Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 22

Habit Tracking Fail

I blogged back in June about these cool habit trackers I found. I wasn't planning to use the immediately, but had a plan for the fall. Well, guess what? It's fall.

I'd already done a test run on the circle habit tracker and knew I didn't care for it, so when the time came to begin, I printed out a 100 Day Habit Tracker with circles that went across the page in rows.

I created categories and color coded each of them with a mid-liner. I was ready to go!

This lasted eight days. Not because I stopped doing the habit I was trying to track. I've been reasonably consistent with that. No, it's the habit tracker itself that became annoying. I had it printed on a single sheet of paper, and each time I wanted to mark off a day, I had to look for it, find the mid-liners, and then color in the circle.

It would be so much better, I thought, if this was in my planner and not loose.

Except I use a daily planner.

Previously, I'd tried putting a monthly habit tracker on the monthly calendar page to track, but I forgot it was there. Out of sight, out of mind.

Habit tracking on a daily page is literally just adding the item to the to-do list section. No mid-liners and fun colors required. And it defeats the purpose of seeing all those circles fabulously filled with colors. And with this sinking in, I abandoned the tracking plan.

Adventures in Cleaning

My shower head has been driving me crazy. Tiny streams from some nozzles. Some nozzles having no water. Other nozzles spraying water sideways.

All my online searches suggested these issues were caused by the need to clean the shower head. The most frequent method was to put white vinegar in a baggie and fasten the bag around the shower head, letting it soak in the vinegar for...some sites said 1-2 hours. Some said 4-6 hours.

On Saturday, I decided to tackle this project. How hard can it be to put a baggie around the shower head?

I bet you can tell by this question that it's harder than it might appear. You would be correct.

It started out easily enough. I grabbed a quart baggie and the jug of white vinegar and headed for the bathroom. I hit a snag immediately. I couldn't reach the shower head.

Step ladder to the rescue. Almost as soon as I had the two-step ladder in place, my shower head decided to release water it was holding. It landed directly on the top step of the ladder. When I tipped it to get rid of the water, some of it went on the first step--the one I would be standing on to attach the baggie.

Undaunted, but irritated, I filled the baggie 3/4 of the way with the vinegar, clutched it with one hand, and climbed to the first step of the ladder.

Two new problems immediately became apparent. 1. I should have grabbed a bigger baggie. The quart size was a little small. It would go around the shower head, but required careful manipulation. 2. Filling the baggie 3/4 of the way was too much vinegar.

The shower head immediately displaced large quantities of vinegar--all over me. Shirt, pants, and shoes got a drenching. I had to change clothes and shoes.

The ladder got a second drenching.

In the video I watched, they used a rubber band to attach their baggie. I went with a large twist tie. As I fastened the bag in place, I kept imagining the twist tie coming loose and the entire bag hitting the floor...or maybe me and the ladder. I twisted and twisted and twisted.

Then I let it sit for four hours. I was a little worried since the shower head seemed to only be into the vinegar a little bit, but maybe it would be enough.

Guess what? It wasn't. There was no improvement at all. I'll have to try again with a bigger baggie.

The Name Game Part 1000

I blogged last week about new characters. Well, dang it, one of the heroes won't settle on a name. Baggs. You met him in Wicked Persuasion. The new medic who replaced Griff on the team.

I've tried out maybe a dozen real first names with Baggs, but he hasn't liked any of them.

Not any of them.

I think--THINK--that it ends in -er. I'm not willing to bet on that because none of those names have stuck.

This isn't the first time I've had a character do this kind of thing to me. I had a heroine who literally had me going through every baby name book I own and every baby name website before we found her name. It's just been a while since a character has made me work this hard.

I'm torn between determination to learn his name, damn the torpedoes, and just letting it be since I don't need his real first name right now and he'll eventually tell me.

It's just that I have a hard time waiting.

Trade In Ambivalence

I'm sort of feeling ambivalent.

