So I arrive at home last night, knowing I would have to fix supper, but I decided to sit a few minutes before starting it. I sat in my reading chair, leaned back, put my arms behind my head, and realized the air blowing on my arms from the AC duct was not as cold as it ought to be. I checked the thermostat/thermometer—it was 82 degrees with the thermostat set on 77. Some was amiss.
The inside air handling unit was working, but the outside compressor wasn’t. I checked everything I knew to check, and couldn’t find the problem. So I shut it off, we turned on some fans, I cooked supper, we ate, I went out and looked for ripe blackberries (finding none, the bushes nearest the house being either past prime or still red), and I headed to The Dungeon, with its coolness and Internet.
The coolness was nice, but the Internet was down. A call to Cox resulted in the message, “I see there’s a service outage in your area; technicians have been dispatched.” So, we went to The Dungeon, but watched an episode of Battlestar Gallactica instead. With an interruption for a long phone call, that brought us to 10:30 PM. By then the Internet was back, but that left too few hours to do much except check e-mail. No real time to do the writing tasks I had planned for the evening.
Which was too bad. I had a lengthy writing to-do list. I was going to go to the old computer, just back from the shop, and back-up recent work by e-mailing them to myself. Then I was going to go to the new computer and download those items (I’ve never been able to set up our home network) so I’d have them in three places, or five if you include the mail server and my hard drive at work. I was also going to begin the process of uploading my two e-books to SmashWords, which includes some exacting formatting. Couldn’t do the things I wanted to do, so didn’t do the others.
Today is looking better. The AC dude will be there sometime today, maybe before noon. The Internet was restored. Tonight looks to be an evening of accomplishment. As I’ve written before, however, it seems that whenever I begin to ratchet up my writing activities, adversity pays a visit. I went to the writing conference, and a two week dry time followed. I pull through that, and can’t do what I planned to do on the computer. I have a ton of personal items to attend to.
Last night I probably should have done some kind of writing on the computer or in manuscript. I could have worked on the next chapter of In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, and have merged the files later. I could have worked on part of a subject that came to me over the last few days for inclusion in The Candy Store Generation, and merged the files later. I could have worked on the proposals for the John Wesley writing series and the genealogy article series, both of which have finally started to come together in my mind and are about ready for making tangible. But that wasn’t what I’d planned to do last night, and I just didn’t feel like changing my plans. Oh stubborn me.
Somehow I’ve got to find a way through adversity to productivity. To embrace flexibility a little more. To have some back-up tasks planned for those times when it just doesn’t work out to work on the urgent or the necessary. Hopefully I’ll get there.