Diary of a Tiger: Fri 11 Nov 2022

Chapter 53: Friday 11 November

Saturday

Saturday should have been Day 4 of NaNoWriMo, but it turned into a day of household chores. The poet popped out at midday to go and setup for a wedding Monkey Dust were playing at Saturday night. This gave us time to have a proper, civilised tea, and the animals weren’t left as long as they usually are.

Sunday

Sunday turned into Day 4 of NaNoWriMo, but I also took advantage of a day with no ghostwriting or any other pressing deadlines to create my daily and weekly planning pages for November, and I printed off two versions of the monthly calendar: one that just has the dates in big numbers that I can just cross off as I go along; the other that has space to write things like deadlines and other fixed appointments.

Then I thought I’d add my monthly multi-project word-count spreadsheets to the mix so I can analyse them over the year. I got a bit stuck with one of the formulae not working properly, but we fixed it between us and I think it’s behaving itself now.

I got distracted by the NaNo, so I went back to that and carried on with the diary work once I’d done my day’s quota. Then I wrote Monday’s NaNo blog post and updated the word-count meters in the sidebar and at the bottom of each post.

Monday

I was late to my desk on Monday, but I didn’t beat myself because I worked at the weekend. Once at my desk, though, I did have a lot to do.

First of all there was the publication day admin for Poppy Day, the last one, for now, of my recent new publications. I shared the graphics and the information everywhere I could.

Next up was the publication challenge update I’d been promising everyone for weeks. This included the gallery for all 54 books that were published as part of my challenge to publish a book a week for a year. And then I shared that one all over the place too.

Then it was gig list admin, which was quick because someone else is managing Diane’s Gig List now and all I have to do is share the posts that she shares. The domain for dianesgiglist.com expired this week and it was like another weight lifting from my shoulders.

And then it was Monkey Dust admin, because they have a gig this weekend.

Once all of that was out of the way, I was able to turn my attention back to my diary. I hadn’t done it for the week yet, so I did that first. I do love ClickUp, but at the moment it’s still not available offline unless you were working on it at the time the internet fell out. So I’m synchronising everything with a hard-copy diary (daily planner sheets printed off from the internet). I also synchronised ClickUp with Google Calendar, because Google Calendar *is* available offline.

The next thing I knew, it was dinner time (midday meal).

Some urgent work came in during the afternoon, so NaNo was shifted along by one day.

Tuesday – Today

On Tuesday, I caught up on my NaNo and then a load of householdy/private/adminy stuff came in, which required a lot of hanging on the telephone, and I had to switch attention again. While I was dealing with all of that, I decided to do the on-screen editing as I could dip in and out of that much more easily.

For example, but not exclusively…

• I had to change the address on my driving licence, and the DVLA website wouldn’t let me, so I spent a lot of time waiting for someone there to take my call and then tell me that they couldn’t change the address either, and they didn’t know why so have gone off to investigate – especially when this is how we’re supposed to be changing our details in the future.
• I was able to change the keeper’s address for my car, online. No such dillying around there. But I had to ring again to change the address on my direct debit for the road tax.
• The chap I spoke to in that department tried to change the address on my driving licence, but it wouldn’t let him, then he tried to send me the necessary form to do it by post, but it wouldn’t let him do that either and in the end he had to direct me to the same website that he was using so I could request it myself, otherwise I would have had to go to the post office and the ‘post office’ where we live now is only open on a Tuesday morning between 11am and 1pm… and that’s it.
• I had to make dental appointments for us both, and ended up hanging on the phone for ages there. We’ve waited 3 years to have our ‘routine’ checkups and they didn’t even have an answerphone facility. I had to keep dialling until someone could take my call, and with dentists as they are at the moment, we might have lost our position on their books.
• I had to make eye appointments for us both, which was easier but still time consuming.
• I’ve been trying to get hold of the doctor here, to register, but they were closed due to staff training, and then when I tried them again, I’d missed them by about 5 minutes.
• And I’ve been trying to book a hair appointment (I got one, for tomorrow, but it’s VERY EXPENSIVE, so I doubt I’ll be going back).
• Alongside all of that I tried to open an account on Mastodon, but there are so many servers there I got completely lost, ended up with 2 or 3 accounts, so deleted them all and decided to stay with CounterSocial, where you can find me at @DianeWordsworth.
• I’m still on Twitter – for now – but, on top of everything else that’s going on there, as Twitter wouldn’t let me have the @DianeWordsworth handle that’s actually been dormant for years, I don’t think I’ll be hanging around there for long.
• Oh yes, and it’s taken me a week – a whole week! – to pay off the last 2 of my debts, all of which have been with me since 2006. It’s as though they wanted me to be indebted to them forever… Saying that, I’m very proud of the fact that the forecast was for my debts to be cleared after 25 years, and it’s taken 16.

Next week

So that’s my news for much of this week. Next week will be better when I’ll be back on track, and with brand-new EXPENSIVE hair. (Someone had better notice when we go out on Saturday night!)

Have a great weekend!

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