A lot of creative types have insomnia. It’s next to impossible to turn off the constant barrage of information churning through our brains at night. We can utilize the most precise sleep hygiene, take melatonin, meditate, use all the tricks, and we still wind up staring at the ceiling at 4 AM while our brains merrily gambol about with memories, ideas, plans, plots, dialogue, etc.

Mine started in grammar school, if I remember correctly, and pretty much runs to this day. I’ve learned how to cycle through various supplements in order to wear my brain down long enough for it to shut up, but any sort of stress tends to short-circuit that process. And like most of us, I’ve been under a lot of stress for years.

That’s not good for a lot of things. It impacts my health, my writing, and my general joy in life. And yes, the knee replacement fixed a large chunk of physical pain that’s been keeping me up, but other body parts decided to pick up the slack. I think what I’m trying to say here is that if I’ve been terse for the last couple of years or so, it’s because I don’t sleep much these days.

If you’re going through this as well, be kind with yourself. You’re not alone, and thinking that you’re a slacker or beating yourself up because you’re not getting everything done that you wanted to accomplish isn’t going to help anything and, frankly, isn’t deserved.

I’m thinking the back of the heat wave has finally broken. I woke up this morning and didn’t immediately want to hide in my office, I’ve had more energy, cranked out a K on Crystal Blade, and the temps only made it up to 98°F. Tomorrow’s temp is supposed to be pretty much the same, then it starts dropping back into the low nineties.

Of course, the worrying thing is that it’s only June and we’ve already had a multiple day run of triple digit temps, something that’s far more common for July and August. And I know this heat has been straining Anita Gigawatt to a dangerous point; Cthulhu only knows what’s going to happen if we get another heat wave like this in those months.

Anyway, I don’t have the Crystal Blade scene ready for Vella just yet (this is a spicy one) but I should have it ready before the end of the day so stay tuned.

The heat wave was supposed to crest tomorrow but I think we got it today. It was 106°F with a heat index of 119°F. I waited until 8:00 PM to go out and get some Whataburger for dinner so that I didn’t have to heat up the kitchen at all and even then it was still 100°F and the car clearly wasn’t happy about running in those temps.

The biggest problem for me is that even though I’m staying inside I still feel drained. I’m getting the worst sinus headaches and I keep having to go lie down before I get nauseated. I don’t know if it’s because the house is pretty much sealed and we’re not getting a lot of fresh air, or there’s just a lot of mold/pollen/cat dander/what have you that’s been supercharged by the heat, or what the hell is going on. But Nicola is wrecked. I managed to get about 800 words done on Episode 33 of Crystal Blade and got that uploaded, and after that I gave up and went to bed.

Does it suck that this crappy weather hits right while I’m trying to finish the book? You betcha. But I’m also in my late fifties and I have to accept that I have some limitations these days, and trying to work through a screaming sinus headache is simply not on. Hopefully once the heat wave breaks I’ll feel better and can get back to work on cranking out the rest of the Blade eps.

I did our big stock-up yesterday with a goal towards parking the Mazda in the garage and not taking it out again until things start cooling off. I have an intermittent fault somewhere in the driver’s door which triggers the door open warning light and makes it next to impossible to lock the door from the inside.I can lock it from the outside, but it requires a lot of fiddling to get the door open light to go off (and I don’t want to leave that on because it’s a drain on the battery).

As far as I can tell the root cause is a short somewhere in the door, which wouldn’t surprise me—that door faces the setting sun and has been baked every summer since 2014. Fixing it will require pulling off the door seal and checking the wires.  Needless to say I cannot do that without dying of hyperthermia at the moment, so the next best thing to do is keep the car out of direct sunlight, drive it as little as possible, and hope that temps cool down to a point next weekend where I can pull it into the garage, take off the door sill and track down the short. Assuming I can find the relevant bit of melted wire, fixing it will be a matter of wrapping some electrician’s tape around the gap in the wire (or possibly some heat-shrink wire wrap, which I have upsatirs).

It will be hot, sweaty, and unpleasant, but better that than paying a garage a grand for labor and diagnostics.

As you may know, Bob, Coca-Cola has been releasing limited edition flavors from their Creations division. There was Starlight (some kind of berry flavor), Dreamtime (mango), Move (coconut), and now we have Ultimate, which was apparently created in partnership with a gaming company.
I like trying out new flavors (I still miss California Raspberry) and they always bring them out in a Zero version as well so yesterday I tried a small bottle of Ultimate. First opinion: it tastes like bubble gum. After some more analysis I decided it tasted specifically like a cross between Juicy Fruit and banana Laffy Taffy; serious tropical flavor with a strong banana note.

Unfortunately, it’s also sweet as hell and was a bit too much for me. So I stuck the bottle in the fridge and didn’t think anything more about it until I was getting a glass of Coke Zero last night. I figured, eh, waste not want not, and poured the remainder of the Ultimate into my plain Coke Zero (I’m gonna say it was a 50/50 mix).

