Gerald Brandt

I’m not sure what is going on here. It’s as though my entire world has gone topsy turvy, and I’ve lost what level of control I had.

Last week was the boys birthday, and I think that’s where it all started. We had birthday party after birthday party, family over for dinner, etc. And I haven’t recovered yet. I still (yes, still) have dishes left from the Sunday dinner. It’s not much, just a couple of glasses really, but still. The house is a horrible mess. And I’ve written about 1000 words this week.

And that’s just not enough. To meet my deadline, I now have to write 1200 words a day, which can feel like a lot. What I seem to have done is slip back into full research mode. And it’s a waste of time. I really haven’t learned anything new.

I wish I knew what happened to me this week.

The hard drive on my email and web server was beginning to fail. Once the system was running, the hard drive appeared to be fine, but sometimes it failed to boot and the drive wasn’t spinning up. So, what could I do.

The old system was running on a Celeron 450, 128 MB of RAM and a 17 GB HDD. In other words, a very small system. I used g4u to create an image of the hard drive, including partition tables and MBR. I then used g4u to restore the drive image under VMware Server running on an AMD64, 1 GB of RAM and a 1 TB RAID5 array (my primary mythtv backend). I told vmware to create a 20 GB HDD, and the transfer went smooothly. It did, however, take a VERY long time; g4u did it’s imaging and restoring via ftp. The 17 GB HDD took about 5.5 hours to image across a 100 mbit network.

I powered up the VMware Server with the newly created image, and voila. The system boot immediately and ran perfectly. So now, the email and web server believe they are running on an AMD64 3500, 128 MB of RAM and a 20 GB HDD. Speed has gone way up, and hopefully so has reliability.

One test I did when I switched the server was to make a copy of the hard drive image and boot another email and web server under a different IP address. I then upgraded the Gentoo 2005.0 based system to a 2006.1 based system using a script I found on the Gentoo forums. The upgrade went flawlessly. I would have simply changed the IP addresses to start running on the upgraded server, but I had received email on the old server. So, I upgraded the old server, as it was running and live. Gotta love Gentoo!

What a week. My boys both had their birthdays this week. On Wednesday I spent the afternoon in Ryan’s pre-school class, and baked 24 cupcakes for them. On Friday, I spent the afternoon in Jared’s grade 1 class, with another 24 cupcakes. Friday evening Ryan had his party with his friends, on Saturday, Jared had his. Sunday we had dinner for the whole family and the family birthday party. Today I have to clean up from the dinner.

It would all have been okay, except that my bro came in from Calgary, so to top it off, I climbed into bed at 3:00 AM Sunday morning. Ugh.

So, no writing in a while, which kinda hurts. I’ll catch up this week (I promise).

I had to pass this along. It made me feel like the worst Dad in the world. Read the story and then watch the video.

Please, leave a comment about it.

update: 9:43 AM: It seems that the link is temporarily unavailable.
update: 7:59 PM: It seems that the link back up.

So, it’s the young ones birthday today. We’re not doing too much special today, but the ‘kids’ party is on Friday, and the family party is on Sunday. Even my bro will be here for that! I’m very much looking forward to his visit.

Anyway, the look on Ryan’s face was priceless this morning. For the last year, he’s always heard me ask ‘Who’s my favorite 3 year old?’ This morning when I asked ‘Who’s my favorite 4 year old?’, he grinned, went kinda shy, and pointed at himself. Wheee!

Writing
I’ve noticed something. When I’m neck deep into my WIP, the blog languishes by the wayside. Interesting. I’m guessing it’s just because of the limited hours in a day. I hope y’all (yes, y’all can easily be translated to ‘my single reader’) don’t mind.

And speaking of the WIP, it’s progressing. I’ve officially brought the word count down from 100,000 words to 90,000. At this point, I don’t think I’ll reach 100,000. Heck, at this point I’m not sure I’ll reach 40,000. I’m hoping my ‘instincts’, as much as I can have them on my first novel attempt, holds true. This being draft zero, there are a lot of sections of simply telling. And, as we all know, when the showing starts, the word count goes up. Saying ‘Bob was mad’ could easily turn into a paragraph showing that Bob was mad.

I’m hoping anyway. I’ve decided not to worry about it too much (only about 100 times a day), and just complete draft zero. I’ll worry about everything else later.

