Day Off Thoughts

It's my day off today and it's a heat wave - instead of -12 F, it's -5 F and it's supposed to actually get above zero today. Whoo hoo! It's hard to comprehend a day above zero these days, which tells me that I'm really meant to be a hermit in the wintertime. But I need to run some errands, and I need groceries, so I'll have to venture out for a while today.

I enjoyed participating in the Snowflake Challenge and got enough
positive feedback that I will try and be brave once more. I may regret
this, but I'm willing to try putting my fiction out in a more open way again.

I promised people in the Snowflake Challenge that I would become braver and put more of my stories out there in my personal journal instead of just in selected community postings as well as post them more often to the archives. That's one of my goals today since I have two completed drabble series that need to be uploaded as well as one story. So I plan to work on that, beta for Iris, and scan some project articles I found as I was throwing away extra copies of some of the magazines the store carries. I might even bring the portable heater down to the computer room and warm it up a bit more. It might be a rollicking -5 F, but it's still darned cold.

The Toho Design Challenge provided the beads you see above. These were
the only beads that could be used in the project. I'm 70% finished with mine, and
I love the way it's turning out, but then life got in the way. 

A bit less than a year ago I accepted a beading challenge project and I got fairly far with it, really enjoying the feel of a needle and thread again. But then my father-by-marriage died and my scheduled free time disappeared. So I have an unfinished project that I had promised to turn in. I've been feeling guilty about that and would like to pick it up again. I'm almost caught up with writing projects (except for my o-fic, of course) so I may try to carve a bit of time out to continue working on this.

I'm looking at about six different text reading software programs. I want
to find one that is versatile and that can run on both Win XP and Win 7.

Speaking of o-fic, a wise friend suggested that I read my book aloud to discover where I feel I started moving away from the original plot path to figure out the best way to get things back into the direction I want. I thought that was a marvelous idea, but really didn't want to sit down and read 100,000+ words aloud. HOWEVER, within a couple of weeks, an author whose blog I follow was talking about the very same thing. She used a computer program that reads the files aloud for you in a variety of voices that you can choose. Now this sounded interesting. I've started doing the research on programs that I think may work best for my application and my type of computer system (she uses Apple, I use a PC) and will choose a software program soon. Then I can begin to listen to my book and see whether it is worthwhile or not, where I might have gone wrong, and what I might be able to do to fix it. Lots of work there, but I feel good about it.

This particular picture is from Manitoba, Canada where their normal temp at
this time of the year is -11 F. I guess -5 F suddenly sounds better to me ...

So, as I bundle up and make plans to be at my computer doing various things for most of the day (along with errands, laundry, and other miscellaneous stuff) I will wish each of you a fabulous Hump Day! Be safe, be warm, be happy!