Back in the Saddle Again?

I am now woefully out of the habit of blogging - or writing of any kind for that matter. So, rather than set myself the task of delving into a complicated topic, I thought I'd make a few self-deprecating remarks about my own shiftlessness. Or maybe I'll just whine a little bit? You see, I get myself into trouble sometimes by setting unrealistic expectations for my own perfection. My myriad character flaws, however, render perfection not merely unachievable but laughable in the extreme.

They say the devil is in the details, and if I may I will offer my own interpretation there. I think the devil can get you with the details. I have this nasty habit of not wanting to finish something if it's not perfect, and unless I have someone else to answer to in that respect I often allow that trait to derail me. When I was in corporate work I had a direct supervisor, and since I do not like making excuses because I haven't finished something on time, or it wasn't done right, I simply made sure things were done and done well.

Writing isn't like that if you're freelance, when there's no deadline to meet. I get ideas for things I want to write about, and some of them are good ones, but I somehow manage to put off starting a piece for another hour or two, which can turn into weeks unless I slap myself around a bit - and trust me, that really is as difficult to do as it sounds. It reminds me of the Jim Carrey movie, Liar Liar, where he kicks his own ass in the bathroom at the courthouse to try to get out of continuing. If you've seen the movie, you already know it didn't do him any good, and left him in a lot of pain for no reason at all. Sort of like the misery I put myself through by procrastinating.

Okay, so if you're reading this I have to assume you're a bit curious as to what I've been up to. I would love to say I suddenly developed a life or something...except I didn't. Being as brutally honest as I am, particularly with myself, I'm left with nothing but the truth. I've been bloody miserable, wanting nothing more than to crawl into a hole for a little while. Misery stems from multiple sources.

First, I'm in a lot of pain. My whole body is getting even with me these days. It's not just the damage in my hip joints, but also what seems like a million other ghosts of old injuries. My knees would love to kick my ass for the damage I did to them when I was thirteen, except that it's physically impossibly for them to do so. My left ankle is still mad about the skydiving accident from nearly twenty years ago. My left foot is spitting nails, and I don't mean toenails, for the three bones I broke in it over twenty years ago. My back isn't happy about something, and is being very passive-aggressive in that it won't tell me why it's so upset with me - the nerve damage shows up in an EMG, and every once in a while both my big toes go numb, but I still don't know what that's from.

A few weeks ago I developed an abscessed molar, too. I've been to the dentist and was put on antibiotics, but they were supposed to call me once the coverage for an extraction went through. Now I'm probably going to have to be put on another (stronger) course of antibiotics, seeing as I've taken every last one of them like a good girl, but still no call from the dentist's office. Time to start nagging them.

Second, I was finally able to get myself a new laptop to replace one that's been very much abused. As thrilled as I am to have one that isn't six years out of date, I'm not so thrilled with having to set everything up. It's worse than simply re-formatting my hard drive, because now I'm stuck with the latest and greatest disaster from Microsoft. Windows 8.1. It started with Windows 8, though, which was a lot worse, so I guess I should be grateful for small favours. I'm adapting from Vista which was unstable and terrible in the extreme, but at least I knew what I was doing with it. I always seem to skip over their best operating systems.

Moving my e-mail history was...um...interesting. I still haven't set up all of my accounts in Outlook, but the major ones are done. My G-Mail has over 8,000 items in it. Outlook doesn't like downloading them all at the same time. It only did a few hundred at a time, but I didn't realize that at first. I kept wondering why the search function wasn't bring things up for me - turned out it was because the items weren't there yet. "Outlook has stopped working," has become my least-favourite four-word sentence. "We need to talk," is now second on the list.

Well, as much as I would like to continue whining until I've gone over everything, I know that if I don't post this now I probably never will. So, hello again everyone. Giddy-up!