A New Laptop Stand, and Some Goals

Hello all you wonderful Internet People!  It has been a very long day here at Mother's house, very productive, but very long.  I went to bed early last night.  I didn't mean to, it just kinda happened.  I was sitting here just typing away on something and my computer started getting hot, which it does, a lot (or it did, but I will get back to that in a minute), so I closed it up to let it cool down.  I was really hot too, so I laid down across the bed to line my head up with the fan that was blowing the air around, and that was all she wrote.  After about an hour my husband woke me up to make sure I was all right, at which point I got up, put the computer away, told my youngest son to clean his room, and then laid back down and went right back to sleep.  That was at 9 o'clock!  I never intended to go to sleep, I just couldn't stay awake.

So, of course, I was awake at 5:30 this morning.  What an ungawdly time of day!  I managed to stay in bed until 6:30 at which point I just couldn't get comfortable anymore, so I had to get up and get dressed.

I did make it outside again today, the first flower bed is nearly finished with the first go through.  I was right, it doesn't really look like I have done anything, unless you compare it to the other ones.  The salt grass is already growing back in where I had it all torn out a couple of weeks ago when I first started this.  Today my husband helped scrape the grass off of the seam in the side of the driveway next to the flower bed, so when he was done I took pots of boiling water out and poured them down the line, and a couple down the outside edge of the flower bed where there are no other plants.  Hopefully that will kill some of it off for a while.

Okay, so, back to the laptop overheating.  This has been an ongoing problem all summer.  I dug out the old laptop cooler unit I had and that helped a little bit, for a while, until I broke it.  This morning asked my husband if he had a spare fan or something that I could use to force air at the bottom of the laptop to cool it off.  He didn't think that would be effective so he told me to give him a few minutes and he would think of something.  What I really needed was something to raise the laptop off the surface of whatever it was sitting on to let air get to the bottom unimpeded.  About an hour later he came back in with one of those cheap accordion style peg racks you get at the dollar store.  Like this one:               
The pegs are large and flat, so I turned it upside down, sitting on the pegs on my tray table, and then set the laptop on the bottom side which is pointed up.  I have had the laptop turned on for 10 hours straight and it is barely even warm!  I have mentioned before that I married a genius, haven't I?  

So, since the laptop is now working the way it is designed to, I spent the day writing.  I finally picked the topic for my first book, and started writing it!  Don't get too excited, I am only 4 pages in, but I think it will be good when it is done. It will be a tragic comedy about a self-destructive young woman and her time at Camp Purgatory.  

Yep, its a autobiography.  Sort of.  It will be fiction, more or less, but loosely based on a point in my life that is replete with comedy fodder.  The names will be changed to protect the guilty, except for my ex-husband, he doesn't get a name.  He is, and always will be, the Moron.  That's the only name I will ever use in reference to him, well, that's the nicest name I will ever use in reference to him.  He doesn't deserve a name in my world, he lost that right 7 years ago, all he gets from me now is to be called, the Moron, for as long as we both shall live.

The goal is to have a finished rough draft by this time next year, and a final draft ready to submit to a publisher by the following September.  I think this is reasonable, but I am open to readjusting the time frame as necessary.  The point is just to have a goal and start taking steps towards reaching it.  At the moment the plan is to try for at least 1,000 words a day.   That's around 3 pages.  I think I can handle that most days. Right now I am just free-writing, kinda like what I do here, but I will go back and edit and rewrite many times before I am done, I just need to get it all down in writing, I can fill in the details, and rearrange the order, later.  

I hate to admit that my Mother was right about something, but she did tell me I should have been writing everything down back then when it was happening.  She was so right.  I sure wish I had kept a journal or a diary back then.  I just never had the time, and I never trusted the Moron not to exploit every thing I wrote down, which he did, every chance he got. 

Oh well, I am writing a fiction book anyway, so whatever I can't remember I will fill in as I go along, and I think I remember most of the best of it anyway.  I couldn't forget that shit if I tried.  

Anyway, its late, and I am tired so I gonna sign outta here for the night.  I hope you found something in there worth reading.  I do try.  Until next time ...