The Neon Nurse's Charting

The gods of Get Rich Quick are mocking me.

Here in Colorado we have two big ticket money wasting opportunities, the regular state lottery and the PowerBall Lotto. I have two sets of numbers I always play, partly because I have a paranoid feeling that as soon as I stop, they will come up as winners.

Last night on the regular lottery, had I been playing THAT one instead of Powerball, I would have had 5 out of 6 numbers and won $448. OHH WELLL.

Lois's new book came in the mail yesterday. That would be the other half of The Sharing Knife, which was so oddly split by the publisher into two separately published books even though it is CLEARLY all one story. Anyway. Because I had felt a little let down after reading the Beguilement half, I was reluctant to start Legacy. Because...what if reading the other half DIDN'T make me feel all better about the two oddly paced books with such a long delay between them?

One of the several other projects I have been pecking away at lately has required me to make my 20th century brain try to comprehend and cope with modern computer Stuff. The progress has been slow. I have been trying to convert a section of a videotape to DVD format and then to a media format uploadable to YouTube.

I feel it has been unnecessarily complex and hard.

Every time it seemed like I was figuring something out and making progress, I would get stuck in that new spot. However, last night about midnight I found yet another site which had much clearer instructions. I decided to give it a try, and during the parts where things were downloading or decoding or re-emulsifying or whatever, I went ahead and started The Book of Approach/Avoidance.

As I feared, the first few chapters were kind of...bland. It wasn't hard for me to set the book aside each time I needed to do some new thing to the video project. When the program FINALLY got done doing what it was supposed to do, I set the book aside, intending to go to bed.

But I was jazzed from the shock of the video project finally going right, so I decided to go ahead and upload it to YouTube. Of course, that part instantly went TOTALLY wrong. Well, not instantly. It went about half wrong and then caused my computer to almost but not quite totally freeze up.

So while I was waiting to see if it would all sort itself out (shyeah, RIGHT), I went back to the book. That's when it FINALLY got into the good part of the story....

About 2:30 am, I rebooted the computer manually and then turned it off for the night. Also, I mentally blew off getting much done the next day (today) and stayed up until almost 6am finishing the book.

I had to get up about an hour and a half after I finally went to bed so I could take Dreamcloud in for his appointment with Rick the Car Doctor. I got to sleep about another four hours once we came back from doing that. My plan is to go to bed early (for me) tonight, at about midnight, rolling back my sleep schedule a little so I can use the cooler early morning hours to finish a gardening project, which has been going along about as speedily as the video one.

So. My exhausted first impression of SK:Legacy is that it's very good overall, but would have been much better as one complete novel.

Now I am going to go outside and grub up massive amounts of unwanted native grass corms and roots while I try YET ONCE MORE to get my .avi file to upload to bloody YouTube.