Tuesday 24 October 2023: I finished something!

Yay! I actually finished something.

Just over a week ago I had a job request land in my in box. My first instinct was to say ‘sorry, I’m full’, but this looked like a quick and interesting job I could easily turn around in a week. I pitched for it, without too much expectation. And I was selected! The job came in a week ago last Friday, I collected it on Monday, and worked on it in between other things throughout the week.

I sent off a quick report ahead of returning the work, returned the work on Friday, and received both payment and a 5-star glowing rating by return.

That’s the way to do it!

The poet really wasn’t very well when he came home from his business trip and he had plans to stay in all weekend. Then he said he’d come shopping with me and wait in the car. Then he said he’d come into the shops too. I did a quick meal plan for the week, a quick shopping list, and off we toddled. We only went to three shops, the butcher, the supermarket and a home store, but we got everything on our list and were back home in no time.

On Sunday he rallied a lot more and we cooked. He made a pumpkin soup. I made pumpkin muffins. And he made a roast chicken dinner. We didn’t have a proper pudding because we still had pumpkin tray bake with orange cream icing from the week before to finish off. He was feeling better again by Monday morning, if a bit weary. But after he went to work, I started to get a niggle of a sore throat…

After feeding the birds and all the usual social media stuff, my first job on Monday morning was to collect the deposit for the job I did last week. It took exactly one week to land in my account so I moved it over to my business account, transferring 10% to my 10% account before putting the rest in savings. As payment of the balance was made on Friday, the rest of it may also land this coming Friday.

I was just about to start the next job on the list when a text message came in from my sister and suddenly I had Probate/house sale stuff to do. I did that, and tried again.

I copied the last two blog posts to Bluesky and CounterSocial and I toyed with adding them to Medium too. Then I made a snap decision and removed all of my stories from Medium that aren’t in a publication. It seems that Medium is having all sorts of problems at the moment, and it really isn’t worth my time and effort.

I played with removing the paywall and putting the paywall back, but then I figured the money I earn from there doesn’t justify even that amount of work. So I removed those that aren’t in a publication, removed one from a publication, and removed two publications, keeping three publications.

Then I started today’s post. I updated this week’s diary and tried to recur some tasks on ClickUp. The recurring didn’t work properly. It didn’t show my completed tasks and the next recurring tasks showed as ‘to do’ on my calendar but ‘in progress’ in the actual tasks. So I logged a bug with ClickUp.

I created posters for the next two Monkey Dust gigs, added the gigs to Diane’s Gig List, and created events for both on Facebook. Then I shared them on Facebook. I didn’t do the invitations yet as there are still a couple of weeks to go. Instagram wouldn’t let me switch between accounts, so I logged a report, closed the window and opened it again. And voila! I was switched and I shared the next gig there.

Right after dinner, the contractor turned up to measure the side door again, but when he opened it all up, he decided to just do the replacement there and then. So he was here for the duration and I had to people. While he was here, I rearranged our eye tests from this Thursday to a week on Friday.

We originally had two days off this week and were were going to the optician on Thursday, but then my hospital appointment came in for next Wednesday and we had to swap that out with this Thursday. We could have still gone to the optician’s, but it would have been a big chunk out of both of our days and the poet would have had to go back to work anyway. So I moved them to next Friday.

Then the poet reminded me that we’re both already at the asthma clinic next Friday, so I had to call the optician’s again and moved our appointments from the morning to the afternoon. Rufus is at the vet this Saturday too. That’s a lot of people for a non-people person in a short space of time.

A new book landed for review, so I went to collect that, convert it to mobi and epub and upload it to Google Play Books. I also checked that the mobi file opened in my desktop Kindle. (It did.)

All last week I was uploading Chapter 2 of Diary of a Scaredy Cat to Substack but, of course, I wasn’t well for much of last week and did really well to get one job started and finished. So I forgot. All weekend I meant to remedy that, and the weekend ran out before I got around to it. I was determined to get it posted today and almost left myself a message, but I thought I’d easily remember such a big thing…

Well, I finally remembered at about 4pm yesterday and I quickly uploaded it.

I still had work to do, but I was feeling weary with this cold I may have picked up off the poet. Rather than sit staring at the monitor, or click mindlessly through the same screens over and over again, I switched everything off and called it a day. I have no interruptions today – or no scheduled ones at any rate – so I’ll have a better stab at things… said she hopefully…