just say there's nothing holding you back

I should have gone to bed over an hour ago, but I got sucked into a vortex of GoDaddy/Wordpress/site issues for my romance alter ego, and I finally emerged battered and not entirely victorious. I realized that the twitter feed on my website hadn't updated in a couple of weeks, so I tried to fix it, which resulted in me briefly losing the entire site. The end result was that the widget I was using is still broken, I downloaded five others that don't work nearly as well, and I'm too frustrated to continue. This is not an important project (although it might be to my mother, since she checks the other site to see my twitter feed), so it's going to have to wait until I'm funemployed (and perhaps for the blog class I'm taking later this fall). But for those of you (in other words, Mom) who want the twitter feed -- it's now linked from the top of this blog. Knock yourself out!

Anyway, clearly I was procrastinating in a major way from the writing. I don't know why I'm avoiding the scene that is next on my list; I even tried making a list of why I didn't want to write it, and that didn't really help. I did have a breakthrough and realize that it was in the wrong place in the story, taking place at the wrong time of day and in the wrong room (and with Mrs. Peacock and the candlestick instead of Miss Scarlet and the knife, right?), but that didn't give me any more words. In fact, I lost 1500 words tonight to deletions -- necessary, but not good for morale. But, I love my desk now that I have pictures all over the place, and I still put a lot of thought into the story even if the word count didn't materialize, so it wasn't a complete waste - and hopefully tomorrow, whatever little snit I'm having over this scene will resolve itself so that I can write the damn thing and move on.

The rest of my day was rather meh; I had a blood test this morning (since I'm doing every elective medical procedure around while I still have fantastic insurance) that at the time seemed to go extremely well. I took their advice to drink a ton of water before the test, which meant that she found a vein on the first try, rather than attempting both arms and the back of my hand (which happened last time, and I nearly fainted). But then a couple of hours later, I had really awful pain in my wrist, to the point that I couldn't turn my arm or type. I of course used my good hand to look up all sorts of horror stories online about people who had nerves perforated by phlebotomists (that's what she said), or who had veins burst and cause internal bleeding. Most of these stories were on a message board for people with chronic pain, most of whom seemed like basket cases (and freely admitted that the 'doctors don't listen because I call too much'), but it was morbidly interesting to wonder whether I would ever recover. Of course, I recovered almost immediately, although it still hurts just a tiny bit, so I suppose my Percocet addiction is going to have remain unborn.

After that, I slogged the rest of the day in a rather desultory fashion that was completely at odds with my two-page to-do list -- after all, what are they going to do, fire me? Of course, that isn't the attitude I really have, and I'm going to have to spend some quality time tomorrow making up for today's lack of productivity -- but I wasn't wholly useless. I even had lunch with someone who just got back from leave and wanted my perspective on reentry -- I'm apparently seen as somewhat of an expert on this, since I'm one of the only people who ever took a 3-6 month non-maternity leave and actually came back for a couple of years -- and tried to convince her to stay with the company. Funny, right?

But now, I have to sleep; luckily it's cooled down from the 100-degree temperatures that were baking everything when I came home, so sleep should be possible. Goodnight!

Daily word count: -1543 (-77.15% of goal)
Productive time: 3hrs
RescueTime productivity rating: 0.86 (global average: 0.88)