2018: Day 126 the one where I ordered more stationary
Dear Reader,
Part of giving up on using Amazon has been learning how to order directly from companies that make the products that I have enjoyed over the years. One of those such companies is Crane and Company who make the stationary I use. Recently my focus has turned to using and writing on Crane and Company note cards. Let’s be really clear on this one I generally only have enough to say to fill up a standard note card. Writing out longer notes on their half pages or full pages is certainly one way to go about things. I’m sure after getting more used to writing long form letters that will be a more viable option. Right now I’m using one Parker fountain pen for almost all of my writing. Based on all of my traveling writing with my fountain pen has not really been on the menu. You may have noticed that my writing productivity for the blog has dropped off recently. That has to do with one certain thing that has drawn my attention.
My primary focuses has shifted from writing every day regardless of the format to a very focused allocation of time to writing academic focused papers. The only real problem with that is that producing high quality academic prose takes a good deal of my focus. It pretty much has to be the only thing that I do during that window. Well I should clarify that listening to music and writing papers is something that happens. Academic writing and listening to some type of music are pretty the only things I do when working on papers. Getting back into the swing of writing papers has been a little bit harder than I had anticipated. Seriously, it has been somewhat taxing to get back into the rhythm of academic writing.
Topic 1: Revisiting some words I wrote on a flight from May 3, 2018
Well I started working on writing out my narrative resume the other day. It was a seriously interesting thing to work on for a few minutes. The last time I sat down and wrote a serious bio for myself was maybe 10 years ago. That brief biography mostly focuses on my academic journey and the various paths that has taken. Right now it is raining in Hartford, Connecticut. My last 5 hours were spent at the airport. Two trips to the donut store in the terminal later this delayed flight is finally taking off. We are beginning to taxi out to fly to Chicago. That is just the first leg of my journey. Right now i’m typing without the safety net of spell check. I have no internet connection and Google Docs does not engage in the checking of spelling without an active internet connection. Sometimes I think that helps me writing and be a little more fluid with my prose. Stopping every few minutes to fix words can really break your stride. Sure I could just wait until the end of my writing sessions and sweep back through the entire document, but that is really not my style.
Nobody is sitting next to me on this flight which is really good. Back here in row 29 space is at a premium and that little bit of extra room to write is very welcome. My goal here is to sit down and writing for the next 2 hours. I’m probably going to need to take a nap on my next flight from Chicago back to Denver. Oddly enough my drive back will happen tomorrow. It will not happen in the morning, but it will happen after midnight and before sunrise. That is a really good reason to take a little nap. We will see how it goes. The last flight I was on was so turbulent that both writing and napping were out of the question. I mostly just sat and wondered why the pilot could not find a smoother path. I’m really not a fan of turbulence during flights. Seriously, a few bumps here and there are acceptable, but those 30 or more second jostlings are just not on my list of things to do or experience. Over the last few months I think they have been increasing in frequency. That is entirely anecdotal evidence based on my observations and talking to folks.
My only real blog post this week was really a giant typo. I had started to write on my flight out and was setting up a blog post. In the midst of dealing with the wildness of the flight I forgot that the blog post had been setup to post automatically. It did post. I went back and read the couple sentence that had been cobbled together and frowned at myself. Oddly enough on this trip I even forgot to chart my Chromebook. Right now my ASUS C101P is charging very slowly via a USB Type-C cable and my external battery pack. That will keep it running, but it is not the way things should have worked out for the flight. I did download a couple movies last night to my phone from Google Play. Apparently, I own a couple movies on that service and randomly season 3 of Video Game High School (VGHS). Naturally, I downloaded the entire season and just might watch it during my next flight instead of taking that nap previously mentioned.
I’m super consfused at the moment about why my Google Play movie downloads will not play. The application has a download only mode, but nothing has an option to hit play. I can see the two movies and season 3 of VGHS. They are taking up space on my phone. None of them will play during this flight. That pretty much means that I have access to my Warren Zevon Radio Pandora station and a couple other random stations. Ok —- my really random fix for the problem was pretty simple. I went to take a screenshot of the condition so I could submit a bug report to Google. Strangely enough when I hit the buttons to activate the screenshot the option to play showed up within the application. I’m going to call that a major win for this flight. I watched several episodes of VGHS during the flight. That was pretty fun and it was kind of a blast from the past. It made me wonder why nothing else from Rocket Jump ends up in my playlist. Maybe that will change at some point, but at the moment VGHS is the only thing from those folks that jumps out to me and held my attention.
Topic 2: Writing gaps and other forms of procrastination
Sure I have gotten back on track in terms of hosting live streams on YouTube a couple times a week. That has been easy enough to get setup on my new computer. Sure the Corsair 740 is a pretty decent case and the setup works out pretty well. Maybe at some point I’ll drop another RAM kit into the box, but for the most part that custom built computer is ready to rock and roll. My level of writing procrastination this month so far has been epic. Sure that is something that I know better about and should be able to guard against, but none that has seemed to matter very much. The procrastination has been real. It has to stop and things have to start moving forward at amore prodigious pace.
Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Leave a Reply