Everybody hump!

Okay, not really that funny.

I actually had RayK and Fraser in mind. I didn't watch any more episodes last night, but they're on my mind anyhow. And not in the "humping" sense, either. Not really. I'm working out their orbit in one part of my story.

When I rolled into the office at 7:45 this morning, Buehler was already here. Spooky. He normally shows up around 9:00 or 9:30. It's very unsettling to have him here so early in the day. I normally start off my day by checking my personal e-mail (which seems to be working normally again) and surfing the news to see what's new in the world. Makes me self-conscious to have him sitting there. (And grateful I was on time.)

I worked on my ban/block lists again for a while last night before it occurred to me that some people are no doubt visiting one of my blogs for legitimate reasons. It's possible that getting a lot of traffic doesn't automatically mean spammers. But! I'm absolutely thrilled to say, it's the third of the month and so far I've held the referral spam down to five hits, on each blog! I don't doubt that after the Great Reinstall the other night, I've forgotten to block someone, so I'll get nailed sometime this month, but not so far. (Sometimes momentary triumphs are all you get.)

Dammit. I went to get coffee and forgot to close this document. I don't suppose anyone looked at it, but still. I'm getting frighteningly absent-minded.

In theory, I'm still plugging away at beta-testing BelleCall, the case program we're designing for the Belles. Or, I should say, I'm beta-testing it again. When someone tells me to "take a look" at a piece of software, the way Buehler did last week, I assume it's already been tested thoroughly and that I'm doing to sort of second-stage beta or something.

It's my failing that I consistently fail to remember that, around here, "take a look at it" means that I'm probably the first person besides the designer to lay eyes on it. So, instead of the brief (6 hour) look I took at it the other day, today I'm trying to break it. I've already found over a dozen new things. I was very sloppy last week.

One piece of exceptionally good news is that, less than two weeks after I started it, the WonderDrug has just about eliminated my I.C. symptoms. I do still have little (ahem) 'episodes' but nothing like the scale of what was happening before. I'm sleeping better and my energy level is back up, too. Sure is nice not to be 'flashing' fifteen or twenty times a day, I promise you. (Okay, it might not have been twenty. I'm prone to exaggeration when I'm not lying, but it sure felt like it.)

I did some drawing last night. Actually, I put in another two or three hours. A new hobby takes a lot of practice.

(I swear, learning to write was a lot easier.) (Of course, I just shoved things onto the page and counted on my beta readers to help me fix my biggest problems, back when I was starting out.) (Then I gave up on improving.) (Then I stopped writing.) (Then I started again, focused on trying to write well, and crashed and burned.) (Now I'm dabbling. The instant I feel a desire to "do it better" come over me, I close the computer file and do something else for a while.)

I can draw three-dimensional rectangles now if I have the book with the instructions. Without the book, I still don't get the perspective right.

Last night I branched out into houses. A house is a three-dimensional rectangle with a roof. So far I'm not having success at roofs. My first attempt...the roof looked like it belonged to a house in Flatland. Actually, some distorted version of Flatland.

I may switch and work on interiors for a while, instead. Furniture is an interesting problem. Also, scale. I tried an interior last night and wound up with 22 foot ceilings, a 17 foot tall door, and a 2 foot tall couch.

I brought a drawing pad and one of the books on perspective with me to work today, but more out of obsession than out of any belief that I could find a quiet corner to each lunch and work on these things.