The good, the bad, and the just plain weird

In no particular order:

My email is a bit better. I haven't caught up on responding to people yet, but I'm only getting each individual email one time, as opposed to four or five.

However, Entourage is now asking me to sign in every time I push "Send & Receive," something it's never done before. I didn't even know I had a password. Which is okay, since it doesn't care whether I type it in or not. It'll give me the mail either way. It just wants to say hello, I guess.

Also, it's not real hung up on that whole chronological order thing. My hypothesis is that my server's been watching too many science fiction programs and has delusionally decided that it's a being from another dimension that doesn't have to be trapped by mere human definitions of past, present, and future. At any rate, all my mail is thrown at me in no particular order. If something came at seven this morning, it may have to wait in line behind something sent at one this afternoon. My arriving mail used to line up as neatly as the kids at Madeline's boarding school; now letters tumble down like blocks in a bad round of Tetris. But overall, this particular shade of insanity is an improvement.

Speaking of email, I just read a posting on my statewide support loop saying that the reason the poster didn't care for a particular magazine (not mine) was that most of the articles seemed to be written by the same woman. She didn't even say they were bad articles. Just sharing an author was a bad thing in and of itself. So now of course I'm feeling even more insecure about my own publication. Which is good, 'cause I was only having three or four fits of bitterness and self-loathing a day until I read that. Now I have to decide if it's better to lie to my sweet readers and start using my creative powers to come up with pen names for half my own articles ("Making Park Days Fun, by Crayola Spatterstick"), or if I should just wait until I have lots and lots of articles by other people before I throw another issue together, and not write the articles I do feel like writing because I don't want the magazine to become known as "It's All About Me, People!"

Speaking of waiting on issues, this particular issue may be a few minutes late. The computer we use for the desktop publishing aspect of things just silently died.

I've been having a bad week of it healthwise, and my bedroom is silently filling with dust. And I haven't been very silent about how guilty and horrifyingly slovenly I'm feeling about that. So when my husband came home yesterday after a day out with our son and asked if I'd cleaned, I said wretchedly that no, as a matter of fact, I was still the same slattern he'd left that morning.

"Because my computer won't turn on," he said in a milder tone than I've ever used to announce that I'm out of my favorite tea. "I was just wondering if you'd dusted or something."

Here's how awful I am. I do sometimes in the course of cleaning inadvertently hit switches, push buttons, and move the weird little thing that lives under the screen just a little to the left and then all of a sudden the computer can't understand English. And so when my husband announced that he'd tried everything (and believe me, he knows everything to try) and he was going to have to call the $$$ repair people, my internal response was, "Thank Cthulhu I didn't clean today."

I felt an even stronger version of that this morning when, after speaking to the repair people, my husband told me that they'd be by as soon as they could, and he might want to "have another computer on hand, just in case." I had no idea what he was talking about until he explained that yes, they meant that they might not be able to fix this one and so we should buy a new one and keep the receipt until we find out for sure whether the old one is past help.

So: it's looking as if we'll be lucky to get through this at a cost of only about $500 (which we also should have had on hand, just in case), and still I'm stuck on "Oh my HELL, I am so glad I didn't clean that bedroom."

Because if I had dusted and vacuumed and generally caused a domestic disturbance, and the computer had done a Little Nell that very day, it wouldn't have mattered if my husband had sworn on a stack of Buffy DVDs that I didn't make it happen. I would have gone screamingly insane, convinced that I killed the computer. Worse, no matter how much he swore to the contrary, I'd be convinced that some little tiny part of my husband's mind believed that I was the culprit.

So the lesson for today is: don't do any cleaning, no matter how badly it needs doing. At the very least, don't clean any rooms in which something valuable (family heirlooms, computers, children, pets) lives. Trick somebody else into doing it. That way if anything awful happens, you've got somebody else to take the fall.

So this issue may be a bit late. But the next one will be early, because it's looking as if we're going to go bimonthly. Like, now.

Yup. It just happened. Even before the computer disaster, it was becoming time.

It'll be better for everyone. Subscribers won't have so long a wait between issues, so people like the lovely little honeyblossom who's received the last three issues right when they came out will have less of an excuse for telling me in rhymes-with-itchy tones that they have felt robbed from day one of their subscription because they paid their money and "got a couple of issues eventually." I do call the magazine a QUARTERLY all over the place, but that snuggly teddy bear can't be the only one who feels that there's a huge gap between one issue and the next. So now the waiting period will be shorter.

It'll be better for people who want to buy just one issue to see if they want to subscribe, because we'll be able to bring the per-issue cost down.

It'll be better for me, because I'll have a steadier working pace. And the magazine will be better, because although we're not exactly gearing up to go weekly, we'll be able to address current homeschooling issues in a slightly more timely manner.

We're working out how to make sure that everyone gets what they paid for.  Probably a lot of subscribers are in for some free issues.
As soon as I have it all straight, you'll be hearing from me.

And now I have to dive back into the chaos and admire all the dust on my bedroom bookshelves as I look for official-sounding author names to paste on my own articles.

Keeping you posted...

I’m currently wrestling with a very big glitch, if that’s what you’d call it, with my email. It’s been pretty bad for the past several days, but this morning I started getting every message four or five times. What’s lovely is that I’m on an activist loop regarding the bad news out of the UK, and it tends to be pretty high volume anyway — a couple of hundred messages a day at least. Multiply that by four (or five), plus all the traffic on my other loops and the occasional friend sending a message I’d actually like to read, and you’ll understand all that screaming you’re hearing from the direction of the west coast. Plus I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be getting a magazine out or something. Anyway, I’ll post again as soon as I get things straightened out. Thanks for bearing with me.