Northern dreaming

Okay, done. Hopefully well enough that the end result is readable, this is the first time I have tried to put a whole novel on the program. It should be available in a day or two at most.

Well, one can always tweak it afterwards. Have to say this is one of the aspects I love about that system. I did my best, but since I have to do all by myself – I just don’t plain have the money to use any of the editing or other services available, no matter how cheap some of them are, right now – and I’m not exactly superwoman here it’s probably inevitable there will be at least a few glitches somewhere no matter how many times I read the story through (and if not the story itself, then there is the imobi conversion…). Hopefully I’ll find them sooner rather than later (help appreciated, so if you buy the novel and find editing or any other problems with the file, please tell).

First thing I will be changing is going to be the cover. I’m still not fully recovered from the problems I have been having with my dominant hand, it’s getting better but I still have some slight problems holding it steady when I try to do any more detailed work with a brush or a pencil, so the cover I used for now is a simple photo of a stone arch, an entrance into someplace dark. I have a painting half done, hopefully I will manage the detailed stuff in the next weeks and can then change that cover, I just didn’t feel like waiting more for the cover since I’m not completely certain I will be rid of that problem, well enough, by that time.

It’s a repetitive strain injury, the reason is my work, and since I can’t quit working in order to wait for it to go away, well, the cortisone injections helped, but after that I have still been needing some physical therapy help, strengthening exercises plus trying to figure out better ergonomics at work. I have had similar problems about three times before – once the cortisone was enough, other time needed a bit more work (mostly physical therapy) and for one, carpal tunnel syndrome, I needed surgery, both wrists. I rather hope this will be like that second time, since by now it’s obvious the cortisone wasn’t quite enough. It has been getting better, but I got a couple of setbacks on mornings when there were more papers than usually. My ‘day job’ is that of a paper carrier, and right now I have two routes I do from a car – this includes taking the newspaper from my left with my left hand, transferring it to my right and then putting them into the mail boxes with my right, most without getting out of the car. The problem is with my left hand – I’m a southpaw – I have to bend it kind of backwards in order to be able to pick the newspaper from the left seat – yep, I use a company car and those cars have the driver’s side on the ‘wrong’ side – and that may be the main problem. Other part may be how much I need to turn the wheel every morning, I drive next to the mail boxes standing on the roadside, and do hell of a lot of backing up and turning this way and that way and then back to the main road only to back up again on the next side road… well, I’m getting very good as a driver, at least as long as we are talking about handling a car in tight places but with no traffic to speak of since I do those routes between midnight and sunrise. I used to do routes which were mostly high apartment buildings but my knees can’t quite handle all the stairs anymore, and I was lucky enough to get these car routes, but it seems I’m going to need some adjusting here.

The joys of having an unconventional sleeping schedule – I work between two and six in the morning, so usually I sleep from about six or seven in the morning until about noon, then usually get a nap of two to four hours around midnight before going to work.

Unfortunately that means that I sleep most – or should, anyway – during those hours when repairs are done, when they need doing in the apartments of the apartment building I live in. Like several days last week. No point complaining, of course, since the drilling and hammering and more unidentifiable noises happened exactly when they are supposed to happen. Well, right now I only have that night job so not that big a problem, plenty of hours still left when I can sleep. You might think. Problem being that my kind of sleeping schedule is hard to keep even without distractions, so one f*cked up day can mean a week or two before I can get back to it. Humans are meant to sleep when it’s dark, not after the sun has risen. Right now I get sleepy a bit after noon, and if I succumb and go to bed and don’t use the alarm I will wake up around eight or nine in the evening. Unfortunately, from past experiences, the best way to get back to my normal schedule probably is to just keep pushing going to bed a two or three hours forward every day until I’m where I am again sleeping something like that four hours before work, and will then be sleepy enough to get to sleep right after work again.

Interesting part is of course how safe I am for driving even with my normal schedule. I have a couple of morning newspaper routes, and I do the routes with a company car (driver sits on the right side since that makes it easier to drop the newspapers, or, for the postal carriers who use the same cars the daily post, right from the opened window into the mailboxes – the idea is that on the countryside we are supposed to be able to do the whole route without having to get out of the car once, which of course never works quite that way in practice, especially during the winters :)). I do have to use my own to get where the company car is since the distance from my home is 12 kilometers, and buses don’t go at the time when I start the work. So, lots of driving between sleeping. Very good there is hardly any traffic at that time of the night. I haven’t had an actual accident yet, but I have to admit I have smashed the driver’s side mirror on the work car a couple of times (on the wrong side, remember, and I need to get close to those boxes in order to be able to get the newspaper in without getting out of the car, and some of those boxes are high enough that the damn mirror will hit them if I get just a liitle bit too close). I am not perhaps completely alert when I’m working.

Oh, the mirror hasn’t been completely totaled yet. Even if the person who drives the car during the day seems to keep doing the same thing to it. It’s just gotten loose enough that now even a small hit means the parts fall apart. Or driving over a big bump in the road. There are several rubber bands around the thing which sort of hold it together, but if we forget to replace the ones that break, yep, then things start to fall off.

Anyway, this week was mostly eaten by the disturbed sleep schedule, I didn’t get much done, but I’m getting things together again (awake enough in the mornings to paint right now) so should get new material up tomorrow or day or two after, latest.