Current mood:

anxious

June wrap-up
CONvergence is still fresh in my mind, and I'll have something to say about it eventually.  For now, though, it's time to reach back before it into the month I consider my favorite of the year--June.  The program I work for is adjourned for the summer, which left me nervously looking for work at the beginning of the month (and before), struggling with things I hate doing, like calling strangers and trying to find elusive information on websites about work opportunities and dealing with technical difficulties. 

Eventually, it was too late to join any summer programs and I gave up on it.  I may, however, be doing online tutoring for tutor.com.  I took tests in -all- their subjects in early June, passing most of them, although I had a lot of help from the internet.  I applied, but then they announced a site redesign and put all new hiring on hold, and I've just now gotten an e-mail telling me to schedule a mock session.  I'm nervous about it for various reasons, but it may go well, as I like explaining things and I like chatting online, so you'd think it would work well for me until my program resumes in autumn.  (And it will, although just barely.  I'll be the only paid tutor left at my location, working with volunteers, instead.  I was worried that -none- of the funding would come through.)

Taking those tests was interesting and educational, at the least.  In particular, I finally learned some basics in statistics, a branch of math I never studied in any depth before.  I also now have an online friend who's quite good at math (and economics) and also enjoys tutoring, so he's been teaching me some concepts now and then.  He's awesome.

So, the book.  I totally wanted to have it out by now.  I wanted to have the e-store open and promotional materials printed to bring to CONvergence.  Did not happen.  Who would ever have expected that print-on-demand publishing, just a step removed from self-publishing, would involve delays or unexpected problems?  Impossible.  It's a fluke.  But anyway, right now I'm waiting for another (hopefully final) proof of the book to be shipped to me, and for several days I've been putting off putting into practice one of the tutorials I've found on isolating Photoshop images.  That comes after I finish this post.  I gotta make me some bookmarks.

This month I went to the doctor for the first time in over ten years.  Yeah.  It was...uneventful, really.  Although I went to the wrong site at first and had to deal with a scary parking ramp and stuff.  Um.  I wasn't aggressive in asking questions because I wanted to just test the waters and get an idea of what basic medical coverage could do for me.  I was totally uncertain what to expect, and I'm still fairly uncertain, but the gist is that I feel like I'm on my own unless one of my medical issues becomes a serious problem and not just a minor inconvenience.  And at the end of the year, chances are I'll no longer be eligible for MinnesotaCare and have to content myself with paying for some sort of catastrophic coverage.  I have things I can try doing.  Really, the reason I took so long to see a doctor was that the whole medical establishment really scares me.

I've been going in to the library on Thursdays to run Puzzlemania.  I get out a couple bins of jigsaws and tangrams and things, I bring some special games from home, and I get the kids who show up involved.  It was a one hour thing from two summers ago that's now two and a half hours.  Although I don't have a contract yet, I'm told I'll be paid twenty dollars for each session, which isn't much but it's something.  Puzzlemania is enjoyable, although a bit dull compared to how it used to be, with visiting groups dropping in.

Now that I'm no longer working Tuesday nights, I'm able to go to writer's group meetings again.  They moved the night at the end of the NaNoWriMo year (early December) from Monday to Tuesday, but I didn't really mind not going to meetings, because I'm not all that into the group and I was working on a book that wouldn't have benefited that much fro their kind of critique, rather than the short stories I was doing before that.  (I did revise one of those stories this month, though I know I'll have to again.)  But now I've been back to the group twice and it's okay.  They have a couple new members, and it's a decent time with decent people who have a kind of lifestyle connection that allows them to talk knowingly about how being (mostly) unpublished writers is.  I feel like I'm a bit on the outside, and I don't really like the semi-structured way the meetings go, with their critique slots and presentations on themes, but eh--they amuse.  And I get a nice walk downtown, and sometimes walk all the way home, which means I must be getting some energy/inspiration from the whole shebang.

I terminated my domain registration account with a company that I just signed up with on a lark something like a year and a half ago to see what happened.  What happened was the company turned out to be horribly evil and incompetent.  One of those dealies where it's almost impossible to close your account, which in my opinion is offense enough on its own to justify shutting a business down completely.  I'd thought the worst case scaenario was that I'd throw away four bucks on a service not worth it, but actually, they later sent an e-mail saying that unless I specifically responded to the e-mail in a certain way, they'd go ahead and upgrade my account to some premium package for a charge of $50.  This, is my opinion, is enough to justify jailing the people in charge of the company for ten years.  I said no, and wasn't charged.  Still, my fear of talking to strangers on the phone (not unrelated to my fear of doctors, I daresay) kept me from calling up numbers and demanding to cancel the account, which the internet told me was hard to do even then.  (The internet also told me that the company is technically incompetent, too.)  I did end up charged fifteen dollars for a premature renewal I didn't ask for, but I decided not to try and get that back.  I eventually got around to dealing with it this month, and was able to cancel the account by speaking with live chat operators.  At least, I think it's canceled.  I got multiple messages saying it was canceled, but my login still works and one page still says I'm up for renewal, which I was told is a 'glitch'.  We'll see.  I was going to leave the company's name out for some reason, but why bother?  It's Globat.com, a.k.a. DomainsAreFree.  I should have checked their reputation ahead of time.

I went to the wedding of cari_rose  and crytel .  It was nice.  I kept busy and everyone seemed happy.  I thought I was going to witness the union, but they got members of the wedding party to do that, so I got other duties instead.  The weather was lovely and the turn-out respectable.  And I played my first ever game of frisbee golf.

I went to davidwilford and Erin McKee's anniversary party/MN-Stf meeting, which also observed Erin's birthday.  It was great, even though I got into a funk for no good reason partway through.  It wore off.  I played croquet and lawn bowling, and did some filking, and drummed for the musicians who played later on.  I was proud of being brave enough to take a turn in the music circle, singing an extended parody of Christina Aguilera's Coca Cola jingle.

Game parties have continued to be delightful.  I got to play two games I'd wanted to try for a while, Amazonas and Formula De.  Blokus-3D is also nifty.  And I played a series of solo games of Agricola, the elaborate farming game.  I failed on my first try with the simple deck, but I won my second series with the complex deck very handily.  I also played a jiggity freeware game called Polychromatic Funk Monkey, and the sequel to a favorite flash game, Hedgehog Launch.  And I've been roleplaying on MUCKs and on AIM, which is satisfying, even if the campaigns I care most about are lagging endlessly.

I trimmed the hedge (not as hellish as it sometimes is, though I made an ugly mistake), gave my father the latest Peter Beagle book for Father's Day, was amused by a robin tugging at length on the rope attached to the ladder outside my window, dug up a bunch of unwanted little trees, paid estimated taxes, helped a Somali immigrant train for her citizenship test, ran a game of Magnet Maze that didn't end well, and installed a window blind for the first time.  And I missed a bunch more things I could have done.

Oh.  And I walked to Southdale, the world's first heated indoor shopping mall, something I'd wanted to do for a while.  The walk was about six miles, but it was hard because I went in the morning after being up all night working on my book's back cover.  I bought black pants and stuff from the dollar stores, and was hugely sleepy all over the place.  I put my head on the table in a Taco Bell and elsewhere.  A Sbarro combo meal was horrible, but a Starbucks white chocolate mocha and petite vanilla bean scone were excellent.  And I got a massage from an electric massage chair.  Mmm...in the state I was in, that really hit the spot.