Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic What's Keeping You Busy?

What's keeping me busy?

• Work
• Personal crises (plural) - some resolved, some not
• Getting older - it sure ain't for sissies
• Non-serious but recurring illnesses (may be related to previous item)
• Did I mention work?
• Preparing for my niece's out-of-state wedding this month (she asked me to play piano and I couldn't decline
• Getting older - wait, yeah, that, along with loss of short-term memory
• What are we talking about again? Oh, right.
• Legal problems brought on by our younger son

On the whole, it could be worse. I'm still looking down at the grass instead of up at it.

Mouserocks: So glad that you were safe in the fire . And yes!!!! Castle is back on--Woo hoo!!! I totally credit and thank you for talking about it here--it's the reason I'm a big fan now .

Christina: Congrats on your amazing news

Virginia: Hope the job interview went wonderfully!

DC: Excited about the story! And love hearing news on the kid front. Growing up fast!

Morgana: Your story on the boards is still on the top of my reading list. Can't wait to start it (and hopefully soon !)

KK: Bitten by your muse! Yes!!!

Lynn: Hope that you are feeling better?

Lady Loisette: Sound really busy with your work--I know from experience (see avatar ) how talented you are. Thanks again for all your amazing work

Virginia posted:

And Lynn posted:

Thanks, guys! We are getting together an offer for a house down in Iowa--finally, we think, we have found 'the house' . We've been sort of floating between the two states since August--thank goodness for family in Iowa . Still need to sell our house in ND, but things are definitely starting to happen overall. Yikes, yeah...this process has definitely been a process, but thankful no one is school-age yet. And the end result? So excited to settle back into life in Iowa sometime soon

Have a good week all!
Laura

Family.
Work.
Getting more insulation put in the attic.
Dealing with a huge plumbing leak (not to worry, it went away when I threw a boatload of money at it. Aargh. )
Having all the bedrooms painted which meant removing rather a lot of books + a ton of other junk + furniture from rooms.
Going through all the books and junk after rooms painted.
Getting rid of a lot of stuff after going through it.
Slowly working on home inventory for insurance purposes on the stuff that's left over.

Long overdue, but it's been a job that has taken months.

Morgana: To answer your question, TV is what we all watched at night roughly 20 years ago before the Internet took Elvis's crown and, by the sound of everyone's posts, the workweek got bumped up to 60 hours/wk.

Lady Loisette: I have to say it sounds like you have a really fun job. Can I be envious?

IncompleteSong: yea! Another work in progress!

Deadly Chakram: Don't worry about missing some of my stories; Wrong Clark will be posting for many, many months to come. I will be posting my short 3-part auction piece for KK in a couple of weeks for those of you with not enough hours in the day for my soap opera.

Terry: I'm sorry to hear that you're being bogged down with crises. Well, at least, it's fodder for your next story, right? /starts singing along with Lex and Nigel about grey clouds having a silver lining/ That's sweet that your niece wanted you to be such a large part of her special day. Take it for the compliment that it is.

Laura: I didn't feel as if the interview went well. Perhaps I just got that vibe because, and I'm quoting here, "shy and introverted people wouldn't do well in this position because they can't talk to people." Wow, that's ignorance and pretty darn insulting. I didn't describe myself as shy or introverted (I'm smarter than that), but I do have over 10 years of customer service experience and it hasn't held me back, yet. Well, 9 more tortuous interviews like that and my self-confidence shall liquid sludge on the floor. Let's hope I get a new job before I have to suffer through that. Only two more months until my husband's new 60+hr/week job is over, so no pressure.

Lynn: I hope you've been able to recover from your cold. The one I caught from my kids (which lasted 48 hours for them) is still stuck in my chest, leaving me with hacking coughs several weeks later. Joy. Then, again, it may be a holdover of the cold I caught in June (yes, JUNE), which has been plaguing me all summer with runny nose and cough.

IolantheAlias: Wow, you've gotten a lot accomplished (albeit, some of it unwillingly) this year. Isn't that what money is for? To put in a new boat for your contractor and/or plumber to use on his holidays? I'm envious of your completed painting job. Paint is now discretionary money, so my puce brown office (stating it kindly) will remain so for the foreseeable future. My husband also doesn't want me to change the trim color from natural (walnut?) brown to almond, so now I have to find another color than maroon to use. Sigh. So much for my dream of a red room.

The screencapping part of it is definitely no fun at all. It takes a very long time and parts of the process are very tedious.

I timed myself when capping one particular episode and I ended up clicking the mouse button in rapid-fire motion, non-stop without slowing down or stopping (because if you do that you've just messed up and have to scrap your work and start again) for 7-and-a-half hours. My poor arm was begging for mercy, but I had to keep going.

That takes forever to do and it is also the easy and "fast" part of the job. I then I have to sort through the thousands of pictures (sometimes more than 10,000) and narrow that down to the best 100 or so, sometimes even less. That is extremely difficult to do.

After that each picture must be renamed individually. Then each picture must have a watermark added to it then renamed yet again. Once all of that is done the files/folders have to be created on the website and the pictures loaded up to it, either individually or in small groups.

The whole process takes quite a lot of time and work to do. Usually around 6-8 hours the night the show airs, working until the early morning hours. Then sleep for a few hours, wake up and immediately get back to work on it and then work all day and night again until the early morning hours. On occasion it can take even longer than that. I was stuck working one a set of double episode screencaps day and night for weeks.

I also don't get anything for any of the stuff I do for the site. I'm lucky if I get one thanks of appreciation on occasion. Basically I was just asked if I could do all these things and I agreed, knowing that if I didn't there wasn't anyone else who could do it and the site would greatly suffer.