My phone is nearly four years old. My battery life isn't what it once was and I'm charging a lot more often. And the memory... Well, I've been butting up against the memory issue for years now.

It's my fault. Not because I have a ton of pictures on there (although I probably do need to prune them), but because of all the podcasts I've downloaded, but not listened to yet. My podcast app is always number one on the list of storage users. And this is after I off-loaded all the podcasts from one of the writing podcasts I listen to.

I nearly upgraded last fall, but while I was dithering, the phone I wanted sold out and had a delivery date farther into the future than I liked. And then the roof needed some work and I used the phone money to fix that.

This year I did it, though. I ordered a new phone with 4 times as much memory as I have right now. Okay, so it was the baseline memory for the phone and not an add on. It's still 4x more than what I have now even if it is standard.

And this is where the ambivalence comes in.

This is my first personal smart phone. I ordered it at the start of the pandemic because the company was talking about taking away everyone's business cell phones for cost savings and I'd become too reliant on the thing. That's when I finally jumped in and ordered my own.

I tried to order white because all my work phones were black, but white was sold out. I wasn't that fussy about the color--I just needed a phone--and I ordered the yellow. I actually ended up really loving the yellow. It's a very pretty shade and I had a clear case, so I learned to love it.

This phone and I went through the pandemic together. Every bit of it.

Yes, I'm really excited to get a new, faster phone with a fresh battery and so much more storage, but I also feel sad about trading in my yellow phone. I never felt this way about the two business phones I sent back when I was upgraded at work.

As I write this, my phone is charging. Again. I know it's time, but yeah, feeling torn between yeah, new and shiny! and oh, no, I have to send away my phone.

Introductions

I've been notebooking on Wicked Suspicion, the next book up in the Paladin League series. While I was working on this, a couple members of the team introduced themselves.

Well, sort of.

If you read Wicked Persuasion (released this August!), you met one of them already. Baggs, the new medic on the team. He replaced Griff since he's in medical school now and no longer on the team.

I thought the second guy was Mazz, who made an appearance in Finn and Zo's book, but that wasn't who he was. Instead, this guy is someone who has been undercover in all the previous books and I never met him before. I like meeting new characters, so this was fun.

Not so fun was the name game which followed.

If you've followed my blog for a while, you know that I don't get to name my characters. They pick their own names. If I'm lucky, they'll actually tell me what it is, like Mika did in Through a Crimson Veil.

I'm rarely that lucky. The name game usually involves me searching baby name websites until the character says "that's me!"

Sometimes it's quick.

The new guy who wasn't Mazz, found his name easily and we were good to go. The problem was Baggs. I thought he picked his name fast and effortlessly, but it didn't sit right and I reluctantly had to admit it was wrong. The only clue I had was I was pretty sure his first name was something Irish.

Then began a lengthy search across multiple sites. I tried out different names, wanting to see if he responded to them or not. I think--think--I have his name now. At least he talked to me when I used it and I didn't have a whole lot of crickets chirping. I'm not prepared, though, to say I'm 100% sure it's really his name. Not yet.

By the way, Case and Nyx were both easy name characters. Neither of them gave me the name, but Nyx was close enough to be nearly effortless. Case and I had a spelling issue to work out with his name, but that resolved itself quickly, too, and we were good to go.

Now they just need to share some more information. Everything I'm getting from them is deep, deep into the book. I'm making notes, but I need them to share the beginning.

Desk Chair Project: Setbacks!

I thought I would have part 2 of the desk chair reupholstery project ready to post, however, there were setbacks. Plural.

The first issue arose with threading wire through the channel I created at the edge of the new cover.

My chair does not have the fabric stapled to the underside. There are metal tabs it hooks into and threading the channel is important to keeping the cover in place.

The old cover had wire threaded through its channel. I didn't have any wire, so I thought I'd use the old wire. If I gathered up the extra material, it should work fine even with the new cover being larger to accommodate the additional cushion.

Nope, that didn't work.