You may have noticed I’m calling it draft zero. My personal opinion is that the first draft is such a hodge podge that it can’t really be called draft 1. There is tons of telling, a few POV issues, and I seem to be moving from 3rd person present tense to 3rd person past tense at random. What I will call my first draft will first and foremost solve those problems. Draft 2 and onwards will start looking at other things.

I’ve passed what I will call ‘The First WIP Milestone’. I have over 10,000 words in 11 scenes. I’ve outlined 41 scenes, which is why I’m concerned about word count. Still, I’m happy!

The Anshi Legacy

words: 10,826 / 90,000 (12%)

I thought I’d post, just so y’all knew I was still alive!

I’ve been able to write every day, but not nearly as much as I would like to. I’m behind my (self-imposed) schedule, and in order to make it, I need to write about 1200 words a day. I prefer some breathing room, so I’m going to try for some 2000+ word days. We’ll see what I can do.

The Anshi Legacy

words: 8,081 / 100,000 (8%)

or, if I change my target, as I think I may need to…

The Anshi Legacy

words: 8,081 / 90,000 (9%)

My nephew and his girlfriend took the boys to a corn maze tonight. They came home pretty late, and both boys were obviously tired. We’ll be paying for it tomorrow. But the happy looks on thier faces when they came home is all worth it.

Well, we got snow. Not a lot, and it most likely won’t be sticking around, but snow none the less. I don’t think our temperature went above 0 (Celcius) today, even though our normals should be up around 12. Brrrrr. Cold.

I’ve got Jared into the lunch program at school tomorrow, so I don’t have to be home for most of the day. I have a few longer errands to run, and it’ll be nice not having to look at the clock. I’m still hoping to get some writing done in the afternoon.

As for writing, not a bad afternoon for me, about 1200 new words on the WIP. I was hoping for a tad more, but the wife will be out of town for the next couple of days, so I’m going to spend the evening with her. I’m hoping to standardize the times I write, but we’ll see if the kids let that happen.

The Anshi Legacy

words: 7,132 / 100,000 (7%)

Up here in Canada we enjoyed our Thanksgiving weekend. Good food, good family, good times. Who could ask for more?

However, I did absolutely no writing. Oh well.

Misc
50 strategies for Making Yourself Work.

Jonathon Sherwood recently posted a question on his blog. This is my response:

Juggling the time to write with the time for kids or work is one of the most difficult tasks I have to perform.

Some have told me I should have no problem juggling my time, since I am a stay-at-home dad. Personally I find that my personal/writing time is scarcer than it ever was. I’ve actually written a bit about this in my blog recently.

What happens is that the stress really starts to pile up. I look at my WIP and the kids start clamouring for attention. I play with the kids and the WIP languishes at the wayside. By the time I sit down and start writing, it’s mostly bad (okay, so it’s still first draft).

I tend to be an organized ‘by the clock’ kind of guy. I had my days scheduled to play with the kids in the mornings, while doing housework. In the afternoons, monitor the kids play and write write write. Hey, it actually worked for a month or two, until the pressure built too high.

My decision in the end is closely related to my ‘by the clock’ method I described above. The main difference is my attitude. I have decided to prioritize my work, and be much more relaxed about the whole process:

1. kids
2. writing
3. housework
4. others

A short and simple list. If I am working on item 3, I allow items 1 and 2 to interrupt at any time. If I am working on item 1, nothing is allowed to interrupt.

Do I get any writing done? Surprisingly yes. In fact, I get more time than when I stressed over it.

Is my house clean? Sure. Not as clean as before, but it’s still good.

I told my wife about my priorities, especially that the house may not be as clean as normal, and she was all for it. I’m more relaxed, the kids are happier, and the world continues to spin.

I’m still writing mostly bad, but that’s a different issue entirely!

So I went out for a motorcycle ride last Sunday. I left the house and met Steve (FZ1) and Greg (ST1100) and we headed out the Whiteshell. What a blast, 8 ¹/₂ hours of pure fun. Some twisty roads and small hills, on really bad concrete. What more can I ask for? Of course, as we started heading home, I saw a deer in the ditch. It freaked me right out, since if I hit one on the bike I probably wouldn’t be as lucky as I was in the van.

Now that I’m a stay at home Dad, I probably won’t be able to register the bike next year. $2000 for a 2003 bike is a bit steep for me. Now that I’m thoroughly depressed about that…