A revelation—Ultimate’s sweetness was muted by the plain Coke Zero and the really strong banana-y tropical flavor became a pleasant note instead of in-your-face overwhelming. So I picked up a case of the mini-cans today and I’ll be combining them with Coke Zero for the next week or so as an extremely refreshing summertime drink.

Because I follow the divine Suzy Eddie Izzard on the Book of Face I was able to get the fan club promo code for her upcoming North American tour, which will be a remix of the best of her previous shows.

Years ago when we had a lot more money I got front row seats as a birthday present for Ramón and we had an absolutely divine time (I was also amused to realize that the window on the set that showed a slowly changing view acted as a clock so that she could time the set and know whether she needed to stretch or speed it up). Needless to say we don’t have front row seats this time (they weren’t even available by the time I got on to look) but we do have decent seats and will very much be looking forward to this in November.

When it’s 89°F out but the humidity is 72% and you have a heat index of 107°F, yeah, you might need to sit down with some water after going to the store.

On the plus side, we have cookies because last night I had a huge craving for something sweet but wasn’t in the mood to get dressed, put on a bra and head over to the supermarket. Instead, I remembered that we had the makings for cookies, including some rather tasty Nestle Toll House Frosted Cinnamon Roll Baking Truffles in the freezer, and whomped everything together into some yummy, yummy snickerdoodles.

Now I just have to hide the bulk of them from Ramón because he is not supposed to have that much processed sugar (I’m not greedy or cruel—I’ll put out two a day for him).

I have had better days.

I had great plans for the weekend—I was going to continue getting the office closet cleaned out and organized, I’d work on formatting books and get them uploaded to Smashwords and Google Play, and I’d get an episode of Crystal Blade ready for Monday.

Best-laid plans and all that. I woke up feeling like someone had pulled the plug on me. No energy whatsoever, I didn’t feel extremely sick but I definitely wasn’t well, and Ramón (he of the bionic nose) said that I smelled a little off and should go back to bed.

Which I did. I pretty much spent the day dozing, watching Journey to the Center of the Earth (which I had only seen in the edited for TV version), and reading. Between Earthquake last week and Journey this week I realized that there are an absolute buttload of movies out there that I have never seen the theatrical releases of, only the TV edits. Now that we have access to All The Streaming Services, I think I’m going to make a point of working my way through the various movies I’ve only ever seen on TV. I mean, hell, I didn’t even know there was a topless scene in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie until a couple of years ago. Who knows what I’ll discover in the next movie I watch.

I am not posing an episode of Crystal Blade today. I’ve been feeling increasingly crappy all day and the only thing I really want to do is crawl into bed at a reasonable hour and go to sleep.

On the plus side, blargh as I’m feeling, I did achieve something today. So I have a 500 GB backup external drive for my antique 2012 MacBook pro (don’t laugh, it still runs like a champ and I loathed the changes Apple made to the MBP until last year). Like any properly paranoid writer I like to leave the external drive plugged in and Time Machine running. That way, everything can be backed up daily in case of lightning strike, cat pee, or what have you knocking out the laptop.

Except that the backup drive stopped working about a month ago. I would plug it in, it would light up, I’d hear the drive start to run, then boom. Nothing. Couldn’t find it as an external drive or anything.

As I’ve been what you might call “busy” for the last month I kept thinking, “Yeah, I really need to take the backup drive to Ramón and have him troubleshoot it, see if he can get it working again.” And five minutes later an emergency would erupt and the thought would go clear out of my mind for days on end. My laptop, bless its heart, kept putting up reminder messages that I hadn’t backed it up for X amount of days and I really should do that, I’d remember that I needed to ask Ramón to look at the backup drive, and yet another emergency would crop up and I’d promptly forget about it.

Until today, when I was browsing through a friend’s FB page and she mentioned that she was having problems with her MacBook Air. A number of people offered helpful advice, chief among them, “Back up the machine and take it to a Genius Bar.”

Which reminded me that gosh, I really really really needed to have Ramón take a look at the backup drive. And then I thought, “Well, hell, I’m a capable techy woman and he’s sleeping right now—why don’t I take a look at it myself?”

So I did. Opened up the case—the connection between the drive proper and the plug was a little loose. Tightened that up, plugged it in … nothing.

While it was connected I opened Disk Utility to see if it could find the drive. Boom, it could, which meant that the mechanics of the drive were functional. I ran First Aid and found out that some of the settings had gotten embuggered in a way that couldn’t be repaired.

I thought about it, decided that there was nothing on the drive that I couldn’t live without, and erased and reformatted it. Set it up as the Time Machine drive for the laptop, told Time Machine to do its thing and voila. Everything is backing up again properly. So I’ve got that going for me.