Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Show me the river, that leads to my home - back to the one I love...

...show me the wind that constantly blows , and I will fly away, fly away home...

I love eastmountainsouth.

So, it's been a rather mild week and a half or so since last I wrote; NaNoWriMo is in full swing, and although I had a great start (4K the first day!) I'm moderately behind on my word count as we roll into day 8 - barely 10,000 words to my credit, more shame to me. Still, those people graceful enough to read the work in progress have given me high praise - which probably defeats the point of the exercise, as then I worry about whether or not I'll be able to maintain that standard - but on the other hand, I'm a flattery junkie, however modest I may try to be. I just love being told how pretty I am, even though I strongly suspect the motivations and sincerity of anyone giving me a compliment.

Yeah, I'm just a giant bundle of neuroses and contradictions. It's a feature!

Life on the ship continues much as before, with the addition of NaNo thrown in for fun and excitement; I've been doing the majority of my writing during rover rounds on watch or immediately after (which probably explains my slow pace, to be honest - I really need to strap my ass into the chair and just work on pushing through the damned thing), with my free time spent on various other pursuits - ah, NaNoWriMo, the one month out of the year that writers everywhere come together to celebrate procrastination. I love it so.

I've restarted (or, at least, made the attempt to restart) my long-running, oft-delayed D&D PBP, Sorrowfell - it's a creative outlet at a time when my creative energies should be posted elsewhere, but it's actually given me some ideas for Searching for Avalon, my NaNovel - part of it's similar themes, and part of it, I guess, is I just need something else to blow off steam.

...I'm the only person I know who needs a hobby to distract him from his hobbies.

Good news on the home front, my parents took Molly (yes, I named my iPod - aren't I cute/pathetic? I name all my electronic gidgets) into the local Apple store, and the techs were able to fix her - at the predictable cost of all my music, damn the luck. A lot of the songs on there were garnered from friends, meaning they're irreplaceable, or damn close to it; the majority I have on CD, but the mp3 files were lost with my last external harddrive, meaning they are replaceable, but it's going to be a right pain in the ass putting all the music back on.

On the other hand, it's a damn sight better than having to buy a new iPod and do all that anyway, so I might as well quit bitching.

Speaking of new iPods, I like the concept of the 80-gig video iPod a lot better than I like the reality. I find the older Photo 'pods more aesthetically pleasing, since they don't have the 'cut off' look to provide the flat screen; I'm a tad irritated that the new generation iPods can't use the accessories from the old ones (so, for example, had Molly not been restored to me and I'd been forced to garner her replacement, I would have had to get a new FM transmitter - a vital necessity for the car, especially given the state of radio in Hampton Roads - and wireless headphones), and I think watching video of any length on a screen the size of even the largest iPod is a silly idea. Talk about iStrain.

...teehee. Yes, I thought of that myself. Please direct your death threats to the little comment link at the bottom of the entry, folks.

Which... pretty much wraps it up for now, I guess. It's five AM here, with an unrep due in an hour - not one, thank god, that I have to deal with, as I was up fairly late (for me, anyway) with an unrep this afternoon. This should be a bright, sparkly paycheck coming up; this pay period has had two unreps thus far for my team, a holiday on the eleventh, and it turns out the day we were restricted to the ship for fueling counts as penalty time - almost 11 dollars an hour for about sixteen hours, just because they wouldn't let us go out in town - which in other times, might have irritated me, but last time we were in port (and possibly this next time, as well), I had no interest in going out.

I am going to have to venture out into Dubai at some point, though, as my dad's asked for a Harley shirt from overseas for this year's Christmas present - his present last year was two shirts from Cadiz, Spain, and I guess I've started a tradition. Makes me wonder just what I'm supposed to do on a deployment where we don't visit new ports - I can see myself buying multiple shirts from different ports and squirreling them away, just to have a present source for the future.

Heh. Guess that's all for now.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

And postcards sailor-man! Thanks for the update, it's always nice to know you are alive. We miss you.