In the end I went to bed too late the night before but I did my complete morning routine including ten distracted minutes of working on the manuscript. My blood pressure is still a bit high, harumph.
Husband and I talked over breakfast and I worked on the new pair of socks. There was the usual internet rounds, some tidying of the kitchen and then I biked to the supermarket while my husband went on a short run.
But before that I did some research about computer keyboards and typing gloves. And ordered some. And then realized that I don’t have anything to wear to a wedding in four weeks, and also don’t have a summer dress that fits me so I spontaneously decided to sew one and ordered fabric.
Grocery shopping went pretty smoothly and I managed to avoid not only the streams of students leaving on my way but also most of the usual senior shoppers. It’s a bit funny that my usual daily schedule is so similar to that of people in retirement. And that while I continue working.
Husband managed to time making lunch perfectly this time, everything was already in the oven when I came back with the groceries and I could unpack and put the away in peace. Hurray!
Lunch was delicious:
And afterwards I ate a whole roll of Marabou chocolate for dessert. Ahem.
I started teaching a little later than most days but then taught all the way through past 7. At which point I was totally done. I ate dinner, read a bit (I’m almost finished with „Radiance“ and will read book 2 right after that.) and then watched a video about the psychological reasons for buying books one doesn’t read. I won’t link it here, it wasn’t very good.
To me that huge library of unread books is equal parts good intentions and FOMO. Every time I buy a book I am totally looking forward to reading it and think about how lovely it will be. Or helpful. Or that it is the next book in a series I enjoy. Or a book by a favorite author. And a part of me, the one that didn’t have money for books in the past, is afraid if I don’t snatch the book up now it will be gone. Which is a not irrational fear with traditional publishing. You want to buy book 3 in a series that came out ten years ago? Pity. But that is changing, of course.
Let’s see. So far this month – like two weeks in – I pre-ordered two books from favorite authors, „Copper Script“ by KJ Charles and „A Suitable Stray“ by R. Cooper. The last one is a book in a series I really liked. Well, I liked book 1 and 2, I bought book 3 but haven’t read it yet. I’m sure I’ll love those two as well, when I am in the right mood for those stories again. Both those preorders are due in May.
I also bought a novella by R.Cooper and two books of Sherlock Holmes stories in Chinese. Those two are graded readers and are just about easy enough for me to read. (Never mind that I already have two more of these books half-read already. But I was so elated I could understand most of one of them that I bought two more because I had this vision of myself reading some Chinese every day.)
I downloaded seven books that were free because six of them are comparable to the one I am about to publish and they looked interesting. The seventh one is a cozy mystery by a friend.
I bought „The Seven Day Stress Prescription“ by Elissa Epel because, well, stress and I could really need some help with that, and also it was only 3.99. I read the first few pages so far.
I bought book 2 and 3 of the „Wraith Kings“ series because Ilona Andrews recommended Grace Draven and the series and I am enjoying book 1 tremendously.
And that’s it for books I bought since May 1st.
If I don’t count the free books (and I stopped tracking those a while ago) that makes six books, seven if I count the one that will come out at the end of the month. So far I finished reading – three, four if you count „Radiance“ which I might as well do because I’m only three pages away from the end.
Well.
At least these days I buy mostly electronic books so while they clutter my ebook reader they don’t really clutter my house. I am not ruining myself even though spending less money on books might be a good thing. I will continue monitoring the whole thing and it will be alright.
And as I was opening my ebook reader to see how many pages I had left in the book I saw that every single book on there was blank and I got an error message that the item had been removed and was unavailable for download. I also saw that the device was telling me it had only 0.48 MB of storage when in fact that number should have been around 32 GB.
I restarted the thing several times, de-registered, re-registered, did a factory reset and all in all spent a fabulous long evening trying to deal with the issue. A quick internet search told me I was not alone, apparently Amazon is aware of the issue and working on it. Just wonderful!
So basically my whole evening imploded because of this issue. Meh.
Interestingly, when I decided to give up for the day and borrow my husband’s ebook reader, found that one with a battery almost dead and looked for another charger, my own gave signs of life again. I had to set it up again from scratch but at least it was working again. Phew.
Leave a Reply