I lost internet and cable service early Thursday morning due to Hurricane Zeta. Those services came back Saturday afternoon. For about two-and-a-half days, I was unplugged from the world.
In the meantime, I did a little reading on the Kindle, and I cut down a tree. It was a nice little respite.
After Zeta blew through, the air got cooler, and it's predicted to remain that way. Late October finally feels like late October.
I'm not a woodworker. Just a reminder. I'm a total novice when it comes to this stuff.
Today, though, I finally got around to trying out my new chisel set. I made a practice mortise in an old piece of 4x4. I had another piece of scrap wood that functioned as my tenon.
The good new is that I actually made half-decent mortise for a beginner. The tenon piece fit snugly inside, and I think it went in to the proper depth. There was a small space on a couple of sides of the tenon where the sides of the mortise weren't flush to it, but it wasn't too bad. Overall, I'm pleased with how I did.
I did have some chunks of wood get torn out from the sides of the mortise while chiseling. I guess that's what softwood does. I don't know.
Anyway, it was a new experience, and while it looked a bit rough, it wasn't a failure. That's a win in my book.
I woke up on Saturday with a stuffy nose and what looked like a sinus infection. I decided to nip this thing in the bud, so I stayed in, didn't do anything strenuous, and drank a lot of water and Gatorade.
It might have actually worked. I usually fail at nipping illnesses in the bud, but none of the days since Saturday have been that bad. *knock on wood*
It would be nice to not be down for the count for a couple of weeks, which is what sometimes happens.
In a completely unrelated side note, I still don't like the new Blogger. It puts a single-space indentation at the start of my blog post. I have to delete that space every time. It's not enough to be a proper indentation--that takes three spaces, if I recall correctly--but it's enough to annoy me. It serves no purpose that I can fathom.
But as long as Blogger is free, I guess I can't complain too much. I still like it better than the alternatives.
I usually prefer to have a story outlined to within an inch of its life before I start writing. The reason is that, if I don't, then I tend to wander off on tangents. Before I now it, the story has morphed into something very different from what I intended. Usually that means that I've written myself into a corner. That's the main motivation for outlining: to prevent yourself from writing the story into a corner.
Right now, though, I'm living on the wild side a bit. I've got the bare bones of a story outline, but only vague stuff, not the usual detailed scenes. And I've started writing the story.
The good news is that I've got over 10k words, and I'm not in a corner yet. It's usually somewhere between 10k and 20k that "the corner" happens. So I'm cautiously optimistic.
The bad news is that I've still got lots of unknowns to tackle. But for now, I'm willing to face them head-on.
In the meantime, I'm putting words on the page. I'm doing what writers do. I'm cool with that.
The internet is full of jokes about Keith Richards, mainly aimed at his inexplicable longevity in the face of his past drug use. But there's another side to the guy, too. In addition to being a fantastic guitarist--and an underrated vocalist, too, in my humble opinion--he's a class act who exhibits lots of respect for the musicians who blazed the trail he walks.
He's not the sort of guy to normally put on a tuxedo and play a country song. He's a rocker, after all. But he'll do it for Jerry Lee Lewis, and he'll do it on short notice. That's the sort of guy Richards is.
If you buy enough Amazon Basics products--Amazon's house brand--then they'll send you a ten-percent-off coupon for your next Amazon Basics purchase. I didn't know they did this. Apparently, though, they have purchase tiers, and when you hit the next tier, you get a coupon. Pretty cool, huh?
I used my coupon to buy the Amazon Basics chisel set.
