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This morning, when I had paying things to be doing, I ended up writing down blurbs for two maybe-someday stories based on all the Láadan work I've been doing lately (http://laadanlanguage.org/pages/).  I don't have much new on the Láadan site, but tons of backend stuff is getting done and the topic is on my mind pretty much constantly lately.

*** Book #1 **************
Mackinac Island, with its summertime population of thousands but a wintertime population of barely 500, seemed the perfect contained location for a social engineering experiment to test how language affects a people.

Now, a generation later, rumors abound that behind the gaudy exterior of fudge and tourists, the worst kind of cult has arisen.

Reporter Dan Argosy is determined to discover the truth.  Armed with a false background and hidden cameras, he braves the snow-swept island.

Will he find the horror he excepts, or an unexpected love?

*** Book #2 **************
Five years ago Connie Argosy's son, Dan, left to investigate the rumored cult that lay hidden behind Mackinac Island's cheery exterior of fudge and tourists, and never returned.  He claimed he found love and happiness, but Connie knows better.

Now, Dan is dead, the result of a supposed boating accident, and Connie is determined to rescue her grandchildren.

Carrying papers demanding custody of the children, and with expensive lawyers only a call away, Connie braves the cold winds of the Mackinaw Straits.

Will she find the depravity she expects, or a place of comfort unlike any she has ever known?
************************* (Read more)

Last night, instead of doing paying work, I updated the synopsis for the done book so I can start sending it out to other agents, since the one agent I sent it to never got back to me.

And, yes, I know not to send it out to only one agent and then wait, but life's been a little busy for the past several months, so I was content to leave it sit there for a while.  So, now it's time to move on and submit to more places, but I had to re-do the synopsis first. 

I actually did most of the synopsis work back in early December and sent it to a couple people to review, but then life got busy again.  It also didn't help that the beginning was really dry... which is not how I want to start a synopsis.  Then on the trip back from the funeral in Kansas, one of the many tangents I went off onto, while driving alone for 10+ hours, was the a new first paragraph.

So I fixed the beginning and polished the rest of the synopsis. 

Then I sent it off to the first agent (after asking her if she wanted a copy), and maybe I'll guilt her into actually giving me an answer on the manuscript.  :-)

Now I just need to polish the 1st few chapters of the manuscript again, now that I've learned more copyediting-stuff, then I'll send the whole package off to other places.

Toward the end of last week, my uncle died.  I wasn't ever close to him, because they never lived close to us and I really wasn't going to go, but my father asked if I'd bring his other sister down to the funeral.

Well, as sometimes happens, the universe intervened and by the end of a constant couple days of changing plans, it turned out the weather was too bad for my aunt to come.  Which left me with a decision to go on my own, or not.  I pondered it Monday evening and Tuesday morning, then decided that since I had everything I arranged, I might as well go.

The 9+ hour drive was uneventful.  I got sucked into a couple antique stores on the way down and only spent $12, which I think is a record.  :-)  But I did get a huge kick out of the dining room set with a listed price of $145,000.00.  And, no, I didn't misplace a decimal point... the dining room set (buffet, china cabinet, silver chest, table, 10 chairs) costs more than my house is worth.  :-)  I'll post pictures if I can figure out how to get the pictures off my phone.

I had a good time with my family.  It was very nice to see my parents, brothers and cousins.

And this morning a left for home... and got as far as Newton, IA before I called it quits.  I'm an experienced winter driver... enough to know when it's just damn stupid to be on the road.  So I'm now holed up in a hotel and Iowa is pulling plows off the roads.  I'm not counting on getting out of here before noon tomorrow, if then.

But I've got TV, internet, fast food within walking distance, and a book to read, so I'm set.

This morning I worked through the details of how the hero saved the day and the consequences thereof.  Which left me with all the tons of stuff that needs to be foreshadowed, which is what I've been waiting for.  Because how can I know what scenes I need to write before I know what scenes need to be foreshadowed.  So, tons of work, but now I have a direction.