The wire was difficult to thread through the channel, and once I ran out of slack, the thing wouldn't budge. I decided that I could substitute twine instead of wire, but the wire was now stuck because the end had frayed and was sticking through the fabric.

Seam ripper time--except the thread was black and the fabric is nearly black with flecks and dashes, making the thread close to invisible. I heard they make seam rippers with lights and magnifiers so I ordered one of them. As it turned out, I didn't need the magnification at all, what I needed was the LED lighting. I got the seam open, fixed the wire, and then tugged it free.

After the ordeal of threading the wire, I feared the worst with the twine, but it went in relatively easily. Time to put it on the chair!

Here is where bitter disappointment struck.

I used the old cover as a template and then I made the new cover six inches larger, thinking that would be more than enough to cover the new foam I'd added.

I was wrong.

While I managed to have enough in front, the rear and the sides toward the back didn't come close to reaching the metal tabs. Not even squishing the foam and pulling with my other hand got the fabric to the tabs.

I had a second problem. I assumed I'd be able to pull the string, gather up the fabric, and fasten it below. The string wouldn't pull enough fabric in. I was only able to gather it near where it entered/exited the channel I'd sewn.

The only thing I can think to do is cut a strip of fabric and sew it to the piece I already made. I'll also have to add multiple twine egress so that I can gather the fabric in sections.

I'm disheartened and temporarily putting this project on hold.

Desk Chair Recovery: Part One

Labor Day weekend was go weekend for reupholstering my desk chair. I've blogged previously about needing to add more foam to this old chair and the cover that was on the chair no longer fitting.

I had the fabric, I had my upholstery thread and needles, and I had advice from a woman I work with who actually took upholstery classes and redid more complex furniture than a desk chair. I steeled my nerves and set out to get it done.

I thought I had too much fabric and I should have ordered less, but after I laid out the old cover, drew a chalk line around it, and then drew a second chalk line about 6 inches out, I realized I did not have too much fabric. It's a good thing I ordered two yards.

I originally was going to use my rotary cutter, but when I saw how the fabric behaved to simply being unrolled, I opted for pinking shears instead to avoid fraying. I think this was the right decision and I'm happy I thought of it. I'm a new sewist and I've never done anything with upholstery fabrics before, so it was a learning experience.

I had a huge box of 100 clips. I used almost every one of them to clip around the circle of fabric before sewing. Curves are difficult for me to sew still and this massive thing is all curves.

I dug out the sewing machine and realized it had been so long since I'd used it that I'd forgotten how to wind the bobbin. I had to pull out the instruction book and curse my way through a few tries to get everything ready to go.

This seam is supposed to be wide enough to thread a wire through like I had on the previous chair cover. Now I need to execute this. Time to sew.

I didn't worry about top stitching because this part will be underneath the chair and no one will ever see it and it's easier for me to sew with the seam up than invisible to me. The woman at work who knows what she's doing said to go around twice, so I did. The second time was easier and I picked up the little areas where I missed fabric the first time.

Here's the fabric side of the seam. Now all I have to do is string the wire through and put it on the chair. It should be a piece of cake!

Spoiler alert: It was not a piece of cake. I needed to recover from this before I could revisit it in a blog post, hence the delay. Stayed tuned for Part Two of my chair adventures.

Review: Top Gun Maverick

I'll try not to give spoilers, but the movie has been out for a minute.

Over the weekend, I felt like watching a movie. Usually what happens is I go to Prime or Netflix, scroll around endlessly, give up, and watch something I own or watch the backlog of TV shows I have on the DVR. This time, that didn't happen.

Amazon had Top Gun: Maverick available for Prime members, which means free to watch! It took minutes to find and start the movie.

Top Gun: Maverick is the sequel to Top Gun which came out sometime in the 1980s. Sorry, too lazy to do a search for the info. Both movies star Tom Cruise. I will admit that I am not a huge Cruise fan and tend to avoid his movies, but I'd heard good things about the sequel and I did like Top Gun, so I decided to take a chance.

