Word count: 7677 | Since last entry: 468 …or Christmas Eve, anyway.
We had a party yesterday, an open house where a couple dozen folks showed up to assemble jigsaw puzzles, talk, and eat. I made brownies using the recipe on the back of the Ghirardelli chocolate can, with the addition of some peppermint extract and mint chocolate chips, and OMG were they good. I’m not quite sure where today went. Went to the gym this morning, cleaned up from the party, went out for lunch, spent too much time online. We’re going to a dance performance in a little while, followed by dinner with friends. Tomorrow we will open some presents, but most of the presenting will be done when we get together with Kate’s family in Kennewick later this week. I hadn’t planned to take any time off this week, but then we decided to take two days for this trip, and now I’m thinking we’ll spend the second night there and come back a day later. I don’t think anyone at work will miss me for that extra day. I bought myself a new phone, a Treo 700p, and I’m liking it a whole lot. Gmail and Google Maps are the killer apps for this platform, for sure. I’m extremely glad I sprang for the unlimited data plan, because if I had all this power at my fingertips and I had to count every kilobyte I’d be going mad right about now. I’ve been fighting some WiFi interference issues that make my home digital music system flake out at irregular intervals. I’m pretty sure that it’s interference from a non-WiFi device such as a cordless phone or microwave, or possibly a WiFi network that’s not broadasting its SSID, because there’s no other WiFi network showing up on the same channel but the problem looks just the same as the interference I see when I run the microwave. But neither of my two closest neighbors was home Friday evening and I was definitely seeing the problem then. Might be my back-fence neighbor. I really need some kind of signal strength meter with a directional antenna to figure out where the problem is coming from. But if it turns out to be my neighbor’s phone or microwave, what do I do then? I’m considering some kind of signal booster to try to power past the problem, but unfortunately my cheapo wireless router (which I have to use because it is the only one supported by my DSL provider) doesn’t even have a detachable antenna so I’m not sure how I’d even connect it. As for the writing… well, things have not been going too well on that front. I’ve been writing only a hundred words a day on those days I’ve been writing at all (missed three days this week). And I got another rejection on the novel, this one from DAW. Plus another short story rejection. Bah, humbug.