Watching the dog - just another name for procrastination. Perhaps I should just postpone the novel rewrite for a week, and allow myself this mucking around time without as much guilt. 

In the meantime, whilst I was at work this morning, my old english sheepdog, Simon, managed to help himself to the contents of a capsule orchard feeder / fertiliser. He loves plastic, but in chewing this, has managed to swallow the internal contents. The label on the capsule says - in both Portugese and English, ‘Not to be Allowed Near Children’ and ‘Must not be Consumed’. 

So, now I’m on dog watch (although he spends all day with me anyway) to make sure he hasn’t poisoned himself. He seems alright, although in dire need of a bath again, as you can see by the photo - taken too close up (because he won’t stay very well, while a camera is in his eyeshot). And yes, he can see me (and the camera) under there. 

…That is the question.

Kathy Moore has a new blog setup, just to list her to dos and to get more organised. I know, because she twittered about it. I would give you the link (look her up under KathyMoore on www.twitter.com) but Twitter is down again. 

Still, it’s enough to make me think - top of her list is to make her computer time, productive computer time. Which is more than I can say about my own time lately - last week (eleven days of it) went past like some fuzzed out pale blur of a real life. My cold-befuddled mind still has me wanting more to lie down than put any work down.

But at least I got to school today, and got my email working properly - it wasn’t for a couple of days, blamed by my ISP towards the email client server - which I’m positive the problem wasn’t, because I set up our main account (correctly!) on three different email clients onboard here.

Today, I should be getting prepared for my mammoth effort scheduled in editing and redrafting my first novel attempt - due to commence tomorrow, for one full month. Instead, I’ve used any and every excuse to not think about that at all.

Things I Have Done (in the name of procrastination)

1. Have been blowing my nose for the entire day, especially whilst outside.
   
2. Spent two hours on the phone with an Indian helpdesk person, (and then their supervisor) allowing them to watch my PC screen while I pointed out the problem of stuck emails on their server.
3. Started reading a completely new novel, out in the sun (managed to use up two hours on and off, on simply reading)
   
4. Walked the dog
5. Actually ate something for lunch (okay, it was only three small pieces of fruit, but…)
6. Sorted out all the emails which had gone missing with my problems.
   
7. Picked up emails in gmail, then pretended they weren’t there.
8. Especially the one informing me a new Friends Reunited contact is messaging me on there. I haven’t seen the woman for over thirty years, for pete’s sake - and she dumped me as a friend when she moved away from my home-town. Still, it’s nice to have friends anywhere, and beggars can’t be choosers, right? And she was a lovely, er, school girl, and best friend for one brief moment of glorious childhood, and…and…and…
   
9. Twittered - four times
10. Facebooked - including remembering to respond to some requests
11. Tidied up the dining room table (by 50% only, before getting fedup with the spam mail and general untidiness)
12. Scrubbed the bathrooms upstairs (and a hallwall) but realise that the house is a pigsty, and all the family is arriving in a few days for the “Big BBQ” where my entire value will be judged by myself about how much of a good hostess I am (or am not).
    
13. Read the few blogs I now pick up in Google Reader - actually, there’s quite a few now.
    
14. Looked into another software application I found through a blog - linked up to it on Linkagogo.
    
15. Went searching for a different software application reviewed through a blog, only to find it doesn’t exist out there on the internet.
    
16. Thought about buying the Notezilla application I am trialing - then thought again. Maybe that PIM software I’d read about is better? Should I try that out, even though it’s really expensive and I have no money?
    
17. Realised what a geek I am… took some pride in that, kind of.
    
18. Went on the school-walk (what we without petrol do instead of the school-run, which ironically doesn’t include running does it?)
19. Took an antihistamine for the first time in my life, because surely this eleven day old lurgy must no longer be a cold, but hay fever, right? Wrong. Although I’ve now discovered I am one of the few who suffers from drowsiness from the one-a-day tablets.
    
20. Back in facebook, a new friend (ex work colleague I discovered on there) had some gadgetty Brain Game on there. Having failed dismally at Academy Brain Academy on the Nintendo Wii the other day, I thought this might give me a chance. It didn’t. I am third in all three of us who have the application - JanMary - you may cordially gloat about your brain prowess with me. After the sixth game, I started getting worse, too.
    
21. Read the four (three too many) mails sent out to parents by the school, informing us of plans for the upcoming sports day this week. Felt guilty because I have limited picnic plans for the day also.
    
22. Read the two parent mails from school discussing the school fete coming up. Our opportunity to gather all those old (like new) toys and books we want to dump - sorry, gift to somebody. Except I seriously can’t be bothered to gather.
    
23. Decided bringing down the laptop to charge it up is not a good idea, as that would force me to actually update the writing files on there also, in preparation for tomorrow.
    
24. Thought about (ie. did not do) designing another layout for the summer scraps album. Nah…
25. With no idea what time the hubbie is getting home from London today (he’s inherited my cold also, poor man) I have made the empowered decision to NOT cook dinner, and just await him. He will be impressed. Not.
    
26. Okay, so I’m going to try out that PIM software, just because nothing else in this world seems to excite me at the moment. That should waste the next two hours just nicely.
    

