I've got to continue the work, of course. Writing this thing is approximately as unpleasant as I expected it to be, but that's not really the hard part. The hard part comes from the change in work conditions that accompanies marriage.
Before I was married, it was no trouble at all to find time and space to write. For example, when Mom was still alive, I had my computer in my bedroom, and if I wanted to write I'd go into my room and sit at my computer and write. If the TV was too distracting, I'd close my door. Mom was usually asleep during prime writing hours, but even during the day she rarely had occasion to interrupt me; usually it was for something minor like ideas for dinner or a phone call.
But when you're married, it's a whole other situation. I'd much rather be with my wife than at the computer, writing, even if she's watching some nonsensical thing on TV. And it also doesn't help if my wife decides to get on her computer, because that distracts me, too.
It's a good problem to have. Do not get me wrong.
But because I'm used to having it very quiet when I work, I simply cannot concentrate when anything is happening around me. Back when I was scrawling text longhand in school (usually ignoring anything that was going on in class around me) I just had to ignore the teacher's voice most of the time. But that's f-ing high school; when there's a cuddly woman distracting you, how do you say "no"?
I think the only way to fix this is going to be getting the damned basement cleaned out, and then taking that area by the stairs and turning it into my office. Build a place that is, as Jerry Pournelle calls it (in his home), "the Monk's Cell." No distractions.
That would be a good use for El-Hazard. It's capable of word processing but not of playing games. Get an inexpensive monitor like the 19" AOC to hook it to, plug in a keyboard and mouse, and go to town. I still need Internet access, because I am used to being able to look up things on-line as I write, but the low-horsepower nature of the computer itself would keep me from straying.
What I really need is an outbuilding--heated and air-conditioned, powered and wired for Ethernet--which could be called a "workshop" and which would be an ideal place to write without distraction. Maybe someday.
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Global warming leads to the coldest autumn/winter in 102 years. Damn those human carbon emissions! They're ruining everything!
Mrs. Fungus watched perhaps twenty minutes of The Day After Tomorrow before deciding, "I'm going to hate this" and shutting it off. The premise of the movie is that global warming causes a sudden Ice Age, complete with ice boulders raining down on Tokyo and the Statue of Liberty being buried in snow.
Polar ice caps melt, reducing ocean salinity, slowing this and that current, causing everything to get cold--but if it's warm enough to melt the ice caps, where did the extra heat go? Into melting the ice caps? That would still have a net positive effect on global temperature; you can't just wish that heat away and it certainly isn't going to disappear in the blink of an eye.
That's the major issue I have now with much of the global warming/climate change nonsense they're still trying to push: where did the heat go? The warmistas are trying to tell us that the heat somehow magically skipped over the upper ocean and is sequestered in deep water, but that doesn't make any sense. It is true that the upper ocean and lower ocean is separated by a layer of water called the "thermocline" where temperature makes an abrupt change, but it gets colder rather than warmer as you descend. (Tom Clancy is educational!) It happens this way because the upper layers are warmed by the sun, and the lower layers are not, and there isn't a lot of mixing.
So how, pray tell, does this deep ocean water get warmer while the surface temperature remains steady? They don't explain that, yet they insist that the deep ocean is where all the heat has been going since 1997, the last year the global temperature anomaly was observed to rise.
I do not believe you can construct a plausible mechanism whereby the deep ocean can sequester heat without warming the surface layers first. And significantly, at that.
The other issue--slower currents in a freshening ocean caused by ice cap melting--has also not worked out as predicted. Even when the Arctic Ocean has been clear enough to permit the passage of ships, it has not significantly changed the velocity of the Gulf Stream, and in fact the ocean current studies have been out of the eye of the mainstream for quite a while because it hasn't been behaving as predicted. (I seem to recall the Gulf Stream speeding up as the north Atlantic freshened, but I may be misremembering.)
My confusion over global warming lasts as long as I try to make sense of what comes from the pro-AGW crowd. When I take a step back and think about it in thermodynamic terms, I find myself categorically rejecting about ninety percent of what they're telling me solely because it's physically impossible. If the deep oceans are warming, the surface oceans must be warmer. If the oceans are warming, the air over them must also be warming, because the heat capacity of water is enormously higher than that of air. Therefore if there is no observed rise in atmospheric temperature for fifteen years, warming cannot be taking place.
Meanwhile, the past few winters have consistently been bad somewhere on the planet. It was Europe (particularly England) last year, remember? Anyone know how the weather was in England this year? It's certainly not because of an unprecedented weather phenomenon ("Polar vortex! ZOMGWTFBBQ!").
* * *
Seriously, cut out the simple sugars, already. It took me a long time to wise up, but sugar is bad for you. It is seriously bad for you, because the human body is not designed to process large quantites of the stuff, and it will give you all kinds of chronic diseases if you consume a lot of it.
I have gotten to the point now that I can't stomach the idea of eating things which are pure sugar. I used to love "Skittles" but now it makes me feel slightly queasy to imagine eating more than a few of them per day. Similarly, when I think about how much high fructose corn syrup I drank--as Pepsi--I just sigh and shake my head.
I don't hew the line as seriously as most low-carb advocates do. I still eat bread, for example, and pasta; I haven't eliminated all starch and carbohydrates from my diet. But I have sharply reduced my sugar intake, and stopped trying to eat "low fat". I eat meat, I eat cheese, I use whole milk and real butter, and eschew hydrogenated oils wherever I can. It takes less food for me to feel sated at each meal; I am not a skinny mofo but I weigh less than I did when I still bought into the whole "low fat" bandwagon.
* * *
This looks like fun. I'd call that a "motorcycle" since a scooter is a step-through design and a motorcycle is not. There have been bikes with automatic transmissions before, so the fact that this one has one does not automatically (heh) relegate this machine to the ranks of "scooters".
And I like how it looks. Unlike JayG I really like it. Take everything that's white in that picture and paint it a candy blue, and dayum that'd be a sweet ride.
Not happening this month, though. *sigh*
* * *
Besides writing three pages yesterday I organized my story folder. It needed it; major projects had their own folders but there was a long list of things that did not, and I got that mess straightened out.
Well, this is the last Wednesday in March 2014. It'll be April 2 a week from today. Whee!