I have never made any secret of the fact that I generally love where I live. By and large. For the most part.

Every place has its benefits and shortfalls, and my place is no exception.

Benefit: I am surrounded by trees and hills. My nearest neighbor is a solid three- to five-minute walk away.

Shortfall: I have to drive a minimum of 30 minutes (often closer to 45) to reach anything… including cell service.

That has been mitigated somewhat by the acquisition of Starlink. But my recent project only cut the obstructions by about half. You’ll probably see a post in the semi-near future detailing the “fun” of replacing my 4″x4″ post with a 40-foot telescoping tower.

Another shortfall is the unreliability of the power grid. We experience multiple outages throughout the year, and a substantial majority of them land squarely at the feet–or most often, roots–of Mother Nature.

Take tonight for example.

I was typing away, happy as a clam as I worked toward my daily word count goal. When all of a sudden, blip! The lights went off, and my computer lost its mind.

I use a MacBook as my primary computer, and I usually have it on a stand with the lid closed. So when the power blips–like tonight–it tends to get a little lost trying to decide whether it should go into sleep mode or keep running or who knows what. So far, it has consistently just shut down, like a regular desktop without a battery.

I’m going to be working on my setup over the coming days/weeks to rectify that, but for the moment, it’s something to be aware of.

Now… the good news is that I didn’t lose any writing. All the software I use autosaves–including Excel where I do my writing log.

But it’s still frustrating as hell.

I think the culprit is the docking station / port replicator that also provides 60W of power over its connection. I’ve been wanting to swap that out with an actual Thunderbolt 4 Hub for a while now, and this may be the perfect time to do that.

Anywho…

Given all the chasing around with the generator and other frustrations, I’m going to call it for the night in terms of writing. I didn’t hit my goal of meeting yesterday’s word count, but I did make a very respectable showing.

Here’s the screenshot:

Once again, let me save everyone’s eyes… including my own.

This evening, I wrote a total of 4,342 words across 2 hours and 38 minutes. I averaged 1,648.86 words per hour.

Multiplying the average words per hour by 1.5, we have an estimated additional 2,473 words, which would’ve had me at a total of 6,815 words for the day. For my goals and desires, amost 7,000 words is far better than almost 4,500 words… but almost 4,500 words in a day is no slouch, either.

I still want to try to make up the 3,500 words that I missed today when I start writing tomorrow. I think I can, but like the master said, “Do or do not. There is no try.”

To really up my daily word counts, I’d need to either spend more hours in the chair (which I’m training myself up to do) or learn dictation… which I’d love to do. For right now, though, I’m still at that stage where my mind seems to go blank when I hit the ‘record’ button.

Yes, Nuance’s Dragon speech recognition software doesn’t have a ‘record’ button, but I’d like to start by just recording me telling a story into my phone or digital recorder and then using Dragon to transcribe it.

Either way, my mind just goes blank right now, and I need to train myself past that.

Except for the next ten or eleven days, I’m working toward finishing Tempus. I know beyond any doubt I can finish it by typing, so that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll struggle through learning dictation when I’m under less of a time crunch…

Or when I care more than I do right now…

Either one. I’m not picky.