37 minutes to Monday

Where the hell did my weekend go? Here it is, just about over, and it seems like I didn’t get much done.

The speaking engagement went well on Saturday, I think. Gayleen came to critique me and she said I did okay. I think some of the group members thought she was my wife. haha The guy taking orders at Arby’s when we met for lunch one day thought that, too. Anyway, I found some kinks in my speech that I need to work out.

We went to the medieval faire in Norman today. Oh boy. None of the kids liked it. All Jake wanted to do was pet the multitude of dogs. Damn, there were nice ones, too. Amanda didn’t want to do anything. I took Alex and Jake to look at booths at one point and Alex just griped he wanted a horribly overpriced Coke and Jake screamed every time I stopped at a booth. So I left them with Kim and took Sara and got in trouble because I bought her a $5 ring. Kim said I was playing favorites again. Hell, I’d have bought Alex something if he would have actually looked around and found something reasonable. I promised him a drink when we left.

Then I went to Lowe’s to buy a shed. Ugh. That took a long time. I ended up paying almost $700 for the shed, a floorkit and the plywood for the floor … then left it there. No way I could have lifted the main box of the 10’x18′ shed in and out of the van. So they’re delivering it. That added $45 and made me wish again I still had a pickup. The stuff could have stayed in the pickup until I had help, but I couldn’t leave the back seats of the van down that long.

It was about dark when I got home. The oil in my car still needs to be changed and I didn’t get anything done on The Prometheus Syndrome. The file is open now, though, and I’m working on it as I download Mozilla and Firefox, programs that are supposed to be better than Internet Explorer and Outlook. I hope so. I’m having computer problems again. Something has corrupted my 3.5″ floppy drive. It tells me there’s no disk in the drive, but a diagnostic check tells me the drive is working. If I leave a disk in and boot up, the computer tells me there’s a non-boot disk in the drive, so it must be working at boot up. This all goes back to the hell that entered my life when I installed MS Service Pack 2. Nothing has worked right since then. I got rid of SP2 and things were better, but still not right.

I got a new supply of bookmarks from my No 1 fan. You know who you are. THANK YOU! And Craig Wolf has volunteered to take bookmarks and any other promo material I have up to the World Horror Convention next weekend. I wish I could go, but at least I’ll have a presence. I thought my only horror con this year would be Horrorfind in Baltimore, but it’ looking like Horrorfind might not be writer-friendly this year, so I’ll put the money in hiding and plan for WHC 2006. WHC is the con I should be attending, anyway.

Jacob woke up. He’s in my bed now. I’m going to edit one more chapter of my book, then go to bed. I hope he’ll be asleep enough I can move him back to his crib. I can’t believe my baby will be 3 years old in just 12 days. But what’s really hard to believe is that I’ll be 39 just 13 days later.