Wednesday 25 June 2025: Catching up…again

Yesterday morning started well enough, certainly better than the previous 2 days. I was up on time and at my desk on time, but the first jobs I had to do were catch-ups from Monday, when I’d spent most of the day faffing with bank statements.

First of all I had to finalise and post yesterday’s blog post. Fortunately, most of it had been written the day before and I just had to top and tail it and choose an image. 

I decided to allocate a weekly slot to finances, and I rejigged the schedule to allow for this on TickTick. I moved a few things around, then transferred this week’s to this week’s diary, a job I should have actually done on Friday. 

Next job was Monkey Dust admin for a gig this weekend. I had to make the poster, and while I did that I had to look for and adapt a vector image to use in the bottom corner of the poster. The adaptation involved removing the background which, after a bit of faffing, was actually quite easy and quick to do.

The venue had already created an event on FB, but the landlady used an older poster and tweaked that to suit her event. When Firefox eventually let me get into the page (DuckDuckGo didn’t…), I shared the event first, then the poster (my poster), and then I had to add the gig to Diane’s Gig List. DuckDuckGo wouldn’t let me in because it wouldn’t read the password brought over from Safari and Firefox, so I went back to Firefox to do that too.

I went into the Apple community to see if anyone else had problems opening or keeping Facebook in different browsers and was delighted to see it isn’t just me. I think I mentioned it before, but the response was to tell FB that their DNS was wrong, because heaven forbid Apple to admit there’s something wrong. It works on everything else, so it must be the Mac Mini that’s causing the issue and not our internet or the signal inside the house.

I did a bit of blog catch-up, reading, commenting and replying. And I had my midday breakfast, renamed ‘brunch’ now in my diary, with the 3pm ‘dinner’ changed to ‘afternoon tea’ and the 7pm ‘tea’ changed to dinner. Both Brummies and Yorkies use dinner for the midday meal, and when in Rome… (or Birmingham or Yorkshire). But the OCD wasn’t liking ‘dinner’ at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. 

I had a reply to my Apple query from a community bod rather than an Apple bod, who said to switch the router off for 30 seconds, which is the only thing I haven’t tried. I don’t think we should have to do that to get things to work but, hey, I’ll give it a go. But I had work still to do so didn’t try just yet.

I was supposed to be starting another workshop on Tuesday, alongside the one I’m already doing, but neither workshop had its videos up yet for this week. So I went back to the other workshop, which started on the same day as the one I was already doing, and checked out the first lot of videos for Week 1. Both of these workshops had 2 start dates and I didn’t know yet if they would record new classes for the different start dates or if they were just happy to see 2 start dates-worth of assignments.

It will be interesting to see if the second lot of videos change when they *are* up. I didn’t do any note-taking, I just watched and listened and took it all in. If the videos are the same, then when this week’s go live it will be a recap. And if they’re different, then I’ll get 2 lots of videos per class for my money and I may learn something different from both lots.

I collected a load of new books, converted them and uploaded and sideloaded them everywhere, so I can read them on any device, anywhere, any time. And I did a load more admin stuff.

Then, finally, I got around to some writing. I’m working on End of the Rainbow at the moment, for the great novella challenge, and the short story The Ace of Pentacles for the bookazine. This will be the fourth and final backstory for the Stevie Beck mysteries, so I’ll be looking at a bit of a marketing drive and maybe unpublishing and republishing the ones already out there.