Well, my foot’s still broken and it’s a bugger getting about the place on crutches, but I haven’t been completely lazy. I’ve been engaged on a number of projects. For instance, the eagle eyed would have noticed the progress panel at the top left of every page now indicates work has progressed with The Watching. I’m now on the last scene of Chapter 10.
The Lawnmower Man.
Since I’ve been effectively incapacitated, even mowing the lawn is beyond my capability right now. This at least absolved me of responsibility when the dear lady wife mowed over a 16lb tamp bar and destroyed a blade.
It also destroyed the spindle too.
That called for a whole new spindle and blade set up. Which of course, the mechanic of the house had to take care of. Go me!
Yes I look pissed off, but in my defense, that was taken on the first day of the problem, when we realised we couldn’t fix it because we didn’t have the parts.
Ninety dollars later and the foot still broke, a job well done at the end of the day.
Now, what else did I do?
This Vacuum Cleaner Sucks.
A good while ago, there was a time when we didn’t realise that our Dyson vacuum cleaner would stop operating if there was some issue or other, I’m pretty sure the filter was the cause. We didn’t know that, all we knew was the power button wouldn’t stay down. Well, I taped it down and eventually the power button quit entirely.
I replaced it. But this isn’t that story, this is the story of what happens when you reassemble the thing with a new switch but don’t route the wire properly. Eventually the terminal works its way off of the switch and the thing completely stops operating.
Also, the last time I had this thing apart, apparently I lost one of the springs because it wasn’t there when I opened it up again. As luck would have it, a cut spring from a crappy retractable ballpoint pen will work.
You Did Nothing Useful Then?
Well, it might have taken me five weeks, but I also finished my latest research reading for Lock Out Tag Out, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
I’ll write up my notes as and when I can, right now I’ve only just started collating them. I won’t say anything much about it in this post, except to comment that I’ve pretty well settled on a research process now. I’d been experimenting with different approaches, the one which I thought most promising on the face of it has proven to be the most embarrassingly poor.
When I read through Infamy, I jotted notes down in a separate notebook. This seemed like a great idea since I could make somewhat detailed notes, keeping a page reference in the notebook, and I’d spare the book itself from being defaced since I’ve always detested people who write in books.
Well, now I’m one of them.
It beats still not having gotten all those notes collated.
My note process now is to simply underline the text that seems pertinent and mark the page with an indication of exactly why I thought that snippet was important. This is usually just a symbol or a three letter code as a reminder. It’s not as useful as a more detailed note taking, but it’s better than coming back to it later and wondering what was the importance of some underlined text because I’d forgotten.
Next time I might try directly entering notes into Scrivener on my Windows Notebook.
The Watching.
In my work on the novel I’ve been reading each revised scene aloud and revising awkward parts to improve how readable it is. At this point, I’ve caught up with myself and from here on I’ll need to be responding to the comments I made during the last read-through and reading aloud at the same time. If I can keep to a simple pace of 1,300 words per day of revision, I have about three weeks work left.
At present, it’s looking like coming in about 83,000 words, but there’s still a third of the book to work through, so that could change.
Keep on Keepin’ on.
That’s the plan.
I have two more weeks before my next podiatry appointment, at which time I’m hoping I can dispense with the crutches and be at least somewhat more mobile. I don’t expect I’ll be able to get rid of the moon boot, but it’ll be a drastic quality of life improvement to be able to hobble from Point-A to Point-B with something in my hands other than crutches.
My next post will probably be about then, unless something really interesting happens.
Until then, I intend to keep chipping away at whatever I can, although progress is going to be very slow.
Stay safe and have a happy Fourth of July.
Categories: My Life, Repair Jobs, Research, Revision, The Old Man, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Work Update
Andrew Wellington 
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