Life Goes On
Mar. 15th, 2025 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aMy sister & fam are visiting from the mainland. We had a nice dinner out at Hanapepe Art Night yesterday, and I'll see them again at lunch tomorrow. While I was eating a tasty al Pastor burrito yesterday and my sister was eating curry, she mentioned that she didn't really know what was going on with me because I'm now writing journals anymore.
True enough. I've been erratic at my journaling since we moved out here to Hawaii, I think because I'm now writing full-time during the day, but then I got even more burned out when Lucy was sick, a year and a half ago now, and so I've mainly written about our couple of trips since then.
But here's a bit of what's going on.
CONTRACT WORK
In November I took on a new client for my technical writing. I gave them a day a week and we undertook a 13-week contract, which closed out in February. It was my favorite type of work because they had four big documents to write, and they handed them off to me, and I wrote them over the course of about 100 hours as I saw fit. Some required some online research, some required interviews with their staff. But mostly I could just sit and write. At the end I handed them several foundational documents about security practices for their company and about the architecture of their platform that have already proven to be very helpful in spinning the company up.
The hope is that after they've ramped up a bit, they'll call me back in for more work. Maybe as soon as in another month, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was much later in the year. But, at the moment I'm very happy to get my day a week back, because it was putting a real strain on getting my personal projects done.
PERSONAL WORK
And my personal work is really getting to some big milestones, which is good after five years of half-time work.
This is Free Trader Beowulf, my system history of Traveller, started hitting shelves in print form last fall.
Designers & Dragons Origins, my four-book product history of early D&D products is moving through the editorial process. I got the fourth and final book back from my editor on Friday and have it open in another window to check those edits.
Designers & Dragons: The Lost Histories, my three new volumes of company histories, is nearing first draft where I will have all the histories written for the new volumes. But, there's lots more to do there regarding updates for both the new and old company histories.
I suck at marketing, so I haven't been calling around to get on any podcasts or in any magazines at the moment. Both of those things happen from time to time, but it's because they ask, not me. So I should do some of that, especially as I close out my current drafts!
(If you have a podcast and would like to talk history, or if you have a magazine and would like a history-related article, call me!)
CATS
When last I wrote we had a cat stand-off, with our new scaredy-kitty Megara and our slightly-older bully-kitty Elmer not allowed in the same rooms at the same time. Which has resulted in tiring months of cats being locked up either in our bedroom (that's Megara most of the time) or my office (that's Elmer and optionally Mango when I'm working or gaming and we want to let Megara roam).
We tried animal behavior work for a while, and there's been some good reactions, but I just don't see it breaking Megara's flee and cower reaction or Elmer's chase and bat reaction.
So we've called our carpenter and he's going to be over in a few days to put a wooden gate at the top of our stairs. See, Elmer has mostly hung out downstairs for the last couple of years, mainly coming upstairs for food. So we want to try and make that more official. He won't be neglected because my office is downstairs, and I do my online gaming downstairs, so he should get 40-50 hours of whatever interaction he wants down there.
(Not that we can actually build a gate tall enough to keep him out if he tried, but we think he mostly won't try, and besides that it'll likely break any chases if Megara wanders downstairs and then gets scared by Elmer. Because she'll go over the gate like a leaf and then Elmer will have to figure out how to jump high enough.)
Fingers crossed this is a solution, because nothing else has been so far. And I'm really tired of our bedroom door being closed all the time and my constantly sealing off my office.
HOME IMPROVEMENT
We also had the same carpenter out last year to rebuild the steps up to our porch in front. As he explained, they'd been built badly originally, with wide planks that bowed, causing them to pool water, and with risers on the back, further preventing draining. So the stairs were rotting out and slimy and looking pretty bad in the process. We called him out not knowing exactly what he'd want to do, and he pretty revamped the whole stairway. Looks very nice now, and isn't constantly wet or slippery.