No! Don't do that! That is *precisely* how I earned myself a permanent repetitive stress injury decades ago. To this day, I use a mouse left-handed because my right, dominant wrist hurts if I mouse for more than a minute or two at a time with it. Please don't do yourself a permanent injury in the name of dedication. Listen to your body; it is trying to save you from having pains *FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE*!!! (Sorry about shouting; I just want to emphasize that what starts as temporary pain can become chronic quite quickly.) I really wish someone had given me this advice years ago.

Joy,
Lynn

Ditto to everything Lynn posted, Lady Loisette. It sounds as if you need some help managing that site. Being a perfectionist at your job isn't worth your health or well-being. It sounds as if you need a vacation to re-evaluate your needs. If you don't soon, you'll no longer be a fan because you (will) no longer love what you do. Anyone else who doesn't understand that can get their own repetitive stress injury doing it for you. Good luck, Lady Loisette. We're rooting for you!

Virginia, being ill for so long must be extremely frustrating. I hope you are finally able to shake your cold soon.

I've actually been diagnosed with the flu and with the start of a secondary, bacterial infection. I've been given antibiotics to treat the latter, and given a note off from work for this so that I can rest and let time deal with the former. I'm doing a little better than I had been, but I've a long ways to go.

Terry, wow. It sounds like your being overwhelmed. You definitely have a lot on your plate. I wish there were some way I could help.

Take care,
Lynn

I'm careful when doing the actual capping part and haven't caused myself any pain while doing it, only tiredness and if one arm gets too tired, I'll switch it up for a while. I've also since manged to rig it to make the caps without using the mouse at all and instead use the 0 key on the number pad and can easily alternate which finger I use to push the button. Mostly it's just a time-consuming tedious job. I do end up getting pretty pictures at the end though.

My next sceencapping job won't be until at least January, so I'll have had about a six month break by then. The other parts of the job I do for the site aren't so bad.

Just checking in with an fyi... because I was planning on finishing up a story and posting it tomorrow... I might be busy again because there's a chance I will be evacuated due to ANOTHER fire that some idiot started this afternoon. Literally, a guy drove up I-80 tossing flaming papers (or something) out his car window, starting five fires which has now turned into one big fire... now the highway's closed and we're just hoping it doesn't jump to our side of 80. So, I'm gonna be doing some just-in-case emergency packing, but they probably won't let it cross the highway. Right now it's heading away from us, and hopefully they'll get it under control. But it's certainly frightening! This is the closest we've ever been to a fire!

I'll check back in when I can.

Yikes, Mouse! I hope that they caught that vandal. I wish you luck and heavy rains with no wind. Keep safe.

Stay safe, Mouse!!!

3 months into the fire season and CA has already spent its yearly fire budget! Hope this recent fire stays away from structures, Mouserocks.

Quarter grades are due Friday. Just had to grade a class worth of essays trying to prove to me that states couldn't deal with the problems caused by the Articles of Confederation, necessitating the creation of the U.S. Constitution. A little rebellion now and then is a good thing...

Driving to Las Vegas this weekend...big road trip for my brother's 40th birthday party. Tons of people flying in or driving out there. It's only a four hour drive for me (assuming good traffic on the 15...NEVER assume there will be good traffic!).

Currently working on the sequel to Distant Closeness, since people seemed interested in knowing what Lois and Clark might be doing in that nice, big bed at Smiley's camp. I'm up to 37 pages at this point and I'm maybe half done. This will easily be the longest story I've ever written. But you nfic readers will enjoy it!

Mouse: How are you and your family doing?

Groobie: How did the 40th b-day weekend go?

Groobie posted:

YES. WE. WILL.

So very excited--and am loving that it is your longest work yet. It will be amazing!


Offer accepted on the new home in Iowa, and barring any craziness in these final stages, we should close mid November and have a 'home' again. Woo-hoo!

Have a great week!
Laura

Congratulations!

Working -- those 8 hours a day seem to spill over at times.

Getting the garden ready for fall planting. I picked all the apples, pomegranates, and olives and am working on processing them (olives take a while to become edible; I'm not sure what would happen if they were eaten fresh, and I don't aim to find out). There are lots of pomegranates this year, so lots of pomegranate jelly (so of course I need to bake bread to go with it). The apples will theoretically keep in a cool place, but the daytime temperatures are still in the 80's and 90's (or hotter), and there's no space in the refrigerator for them, so they are being made into dried apples and canned apple pie filling, but not applesauce -- these are baking apples and they're too dense to make good applesauce. I pulled out the summer vegetable plants and dug fresh compost into the planting beds, so now I'm waiting for it to be a little cooler before I plant the seeds (lettuce, spinach, chard, beets, snow peas, carrots, and onions), plus I already put in the potatoes and garlic I'm growing from potatoes and garlic cloves that I sprouted in the windowsill. I'm also picking lots of strawberries from plants I grow in the semi-shade of a pitiful looking juniper, though most don't make it into the house before I eat them.

Politics. I agreed to help a former student run for city council, and soon thereafter remembered why I don't get involved in politics. I hate phone banking and precinct walking, and dealing with some of the present city council members makes my patience and my internal censor disappear. I can deal with over-excited teenagers just fine; it's adults who drive me nuts.

Oooh! I like this thread! I can secretly catch up with everyone's lives while pretending I've been here all along. *inset evil giggle*

Lovely to hear about babies walking and kids and teachers going off to school again! September is always so exciting! Sorry to hear that some of you aren't having the best of times right now & I hope it turns around soon for you all!

I'm only 192 days away from graduating college with an advanced diploma in biotechnology, so basically (aside from this lovely long weekend for Canadian Thanksgiving), I'll probably just check in with you all again in a 192 days...

Congratulations, Mrs. L! What great news!

MrsLuthor - So awesome to hear that! Congrats!

Congratulations Mrs. Luthor!