Pete Mitchell (Cruise) is a test pilot in the Navy when he receives orders to return to Top Gun and train a group of pilots on a difficult mission, one that only he has the skills to teach. Among the young pilots is the son of his friend Goose, who died during Top Gun training in the original movie. He's not a fan of Captain Mitchell.

There's also a side plot about a former lover he left behind at Top Gun--not the scientist from the original movie. She's never explained and it's never explained when or how he met the new woman.

Overall, I liked this movie. I would have preferred a little more focus on the younger pilots and a little less on Cruise's character, but I already admitted I'm not a fan of his. Maverick flew circles around the kids the entire movie and I'm not sure they ever bested him in any exercise, which also gave it a flavor of being all about Cruise and only Cruise.

That being said, it was exciting! The climax had me on the edge of my seat and I was like whew! when the climax ended. I feel like the scenes after the final climax needed a little more wrap up, especially the romance between Maverick and the bar owner, but that part almost felt thrown in to the movie anyway, so I'm not calling it a major flaw.

I'm giving it 4/5 stars. It was an awesome way to spend a couple of hours.

Themes and Brands

I was listening to a publishing podcast about branding while I was driving home from work this week. The branding conversation usually leaves me feeling overwhelmed because there's just so much there.

And the overwhelm frustrates me because I was an advertising copywriting major in college. This should be the kind of thing I vibe on and yet it's not. Not anymore.

But I was thinking about the types of books I write regardless of subgenre. As in I think all my books have this whether they're romantic suspense, paranormal romance, or science fiction romance. There were two things I came up with:

1. While my stories have a foot in reality, they're a little over the top.

My favorite movies are Speed, The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, and The Terminator. They all have action, adventure, and romance. And they all also require the suspension of disbelief. All fiction calls for this, but these movies need a bit more. This is what I like to watch. This is what I like to write. So if a reader is looking for gritty realism, I'm probably not their author.

2. My heroes and heroines always work together even if they don't necessarily get along with each other. At least at first.

This was never something I wrote intentionally, but I noticed it as a pattern in my writing a few stories in. For example, Wicked Salvation. Griff and Cat do not like each other at the start. They might be attracted to each other, but if she didn't need his help, there is no way she'd be hanging out with him.

Same for Griff, but for other reasons. He has never been able to walk away from a woman in need of assistance. He wants to walk away from Cat. She irritates the hell out of him, no matter how much he wants to sleep with her. But if she's hellbent on her ruby rescue plan, he can't let her do it alone because he knows how much danger she's in.

Another piece of them working together is that they learn to like each other before they fall in love. Again, not something I deliberately set out to do, but in hindsight, yes, it's important for a relationship for the couple to like each other, so it works for me.

But while I have these two things that cross my books, how does this build a brand? I don't know.

Weirdness and Bling

I have a crazy amount of apps that count my steps. Four of them. What's even crazier is that at the end of the day, none of them agree with each other. Literally, no two are alike.

A couple of them show ads. :-( I don't like this, but I don't look at them often enough to pay to get rid of them. One of them, though, showed an ad that startled me. It was for drug rehab.

Do enough people who use fitness trackers have a drug problem to make this advertising provide a solid Return On Investment (ROI) or is this one of those things where the advertiser just buys space and an aggregator shifts it out to whatever apps it thinks are best? I have no idea, but it wasn't an advertiser I expected to see.

I've been doing shorter lengths for the virtual races because there's one through the Amazon rainforest that I bought and that one is long. Okay, there are two versions. One is sort of long and one is really long, designed for cyclists and marathon runners, but I'm planning to do the really long route because I want to see as much of the Amazon as possible.

But because this race will take most of a year to complete, I'm trying to finish all my other races first. I'm doing them shortest to longest. I have a few more left to go before I can tackle the Amazon.

I finished London, though, and I finished Conquer 2023. Conquer 2023 allows you to set your own distance--I picked 1300 KM--and I ran it concurrently with my other races, so it wasn't an actual race. You know I like my race bling!