(Mind you, we've had a VERY dry year here in Kauai, I just saw a report that the rivers are at a 109-year low state-wide. Shades of California and the constant drought panic encouraged by the newspapers trying to sell their stories.)
That carpentry encouraged me to finally get back to work on home improvement projects, something that's been on the back burner since at least before Lucy got sick. (I've got two not quite done: repainting the rest of the deck on our lanai, as I'd previously painted just the new boards we put in on the outer third of the lanai; and putting laminate flooring down in my office closet, to match the rest of the office.)
But our carpenter's work encouraged me to restain the porch as well as paint all the railings around the porch, as he'd had to repair them some and so they were now a motley or old red paint and white epoxy or other patching material. Kimberly and a I chose a rich blue and over several hours on a couple of weekends I sanded and prepped and then put enough of the new blue paint down to cover up the dirty red that we'd never liked. (And the white epoxy; that actually took the most work to cover.)
But that of course requires redoing all of our red highlights. We're thrilled to get rid of all the muted red, which looks too much like the red dirt of Hawaii, but it's a big task. After the porch I also painted trim on the archway of our garage and on the top of a wall just inside the garage. Still to do is the railing on our lanai and one shelf at the bottom of the short stairway in our garage that leads to our house. Then we get to the big stuff: a 3 or 4 foot tall strip of stucco all around the bottom of the house and the trim at the roof line. Kimberly and I are going to figure out how to paint the stucco, and then we'll hire someone to do the roof trim, which will probably require replacing the rain gutters (which is fine, as some of them were off the house and some of them were badly damaged when we moved in, and that hasn't magically gotten any better, so I'm not sure how well they work at the moment).
And after that, I can maybe get back to some of those other tasks.
UKE
Oh, and my mom and Bob got me a Uke for Christmas, so I've been playing with that a bit. I'm not practicing every day like I'd like, but I'm gaining familiarity with chords and how to hold the strings right and strumming and all the rest. I'm working on "Here Comes the Sun" as the first song I actually know how to play, as it's got some fun finger-picking riffs in-between the main strums.
Still a ways to go.
So that's a little bit of what's going on at the moment.
True enough. I've been erratic at my journaling since we moved out here to Hawaii, I think because I'm now writing full-time during the day, but then I got even more burned out when Lucy was sick, a year and a half ago now, and so I've mainly written about our couple of trips since then.
But here's a bit of what's going on.
CONTRACT WORK
In November I took on a new client for my technical writing. I gave them a day a week and we undertook a 13-week contract, which closed out in February. It was my favorite type of work because they had four big documents to write, and they handed them off to me, and I wrote them over the course of about 100 hours as I saw fit. Some required some online research, some required interviews with their staff. But mostly I could just sit and write. At the end I handed them several foundational documents about security practices for their company and about the architecture of their platform that have already proven to be very helpful in spinning the company up.
The hope is that after they've ramped up a bit, they'll call me back in for more work. Maybe as soon as in another month, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was much later in the year. But, at the moment I'm very happy to get my day a week back, because it was putting a real strain on getting my personal projects done.
PERSONAL WORK
And my personal work is really getting to some big milestones, which is good after five years of half-time work.
This is Free Trader Beowulf, my system history of Traveller, started hitting shelves in print form last fall.
Designers & Dragons Origins, my four-book product history of early D&D products is moving through the editorial process. I got the fourth and final book back from my editor on Friday and have it open in another window to check those edits.
Designers & Dragons: The Lost Histories, my three new volumes of company histories, is nearing first draft where I will have all the histories written for the new volumes. But, there's lots more to do there regarding updates for both the new and old company histories.
I suck at marketing, so I haven't been calling around to get on any podcasts or in any magazines at the moment. Both of those things happen from time to time, but it's because they ask, not me. So I should do some of that, especially as I close out my current drafts!
(If you have a podcast and would like to talk history, or if you have a magazine and would like a history-related article, call me!)
