write in my journal daily for a year

but I’ve got another one going now. I was up to nearly half a year when I screwed up and forgot to write for a day. Now I’ve got another streak of about a month and a half going, and I try to make it a habit to write every morning first thing when I get up. We’ll see if I can make it to the end of October next year, though…

Today I completed my 106th straight day of writing on 750words.com every morning. Though a lot of it has just been drivel about how my days have been going and all the things I’d like to do which I haven’t done, I have managed to write over 136,000 words in that three and a half month period. That’s pretty much the equivalent of writing a full length novel and another novella besides. So, if I could manage to get my writing a little more organized and pointing in one direction, maybe I can even become a writer…

Thanks in large part to the 750Words.com website, I’ve been getting up every morning and spending twenty minutes to half an hour typing away. I haven’t missed a day since I joined the website, I’ve completed the March and April monthly challenges, and typing every morning has become just sort of a little ritual I do. Another 280 days, and I can mark this one as done, then set up the goal to write every day for two years…

For a little while, I’ve been seeing various entries from writers about the website called 750Words.com, and its various challenges and such. So I went ahead and joined up yesterday. The goal of the website is to get people to write the so-called “morning pages,” three pages of free-form, unedited writing that most people usually write in the mornings to sort of get their juices flowing and get the distracting crap out of their heads and down onto paper. In this case, of course, it’s done with a computer screen, but it’s still basically the same kind of deal. They have little challenges and point scoring and such to try to keep you interested. I’ve done two days in a row now, and I guess that’s my new start on doing that full year…

So for the past couple of days, I really haven’t done much writing. I guess that’s a sign that I’m going to be starting this goal all over again, with the 24th of January being day one of the new journal year. We’ll see how far I make it this time around…

I was sort of trying to keep up with this here on 43Things for a while, but lately I’ve just been posting the stuff on my blog. I’ve made it over a hundred days a couple of times, and I’m currently at about a month, but I’m still not able to keep it going for an entire year. Maybe this will be the year…

Today was another crappy day at work. I did manage to get an hour and a half of filing done, but that’s about it. Turns out that Steven had the day off, so it was the two drivers and the new porter and me. At least I managed to get a little bit of stuff done before I got called back to the drive.

On the further downside of the day, I think I lost one of the department’s walkie-talkies in someone’s car. I wonder how much one of those costs…

And I got invited to lunch by the department managers tomorrow. I’m not sure what that’s going to be all about, but I’m guessing that it will be an ego-stroking session complimenting me on helping out on the drive. I guess we’ll see.

After we got home today, we took Ernie down to Petsmart to get some more dog food. As always, people thought he was just adorable. We also stopped at Kroger for a few things, and I waited outside with him while the girlfriend went in the store. He didn’t get a lot of direct attention there, but a number of people smiled and waved at him as they went past. He’s always a hit.

And now, because I need to get up earlier than usual for his vet appointment tomorrow, I’m going to go to bed…

It was another day of basically being a porter at work. When I got there, I thought I was going to be able to do some of my own work. One of the drivers had called in sick again, but they had Steven, the regular porter, and Raoul, the new guy, both there. So I took about half of the paperwork down to the file room and told the ladies up front to give me a call if it started backing up on the drive and I’d come back and help out.

I wound up getting about ten minutes of filing done before they called me. And for the rest of the morning, I was being a porter. When I finally got a bit of time where everything seemed to be caught up for a bit, they needed me to go take someone home. In the end, I never got back to the file room at all, except to get my thermos of coffee and bring it back to the service drive. So now I’ve got at least five days of filing backed up, and it doesn’t look all that great to get any done tomorrow.

The one nice thing is that Steven mentioned to me that he really appreciated all the help that I’ve been giving them. Not that management has really commented or anything. But at least the people in the trenches seem to notice sometimes, and that’s nice.

For the most part, it was another crap day at work. At least Steven, one of the regular porters, got there at about the same time I did today. I nevertheless spent most of the morning running my ass off trying to get cars parked and pulled up and greeting people on the drive. It’s getting pretty close to time to update the old resume and start serious fishing for new employment.

On the plus side, driving took up a fair bit of the afternoon, and they were mostly fairly easy drives. Another good thing today was that they did finally hire another porter. So for this week, we’ll still be a little understaffed, but at least it won’t be like the past four or five work days. I was thinking about possibly asking management what the odds are of my becoming a service advisor, but the more I think about it, the less good an idea it seems. I don’t know, though. It would still probably be a lot more money than what I’m making right now.

After work today, I stopped at the grocery store. I had to pick up coffee, since the last of it went into this morning’s pot. I also got sandwich stuff for lunches and a few other snack type things. Unfortunately, I forgot to get the Sunday paper while I was there. I guess I’ll hold off until next week.

Last night, I installed Dragon Naturally Speaking on the computer. The manual says that you can use a portable recorder, like the one I have, to dictate away from your computer and turn it into text later. Unfortunately, neither the manual nor the help file ever mention loading files to use for dictation, so I’m guessing that they mean you have to play back the dictation into the line-in jack of the computer and convert it that way. Which would suck, because my recorder can transfer over the recorded files in digital form much faster than it can play them back. I’d hoped I could just open them and have it do the speech-to-text conversion digitally, but I’m guessing that’s not an option. Oh well.

And now, it’s getting far too late, so it’s off to bed with me…

It’s been a long day today. We got up fairly early to take Ernie to his class. That went all right. We haven’t really done as much of the homework as we should have over the past week or so, but we got some more helpful hints and such, and I think it’ll still continue to improve.

We stopped at my storage unit on the way home and picked up some of the plywood I have there. I’m planning to use at least part of it to make a more permanent gate to keep Ernie from exploring the upstairs. Right now, we’re just using a big box, and it’s rather inconvenient to say the least.

I got a call from Tom, the drummer down in Lewisville. He had to cancel out yesterday, but he called and I drove down to his place to jam a bit today. Unfortunately it was just the two of us, and that never really makes for a great session. He’s something of a major talker, and a bit of a space cadet it seems to me, but maybe something good will come of it. We’ll have to see.

I just had to print out a pattern for the girlfriend’s mom, and I installed Dragon Naturally Speaking while I was at it, but now it’s getting way too late and I need to get to bed while I can still get a little sleep…