Mewsyngs of an Upstart Feline Miscreant

Re: my last report, I wound up with Trader Joe's chicken enchiladas for Cinco de Mayo, but made myself a BBQ cheeseburger for Memorial Day which was good, though I should perhaps have gotten some french fries or onion rings from TJ's as well. I'll have to keep that in mind for July 4th and Labor Day. For June, it's the usual home cooking; I'll be doing a Korean-themed menu for the first two weeks, then my usual Chinese-themed menu for the second two weeks, in preparation for an American themed menu in the first two weeks of July.

Physical exam went fine. My cholesterol is a bit high but less high than it was the previous year, so that is a positive trend.

HVAC checkup. I've agreed to have them replace the filters and add a purifier to the heat pump itself, which sounds like a boost for overall house air quality.

I wound up writing a 9k word "heistcute" to test out my ideas for the Scofflaw Villainess. The couple of first readers who have peered at it seemed to enjoy it, so on we go! I wrote 22,429 words in the novel itself, tentatively titled "The Chameleon Rose Takes Nova Paree."

I did some further inking on the Treasure Island picture. Maybe I'll get it done sometimes in June? We'll see. I've been focusing on the writing.

I reread Timecrossed Engineer to make sure it's still holding up, then sent it off to archangelbeth to be another first reader.

I also poked at my website a bit to try and get things in order so I can put shorter stories that I've decided to make free there. You can see that here. There are a couple of short stories in the writing section now if you're interested!

The newer short stories (Last of Her Kind, Two Bucks and a Soul, the Chameleon Rose and the Firebrand) I might try and shop around to magazines, we'll see how it goes.

March was kind of a distracted month. So many crazy things happening in the real world.

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I should try and schedule a physical checkup soon!

Still have to finish up with Timecrossed Engineer. I want to reread it at least, and finalized the cover.

My older bro has purchased a house and is in the process of moving, so soon we will be in the process of moving my aunts into his current house so they can empty out my local aunt's house.

Well. It has been an interesting month.

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Well! That was certainly a month.

For various reasons, I decided to renew my passport, which is expiring in the next two years-- if you're not aware, if you plan to travel to another country, it's best you do so when your passport has at least a few years on it. I still have ambitions of visiting Japan someday, and it wouldn't be bad to visit other European countries.

After going through the rigamarole of taking my passport picture at a Walgreen's and then taking the application to the post office, I discovered belatedly I could have done the whole process at the post office, with an appointment. Next time!

I commissioned a new computer from Central Computers. It arrived midway through November, but while trying to set it up this last weekend, I discovered it lacked a secondary hard drive-- miscommunication between myself and the store. I'll be taking it back to get that remedied this month. I prefer to have an SSD for just the operating system and critical applications, and most other things living on the secondary hard drive.

I also picked up a Chromebook from Best Buy. This is now my main non-gaming computer; the intention is that my new Windows PC will be strictly for gaming, owing to Microsoft's intentions of making Recall (which saves screenshots of users' Windows frequently) a part of their Windows 11 users' lives at some point in the foreseeable future. Needless to say, I don't approve of their intrusive manners or their decision to opt users in by default.

I deleted my Tweets from Twitter ahead of the threatened deadline at which they would assume all users had given tacit permission for their Tweets to be used in whatever fashion they pleased, including feeding them into LLMs for training purposes. If you're looking for mew on social media, Mastodon and Bluesky are my hangouts of choice.

I reread Timecrossed Engineer and made various changes. Once Rowyn is done with making her word count goal, I'll see if she wants to be the first reader!

I began working on concept sketches for the book cover. It looks like this will be a long and complex process that will last through December, but I'm hopeful that I'll get good enough results to be able to publish with a self-made cover.

I began planning for the next book to work on... While I have a few outlines I could work on, I decided on a complete change of pace-- it'll be a fantasy heist story, "Grand Theft: Dragon." This is turning out to be quite complicated but I find it the most interesting project at the moment.

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Another great month of writing! 59,421 words on the Timecrossed Engineer, which is in the final stretch.

Cancelled Disney+ and subscribed to Netflix for the next while, so I could watch Star Trek Prodigy's second season and catch up on other things.

Labor Day marked the last day I normally have a hamburger for the year-- that'd be Memorial Day, July 4th, and Labor Day. There's nothing actually stopping me from having one anytime I want, but those are days it's most appropriate, and otherwise, there are plenty of other dishes I could be having for my 'Cheat Mondays', like okonomiyaki or curry udon. Though I've been more often just having a Trader Joe's Chicken Burrito Bowl, with a fried egg on top.

Other than that, things seem to be going well. Planning to get my COVID and flu shots in mid-October.