CATS
When last I wrote we had a cat stand-off, with our new scaredy-kitty Megara and our slightly-older bully-kitty Elmer not allowed in the same rooms at the same time. Which has resulted in tiring months of cats being locked up either in our bedroom (that's Megara most of the time) or my office (that's Elmer and optionally Mango when I'm working or gaming and we want to let Megara roam).
We tried animal behavior work for a while, and there's been some good reactions, but I just don't see it breaking Megara's flee and cower reaction or Elmer's chase and bat reaction.
So we've called our carpenter and he's going to be over in a few days to put a wooden gate at the top of our stairs. See, Elmer has mostly hung out downstairs for the last couple of years, mainly coming upstairs for food. So we want to try and make that more official. He won't be neglected because my office is downstairs, and I do my online gaming downstairs, so he should get 40-50 hours of whatever interaction he wants down there.
(Not that we can actually build a gate tall enough to keep him out if he tried, but we think he mostly won't try, and besides that it'll likely break any chases if Megara wanders downstairs and then gets scared by Elmer. Because she'll go over the gate like a leaf and then Elmer will have to figure out how to jump high enough.)
Fingers crossed this is a solution, because nothing else has been so far. And I'm really tired of our bedroom door being closed all the time and my constantly sealing off my office.
HOME IMPROVEMENT
We also had the same carpenter out last year to rebuild the steps up to our porch in front. As he explained, they'd been built badly originally, with wide planks that bowed, causing them to pool water, and with risers on the back, further preventing draining. So the stairs were rotting out and slimy and looking pretty bad in the process. We called him out not knowing exactly what he'd want to do, and he pretty revamped the whole stairway. Looks very nice now, and isn't constantly wet or slippery.
(Mind you, we've had a VERY dry year here in Kauai, I just saw a report that the rivers are at a 109-year low state-wide. Shades of California and the constant drought panic encouraged by the newspapers trying to sell their stories.)
That carpentry encouraged me to finally get back to work on home improvement projects, something that's been on the back burner since at least before Lucy got sick. (I've got two not quite done: repainting the rest of the deck on our lanai, as I'd previously painted just the new boards we put in on the outer third of the lanai; and putting laminate flooring down in my office closet, to match the rest of the office.)
But our carpenter's work encouraged me to restain the porch as well as paint all the railings around the porch, as he'd had to repair them some and so they were now a motley or old red paint and white epoxy or other patching material. Kimberly and a I chose a rich blue and over several hours on a couple of weekends I sanded and prepped and then put enough of the new blue paint down to cover up the dirty red that we'd never liked. (And the white epoxy; that actually took the most work to cover.)
But that of course requires redoing all of our red highlights. We're thrilled to get rid of all the muted red, which looks too much like the red dirt of Hawaii, but it's a big task. After the porch I also painted trim on the archway of our garage and on the top of a wall just inside the garage. Still to do is the railing on our lanai and one shelf at the bottom of the short stairway in our garage that leads to our house. Then we get to the big stuff: a 3 or 4 foot tall strip of stucco all around the bottom of the house and the trim at the roof line. Kimberly and I are going to figure out how to paint the stucco, and then we'll hire someone to do the roof trim, which will probably require replacing the rain gutters (which is fine, as some of them were off the house and some of them were badly damaged when we moved in, and that hasn't magically gotten any better, so I'm not sure how well they work at the moment).
And after that, I can maybe get back to some of those other tasks.
UKE
Oh, and my mom and Bob got me a Uke for Christmas, so I've been playing with that a bit. I'm not practicing every day like I'd like, but I'm gaining familiarity with chords and how to hold the strings right and strumming and all the rest. I'm working on "Here Comes the Sun" as the first song I actually know how to play, as it's got some fun finger-picking riffs in-between the main strums.
Still a ways to go.
So that's a little bit of what's going on at the moment.