Good news/bad news, this also led me to yet another book, as one of the side characters suddenly became much more interesting.  *sigh*  Just what I need.

Also good news/bad news, in the last week I've gotten direction on several other major projects... my "I hate computers" project has finally turned itself around, plus several others.  Which in a way is good, as I like having specific things to do and goals to work towards... except that I didn't need them to all come to fruition in the same week!!

On top of that, my father called yesterday and asked a huge favor, which he rarely does. So, since he's a great father, plus the fact that he's been my sole financial support for the last six months... I wasn't about to turn him down.  But it means that I'm gone from Tuesday of this week through Saturday.  So all my plans to get to work on all these projects this week, which I had free before my contract job starts back up, just got all shot to hell.

Oh well, if nothing else, life remains interesting.  And now I'm off to take #1-son back to school for his last semester of college before he graduates... scary thought.

This morning, while I was lazing around reading instead of doing all the stuff I should be doing, I finally figured out how Jara's hero saves the day... of course at great cost to himself, and by extension at great cost to Jara.  But he heroically saves the day, which was the piece I needed before I could go on with the story.

Which is good news, but of course now the problem is finding the time to implement it.  Always a challenge.

After two days of work, I'm finally back to ground zero on the website that I attempted my web project on.  I lost two weeks of data.  I just wish I remembered what I'd done on it in those intervening weeks.  Oh well.  But it's recovered and working fine... I don't think I'm ever going to touch it again.

Beyond that, did a little futzing with the new stuff, but mostly read today.  Taking advantage of the holiday week, because next week is going to be really busy.

I submitted my bug report to Drupal folks at 17:32.

At 18:43, they shifted the report from one group to another group (shifting the blame?), but at the same time they made a suggestion (revert to a version of code from over a month ago) that took me 5 minutes to implement, and it WORKED!!!  YAH!!!

Granted it's stupid that I had to do revert to the previous version, but hey, it worked and I'm happy, and they got me an answer in an hour.  Can't beat that!  :-) 

(Well, yeah, it could have worked the 1st time, but I've been a programmer long enough to just be very happy about the hour turn-around time).

So, now I can keep going on this project.  Which is cool, but everything else is now taking a back-burner... and stacking up.  I hope I get this blasted thing running pretty soon.

There are not words enough to describe "Avatar", especially on a IMAX screen in 3D.  WOW!!!

My eldest who is learning this technology in school is so blown away he's wordless.

And I'm now mom of the millennia.  :-)  Especially since I promised I'd take them back and get there earlier to get better seats.  :-)

After four days of fighting with the website I wanted to get up, which I will grant was extremely complicated... I finally gave up.  Okay... It's done... I can't make it behave enough to do what I want to do.  And to say I was angry was putting it mildly.

So, I was recovering from backup (for the 2nd time, and having lost about 2 weeks worth of work, thankfully I didn't do much in that two weeks)... and the brainstorm hit to try the things I wanted to do on a different website.

And damn if it didn't work just fine.  (Update: found a major bug, but it's reproducable and minor compared to other problems I was having. I have note into the developer)

So, four days worth of angst and pain and agony and fighting... all because there's something wrong with the set-up on the first computer.

I really, Really, REALLY HATE computers.

This title should not come as a surprise to any computer professional.

I spent an entire day upgrading one of my websites, to the latest and greatest backend software.  Then I began this project that I was really excited about.  In the beginning, I ran into little problems that I didn't think too much about because everything seemed to work.  Then by the end of the 2nd day of working on this project, the problems were getting worse and worse, and all the debugging I did claimed I had one problem, when I clearly didn't have that problem.  So I tried to revert, and that didn't work, so I tried to fix that... and the more I did, the worse it got, until the entire site was dead in the water.

Thank goodness I had a backup... so now the site it back to where it was a couple weeks ago.  Which means everything between then and now is gone, but at least it's not starting over from scratch.

I really, really hate computers.