Newsletter - February 7, 2023

Rough week! Our youngest woke up sick on Monday. An ice storm hit on Tuesday, and while stuck at home, our daughter's sickness turned into something that had my wife searching the web for clues. Always a bad idea, right? Not this time. She nailed it—appendix gone bad. Of course, we didn’t know that for certain, yet we set out on our icy journey to Dell’s Childrens' Hospital. Trees had fallen across slick roads, creating a narrow maze. My wife kept asking me why I didn’t go faster, and I would point out the cars in ditches on the side of the road with their hazards flaring. But yes, we made it, safely, and they ran tests, determined her appendix was on the fritz, and sent her into surgery toward the end of the day. I went back home to look in our other two kids (this time, icy roads in the dark! yay!), while my wife spent the night on the hospital couch with hourly interruptions to check on our baby. Thanks to my wife, we spotted the problem before the appendix burst, so we were out the next day and back home (the roads were less perilous at that point).

Sadly, we returned home to a good bit of cleanup work due to damage from the ice storm. I still had to work (from home), but would sneak out at around 4:00 to get in some chainsaw-ing while there was still light. Our entire neighborhood looks like a toddler decided to cut his own hair.

Looking out my front door - those are piles of branches along the curb

Looking next door (you should have seen it the day before!)

I am exhausted. Right now, I feel like I could sleep all day and it wouldn't be enough. On the bright side, we've been so busy, the dragon is still on the wall!

Check out the video from last week’s newsletter if you don’t know what this is about

I also had this little project going on

- the laptop won't boot, and I'm fairly confident the GPU went bad. (I can boot from a linux stick where I turn off the modeset for the graphics, but Windows won’t come up even from a stick). A video I found on the web suggests that if I can find and cut the power to the GPU, the rest of the laptop might work fine. Coincidentally, I have a beer-drinking buddy who builds laptop power management units (for Dell though, not Lenovo, but he's going to try to help). Even if I manage to guess the right pin, it might still send the system into a malfunction state. But it's useless as-is--you can't even keep linux alive for long before something tries to hit the GPU and black-screens the laptop.

Oh yeah, this is a writing newsletter.

Believe it or not, writing still occurred! Sitting in hospital rooms for extended periods provided opportunity. Maybe not great focus, but good opportunity. Elliah finished up the first leg of the second part of her journey. When I began this section, I pictured three adventures. But I think I'm going to push the third adventure into the third part of the book. Which means... I'm halfway done with part two. I suppose that also means I'm halfway done with the story. 75k words. Okay, that seems about right. I loved having the bigger fonts in my previous books, but I might have to make them a little smaller this time.

Haven't heard from the student artist(s) in a couple of weeks, but any more input might have caused me a system overload anyway, so I'll acknowledge that I didn't make progress and move on.

I was plagued by nightmares Sunday night. Some were pretty horrible, and they clued me in to the fact that I didn't really process the worry over my daughter when she was in the hospital. But I'll share one of the funnier bits. The world became infected by a virus that did nothing harmful... until you had sex. Sex triggered a mutation in women, causing them to turn into monsters. My brain played with this concept and how it would affect the human race, and I dreamed of a scene where I was tubing down the river, drinking beer with my buddy Bo Bowman. At 6'3", he's a big guy with a big voice. And he's telling me how his wife turning into a 9' tall cyclops was, "not a big deal. We don't need a ladder to change the light bulbs in the vaulted ceiling anymore. But she keeps breakin' stuff, because she has no depth perception." Maybe the "human" race would survive. Someone go write that book, b/c I want to read it now.

o To-Do list for writing last week: