2018: Day 58 the one where I wondered about wonder
Word count 136,538 + 1,183 or 137,371 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

Today you are going to get to see that thumbnail of my Microsoft Universal Bluetooth Keyboard. I know you have been wondering about that thing for the last 24 hours. A new class of compain laptops is coming out that pretty much use your phone to drive them. This class of technology is interesting. Imagine a battery, keyboard, and screen combo that need to connect to your phone to do anything. It is an interesting concept. Oddly enough I have gotten very used to typing on this keyboard attached my ASUS Chromebook Flip C101P device. The keyboard is not epic or anything, but I have gotten used to it and that is all that really counts. Writing and being comfortable during the writing process is the name of the game at this point. That is how things are supposed to go each day for about 3,000 words. You can imagine that looking at this class of smartphone powered laptops ate up some of my time today.

Time is words. Writing words takes time. These are things that happen. They make sence I assure you. Tonight I’m back to listening to a playlist called “100 Greatest ‘90s Alternative Songs.” Maybe I need to find a new playlist or maybe that one will do for tonight. Today was almost a Warren Zevon type of day, but I was able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and muddle through to this moment here and now. This moment of peaceful reflection as things are winding down and I’m getting ready for bed. This writing session is going to have to grind out a number of words. I’m targeting writing 3,000 words tonight. It is time to get back on track and write a normal blog post tonight. That is going to require a little bit of focus and a little bit of luck. In terms of you luck you might be wondering how that applies. It really just applied to the amount of potential disruption that would stop me from finishing out my writing assignment for the night.

We had one little burp in internet service tonight. Pretty much everything in the else lost connection at the same time. I have no idea how or why that happened, but it totally disrupted everything that was running. Canceling cable was pretty easy to do thanks to the advent of streaming video and the choices it presents. Any internet outage pretty much renders that plan useless and forces me to revert to watching whatever is on over the air broadcast television. The title of the blog post for today is related to wondering about wonder. That is an epic use of the imagination. Imagine taking a bucket full of wonder and excitement and just doubling it by wondering about the bucket of wonder. You can imagine that this analogy could go on for hundreds of words. I’m not going to let that happen. That seems tedious. I’m pretty much just going to abandon that one and move on to the next paragraph.

All of that and this blog post is only at 500 words for the night. Getting to the 3,000 word benchmark might not be happening. That seems unfortunate. I just need to pick a topic and get to writing or at least focus in on a really solid narrative thread to drive an hour or so of stream of consciousness writing. Musings along may not get this blog post to the finish line. It is going to take a little bit of effort and some focus on getting back into the habit of writing long form prose. My distraction level has been pretty high as of late. Most anything can pull my attention away from the 2 to 3 things that I’m working on at any given time. It used to be that digging down deep and working with a single minded purpose was one of the easier things to do. Things change and as they change we introduce more and complexity into our lives. That is the basis of how things drop into my focus and receive consideration.

One of the things that really breaks my writing rhythm is constantly spell checking after every sentence of paragraph. I need to focus on just executing one spell check at the very end of the writing process. That is easier said than done. I apparently really like to hit the spell check button in Google Docs. My efforts to write on a Chromebook have worked out well enough this year. They could have been better I guess. Maybe one of the new Google Pixelbook, but that is probably not the case. This Chromebook I am using right now can be purchased for $249.99 at most major retailers. It is not an expensive device, but it works out well enough and it helps me work on my grant writing plan. At my current pace, I’m not going to get to 1,000,000 words in the same year. That means that my big year will not in fact be big and my efforts will have failed. That is sad thought to consider. Maybe it would be best to just focus in on bringing my average words per day back up to the minimum viable writing product.

Writing 1,000,000 words in the same year is really just about keeping a writing average of 2,739.7260274 words or roughly 2,740 words per day. That is so much easier to write than to accomplish day in and day out. So far I have not missed a single day and this is day 58 of my big year of writing. Write now I am working without a safety net and writing real time. The clock is ticking on the blog post that is already setup and ready to go for tonight. I’m pretty much going to write until I fall asleep and this blog post will publish on its own and be out in the wild before the end of the night. I am doing a little bit better at not hitting the spell check button as much. That is a good first step down the path to having a little bit better rhythm to my writing. Getting into a good rhythm is a very important part of the process. So many things can disrupt that rhythm. So many things.

Topic 1: More wonder

My travel interests should be more pronounced. They are not. Maybe visiting a beach in a warmer part of the world sounds nice. That is really about as adventurous as my travel based wonder lust happens to be. Colorado is pretty awesome and it has pretty much everything you could want except beaches and awesome ocean views. Colorado has the Great Sand Dunes and that does include an awful lot of sand. It looks like I’m about to spend some time looking at Marriott Vacation clubs again. I’ll be back here writing in a few minutes. Distractions abound. That happened.

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs