idea: Those of you who remember my Realm may also remember my track record with computers. I break them. Frequently. The average Mac lunchbox Mini gives me two years of faithful service before it up and decides to kark it. Mac Minis are not cheap, but I’d rather a Mini than the virus-prone PC clones.

My current Mini is almost past its inaugural year.

I do have an iPad and a spare laptop [hand-me-down from my Best Beloved] just in case the unthinkable happens and this Mini decides to roll over prematurely. I also have (ta-dah) a Dropbox account, on which I can store 2G of my WiPs before I have to start paying for it.

I have no idea when (or if) any of these things will fall victim to my Fickle Finger syndrome [It’s like a green thumb. In reverse. For computers] and die on me.

I also owe in excess of $200 just to have a working phone.

…and I have no income at all…

sad face

Anyway. You didn’t come here for my pathetic whinging. You came for mad props.

As you all know, I have the artistic merit of a diseased whelk, so no “thank you” art here.

Just simple words.

Thanks for downloading me. Thanks for reading me. You are all awesome, and don’t let me forget it :)

Best. Belly laugh. Ever.

I have an in-joke with my progeny we call “the Fartarsing Competition” which is generally aimed at any kind of road-building activity that’s mostly inactivity designed to impede traffic flow for months on end. You know. Road works.

On our way home from an outing, today, I decided to narrate the local crew allegedly doing something in regards to drainage.

Me: [Bad David Attenborough impression] “We now join the inaction in progress. I see five gentlemen standing around having a gassbag, one fellow wandering around the area of alleged construction and three gentlemen standing around supervising his aimless meanderings. And, yes, there is a gentleman sitting in the shade having a *biscuit*. Excellent fartarsing all around, gentlemen.”

Mayhem: [Perfect Announcer Voice] “And now… Ducks.”

ROFL.

I was laughing so hard my eldest was pleading with me to pull over lest we crash. He had such perfect timing, such a perfect nonsequiteur…

It was art.

Balls!

Blather about my new chair to follow. I just thought I’d at least have an interesting title.

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Some things I’ve learned

You can learn a lot from going overseas. All you have to do is open your mind when you open your eyes.

Long-ass blather follows. Go fetch a cuppa if you’re going to read this.

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Achievement unlocked: Exercise for the day

Some have noted that my life is boring. Heaven forfend I get excitement, because excitement usually involves someone’s life going pants and me doing some variant of the quirkafleg.

[The quirkafleg is a series of spasmodic paroxysms directly related to extreme disgust, a violent tantrum, or a combination of the twain. Use the word and confuse your friends and family]

Anyway.

Today I got my exercise by Culching.

Culch is a fancy word for “potentially useful junk” and does actually exist in some dictionaries. Look it up. What you consider to be culch varies depending on your interests, hobbies or projects. It can be as mundane as free range cardboard or as exotic and varied as the contents of M5.

Culching is what you do when gathering culch.

Translation: I’ve been shopping.

Amongst my multitude of items - I’ll spare the more exotic details, there’s little more dull than a culcher explaining their culch - I managed to find some Pilates-style megaballs. One for me to use instead of my rapidly dilapidating chair, and one for the spawn to nick instead of my new flakking chair.

I also got an upper-body workout inflating the megaballs.

The old chair is in a sorry state. It’s lost one arm, most of its cushy padding, a small percentage of the original leather and the ability to reliably go up, down or lean back. Most of this attrition can be directly blamed on the spawn.

The problem now is what to do with the old chair. Do I let it decay? Turn it into a lawn ornament? Break it down for parts to increase my SABLE [Stash Above and Beyond Life Expectancy] to ridiculous proportions?

I can’t just throw it away.

It could come in handy.