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Back from the Beach

Kelly and the kids have been away at the Outer Banks for the week. Don’t worry, I had the cats to keep me company while they were vacationing.

Progress is Progressing

I published two more books to Kindle this week. This time, I went with Cryptograms. One of the pages needed to be tweaked because the puzzle went into the page margin, but I figured it out and got it adjusted. I also found out how to add page numbers to my puzzle books.

In fairness, I felt a bit weird about putting out books that had tables of contents but no page numbers for the reader to refer to. Fortunately, there’s a free service that will put page numbers into a PDF for you. So, I went back and put page numbers in the previous 4 books and those are now live at Amazon.

It wouldn’t have taken as long to do the Cryptogram books, but I was recording how-to videos to offer as a bonus for Ken’s software. I should have that posted sometime next week.

Of course, I’m WAY overdue for the Christmas story. I started but I wasn’t really feeling it. I was also busy making puzzle books and trying to figure out Electron. I was really hoping to have it done by now, but I honestly haven’t really properly started. It will be another race to the finish but at least I’ll have another book in my Amazon library when it comes to the end of the holiday season.

Practicing Gratitude

Now that we’re into November, attention shifts from costumes and candy to gratitude and comfort food. It’s so easy to forget to be grateful when you’re all caught up in the daily grind.

Now that I’ve come up for air after a long week of grinding away at a handful of projects, I have to make a more conscious effort to practice gratitude. Working myself too hard brings on bad feelings and frustration. I literally cannot afford the luxury of a negative thought. It’s too easy to slide down into depths of misery when things aren’t going as planned.

Of course, being alone for the week hasn’t done much for my self-esteem. I thought I’d feel very accomplished after what I had planned to complete, but things got complicated and took way too long to get done. That can really be crushing to think you can do a certain number of things in a given time period only to find you’re so very very wrong.

I did take time out to eat a lovely dinner each day. Usually, when I’m in a frantic push to get more done than can reasonably be expected to get done, I have a tendency to skip out on meals. When I worked in IT, I had a drawer full of snacks and ramen packets that I could resort to rather than stepping away for a proper lunch or dinner. No good at all.

Fortunately, I’ve got my task scheduler set to remind me to eat a proper breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s important to stop and take some time to attend to bodily needs. Grinding away doesn’t really get me anywhere anyhow, so it’s just as well that I leave that unfortunate habit in the past where it belongs.

Rekindled

At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us. ~Albert Schweitzer

As I said, Kelly and the munchkins will be back this afternoon. She is such a joyous person and I’m privileged to have her in my life. My battery drains entirely too easily anymore. She has energy in excess and doesn’t mind sharing.

You might wonder what it is I bring to the table. She is happy, silly, vital, energetic and so many other wonderful things. What she is not is warm. She gets cold rather easily and that’s where I come in. I am her personal space heater. It’s great for me, too. She’s like my own personal heat sink. We get to snuggle up together and I can keep her warm while she absorbs my excess heat. Yet another reason that I hate summer. Snuggling is less than desirable when everyone is drowning in perspiration. Autumn and Winter? Heck yeah! Snuggle wuggle buggle ’til you just can’t snuggle no mo!

So, anyway, it will be noisier and everybody will have their own little agendas but I’m glad they’re coming back. It’s nice to have some time away to refresh and reset but it’s just not the same without my darling, beloved wife and our silly children in the house.

I hope you’re having a wonderful weekend. I’ve gotta go fetch the fam. Talk to you Wednesday.