Things I Am Meant to Be Doing

1. Get ready for that Novel Editing mission, commencing tomorrow!
   
2. Spend several hours each day redrafting the novel.
   
3. Facebook - respond to Angie Pedersen’s kind donation of three little words on my story.
   
4. Friends Reunited - message back to that lost childhood friend.
   
5. Hoover - the entire house.
   
6. Wash floors - the entire house
7. Tidy up - the entire house
   
8. Scrub outdoor furniture (get rid of bird poo)
   
9. Prepare Picnic menu for School Sports Day
10. Prepare shopping list for Family BBQ Day, Saturday
11. Gather books and toys to donate for School Fete, Saturday
12. Find some kind of recipe for non-alcoholic cocktail fruity drinks for the BBQ
13. Attend - Work, School Sports Day, Ballet lessons, School Fete
14. Supermarket - for BBQ stuff
    
15. Walk the dog - everyday.
    
16. Host - Family BBQ
    
17. Find a cure for this dripping nose.
    
18. Tell my hubbie how special he is (and mean it!) without wanting his help in cleaning the house.
    
19. Take photographs, create layouts
20. Pay credit card bill.
    
21. Cook dinner, without resentment, every night.
    
22. Finish that novel I started reading unproductively today.
    
23. Have a wee nap.
    

 

Don’t know why, or what profit there is in it, but on logging on this morning, I made the discovery that the latest Twitter post up there from me - wasn’t from me.

It was linking to a writing blog, and an article on dialogue, using a tinyurl also. However, I’ve never been to that blog before, and also tend not to use tinyurl. But most importantly, the Twitter post (or Tweet) was posted directly from the web (ie on Twitter itself) at around 12 hours ago.

Yesterday I was in bed at that time, watching Top Gear on the BBC. Before that I had been doing normal family stuff on a sunny Sunday, including doing up a final layout - but I wasn’t on the web. I have an extremely bad summer cold this weekend, so didn’t intend sticking around the web for either today or over this past weekend. Now I am forced to go see if anything similar has happened elsewhere on some of the linked social sites - Facebook timed me out last week, and I’ve not been back since, so that’s worth checking out also. 

The hack into my twitter account (or however it possibly happened) seems relatively harmless, as the tweet targetted a writing blog itself - but anyone who knows my accounts should reasonably know that I tend not to put up links - especially to writing stuff, on Twitter. For Twitter I just tweet about my day - although Blogit in Facebook sometimes updates as a Tweet also (which you can tell on the Tweet - it says it’s from Blogit). I also tweet via Twitterfox, an addon through Firefox, but again, you can tell where that has come from.

Perhaps this is all a big muckup, and I had really been to that website and used TinyUrl sometime ago, and somehow the Twitter servers have just dredged up a post from servers which got stuck in the pipelines sometime. But looking at the way it is presented, it doesn’t make sense to me - and why anyone would want to target my own profile is debatable also. If I am correct in my assumption that my Twitter profile has been obstructed, then just a note for that person - I tend to put ALL my writing links onto the Tumblelog - not Twitter. So that they’re all in the same place as I find them.

It goes to show how important it is to check your own posts however, especially now with so many micro-blogging facilities going on, some interlinked with posts.

Happy Monday morning, everyone. Once I’ve dropped my daughter off to school, I’m going to slope back into bed to try to get rid of this cold.  

 

Through the course of the previous several months, I’ve tried to put updates on my own blog of the adoption assessment, and ended up not publishing these. This morning I did another. It sits unpublished. I can’t do it. There is so much frustration, anger over the long waits, such loss of hope when hearing other’s tales. I can no longer sit here, and bring myself to tears trying to blog about it.

This, though, this adoption process - where we’ve not heard from our own social welfare worker for seven weeks now, where we’ve done all the hard work ourselves, writing out documents, and hoping to ever get to an adoption panel meeting, and having it all dashed by silence from those in charge - this process is what sits behind as background to everything I am, and everything our family is at this moment, and over the last two years now. But my hubbie and I have some kind of silent agreement - to not talk about it together anymore. To not ring them, out of fear of seeming pushy, out of suspicions, and paranoia, and lost hope, and not being in control of our own lives. To not speak about it anymore.  

WordWeb: Free English thesaurus dictionary download


This has got to be my favourite free application for writing. I got WordWeb as a free download from a site offering writing freebies for signing up for a newsletter. I now realise that this wasn't the huge bargain I thought, because all the tools offered are free anyway, but as the downloads arrived with WordWeb, I was satisfied anyway.

I now have WordWeb installed on both computers. It puts a little icon into your taskbar and starts up on bootup, so that it is available at any point. And I've used it continuously, even when trying to work out spelling on a word, rather than hefting down a thick dictionary.

WordWeb works with one-click, as both a dictionary and thesaurus programme. For windows, the application can look up words from within almost any program. Simply hold down the Ctrl key and right-click on the word you're puzzled over. It works within normal applications on your PC, and on browser applications. I've just tried it using Scribefire within Mozilla Firefox. And with the icon in your taskbar, it's available directly from the desktop should you have no words before you.

WordWeb works off-line, with the free version featuring 150,000 root words and 120,000 synonym sets. It can also work on-line, looking up wrods in web references such as Wikipedia. Although the free version does everything I might like currently, there is a Pro version also, with additional features.