Oh hai, I am a year older! (as of the 18th)

My birthday dinner was the usual, duck from Le Fontaine, served on a bed of wild rice with mixed vegetables, with tiramisu for dessert. Yum!

I outlined not one, but two possible standalone novels. These are:

Intruder - first contact at 0.05 times the speed of light. The two great factions of humanity, locked in a cold war with one another, discover an alien ship crossing the solar system at insane speed. Each launches a mission to attempt to rendezvous with the ship before the other one can. But the first mission goes silent days after it begins its operations. Now, months later, the second mission is about to close in on the Intruder. Are the aliens hostile? What happened to the first crew? And why didn't the Intruder stop in the solar system?

Re: Fleet Academy - a disgruntled engineer comes across a mysterious artifact on a planetary expedition that offers her the chance to redo her life. She accepts and finds herself back in her academy days. Score! But her captain, the very reason she's doing this, has gone back in time after her, and is determined to bring her back before the timeline is changed beyond repair. Now the two of them must deal with classmates, their first training cruise, and each other. Is a happy life so much to ask for?

Intruder is off to review by a friend of mine who's much better with things physics than I am, since it's a hard-ish science fiction story, set in a slower-than-light universe. He's already taken one look at things and I've made changes based on his suggestion, but it may be a while before he gets to a second look, so I pressed on with the second outline.

Thanks to ladyrowyn who read over Re: Fleet Academy and gave me some great suggestions, I broke ground on it a few weeks ago, and presently have one and a half chapters written: 10,877 words. I have hopes that it will be a moderately thick novel, around 120k words, but we'll see how that goes.

Interestingly, it took 18 days to write, then revise the outline for Intruder... 5 and change for Re: Fleet Academy's outline. We'll see how that goes.

In other mews... CentOS 7, which is what my old remotely-hosted Linux server is using (I use it for mail and hosting an RP MUCK) has reached end of life, which I found out when the updates stopped running because they'd turned off that service. So I did some digging and figured out I could migrate it to Alma Linux using ELevate. There was a very nervous-making hour and change while it did the reboot thing, but it came back up successfully. Whew! So that's one headache out of the way.

Now what am I gonna do about Windows 10 reaching end of life next year and my machine being too old, apparently, for Windows 11... Eh, that's next-year-Tufty's problem.

26,644 words on Alien Tastes. We're close to the end of the first book! It should weigh in at about 87k words or so. All that just to finish Molly's first day, and she won't even have gotten to classes yet! That will be the *next* book.

I learned that certificates of deposit don't just turn into money, they roll over "renewing" at a new interest rate for the term e.g. if you had a 5-month CD, you'll get it rolled over into another 5-month CD. There's a 10-day window from maturity when you can withdraw the money. CDs beat the 'standard' saving account interest by quite a bit, so learning to work with this will be a good plan, as long as I accurately forecast my monthly needs.

I have gotten my furnace/AC replaced with a heat pump! This is supposed to be more efficient overall, which is good because gas bills have been going up and up around here. Just in time for... it to no longer be winter, meaning I won't be running the heat for the next nine months anyway.

I am in the midst of a low-residue diet for a colonoscopy next week. Whee. The travails of getting old. x.x

I got and finished Homeworld 3! I wouldn't say necessarily 'instant classic' but I think it did justice to following in the footsteps of the original Homeworld, and setting the mood with megalithic structures and bombastic story. I also played through Timelie, which is a good 'rewind-time stealth' puzzle game that features a cat as an important part of the gameplay. Some really tough puzzle levels, but ultimately I didn't have to resort to a walkthrough at any time, which I appreciate.

So what have I been up to since I joined the ranks of the unemployed?

* I did my taxes for 2023
* I figured out and paid estimated taxes for 2024
* I signed up for COBRA continuation of my workplace health insurance, so I'm good for the next 18 months
* I wrote 11,247 words picking up on Alien Tastes
* I posted chapter 6 of On the Wrong Side of the Mirror

It's not a bad start to the 'rest of my life', I guess. I still have a passel of things I want to get done: a general physical later in the spring, taking my car in for a service since it's been some time, maybe start going for a walk once a week, to get some actual exposure to daylight...

On the leisure side of things:

* My WoW raid group beat heroic Smolderon and Tindral, and we're close to getting heroic Fyrakk down... Woo.
* I got Lagkitten to level 50 (the cap) in City of Heroes (Homecoming servers). Also woo!
* I finished Baldur's Gate 3 with a couple friends. We've sunk several hundred hours into this on the weekends, mostly Caturday evenings. It's an amazing RPG with so, so much detail-- be sure to try Speak with Animals! Most of the critters have conversations longer than the one or two lines you'd expect.

Anyway I feel pretty good that I've managed to get some writing done most every day. I'd like to get a book or two finished this year. Crossing fingers!