Musings & Thoughts for Sunday, February 4, 2024, or: Weekend Update, Part the First

Late Morning/Midday/Early Afternoon, Sunday, February 4, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, there, folks. It’s a cold but sunny winter day here in my corner of New Hampshire – or, since we aren’t far from the state border, “Almost Maine.” Currently, the temperature is 30°F (-1°C) under sunny skies. With humidity at 42% and the wind blowing from the south-southwest at 1 MPH (2 Km/H), the heat index is 48°F (9°C). Today’s forecast calls for sunny conditions and a high of 37°F (3°C). Tonight, the skies will be clear. The low will be 4°F (-15°C).

Weekend Update, Part the First

My Saturday was calm and relatively uneventful. Patti’s husband Marc dropped by the house to finish assembling the two DVD towers I originally had in my Miami townhouse (a gift from my mom back in 2009, the last year before her health took a downturn). Those two media towers have followed me in my two subsequent moves. First to the Tampa area in 2016, and later to…well, here almost two months ago. They’re not fancy, but I’m fond of them because they remind me of home in South Florida, and altogether they hold about 100 DVDs.

Marc also brought in one of the boxes marked, somewhat inaccurately, “DVDs” from the garage. It contained a mix of DVDs and “regular” Blu-rays (I have two formats of Blu-ray discs, high definition 1080p discs and 4K ultra-high definition [UHD] discs). Marc filled both towers with the discs that were in that box. He also placed some of my box sets – including the Complete Series DVD collection of 24 and The Office Blu-rays – in the media center where my big 4K UHD TV set sits.

At some point in the future, I will take a day to organize my collection of movies and TV series the way I had it in Florida. I don’t want to do it now because there are still quite a lot of Blu-rays (including my Star Wars, Star Trek, James Bond, and Jurassic Park box sets, as well as much of my 4K UHD collection) still boxed up in the garage. I’d rather reorganize everything in one fell swoop rather than start now and end up fretting about the discs that I can’t easily get to.

For now, though, I’m pleased to see things moving along, and at least I have a wider array of things to watch on my 50-inch 4K UHD set.

On Writing and Storytelling: How I Spent My Day Off

I promised myself that I would not work on Reunion: Coda yesterday – a promise made easier to keep because I woke up too early in the morning, so I was tired – unless I suddenly felt inspired or couldn’t figure out what to do on one of my two days off.  I mostly stuck to my promise; I didn’t touch the main .docx file that contains the manuscript for Reunion: Coda. Not to make edits, and certainly not to add “fresh copy” to Chapter 13.

However, I did work on a song parody of a Welsh martial song, “Men of Harlech” that, once upon a time, I had practiced along with the rest of South Miami High’s Men’s Ensemble in my first semester as a singer in the school’s choral department. It’s an old song, dating from the 18^th Century, and there are several versions of it in both Welsh and English, including one written by John Barry for the 1964 film Zulu.

Anyway, I needed to write some lyrics for a parody I plan to add to the scene I’m working on (Scene Four of Goodbye, Farewell, and Adios, aka “The One About Jim’s High School Commencement”). I don’t want to say more about that; however, I will point out that writing song parodies takes time and lots of hard work, and that if I’d waited till tomorrow to write my spin on “Men of Harlech,” I’d add at least one or two hours to my Monday work schedule. So, since I wasn’t doing anything beyond playing Regiments on my computer, I wrote my “song,” which I call “Boy of Harvard.”

Will I include the entire “Men of Harlech” parody in the finished novel? Not in its present form, no. At most, I’ll just put the first two lines of the first stanza and leave it at that. But at least I got that much done yesterday, and all I have to do is keep writing Scene Four and paste the usable lines from “Boy of Harvard” at the appropriate place in the narrative.

Weekend Plans for Sunday, February 4, 2024

Even though I worry about the slow pace of progress with Reunion: Coda and want to publish the finished novel as soon as possible, I need to stay away from the manuscript and take Sunday off for rest and relaxation (R&R).  Writing is a fulfilling profession, and I love it – otherwise, I wouldn’t do it – but it’s also time-consuming, lonely, and tiring, both physically and mentally.

“Boy of Harvard” aside, yesterday I was good about not working on my novel; I am determined to stay in “weekend mode” today as well.

I normally sit at my desk and spend time on social media, listen to music, and play computer games. I might – don’t hold me to it, though – break this old habit I’ve had since my days in Miami and spend time offline, either reading a book or watching something on the 4K UHD TV in my bedroom. And since I can play CDs on my 4K UHD player, listening to music in my bedroom is also an option. (I can’t, for now, access my Amazon Music account on that TV; for some reason, it won’t connect to our Wi-Fi router even though it’s a Samsung “smart TV” set that should be able to hook up wirelessly to the Internet. I have Amazon Music on a smaller set that’s in my office, but that TV – which is the one I had in my bedroom in the Tampa area – won’t be up and running till my office is completely set up.

I also must go outside for a while and get some fresh air and sunshine, so before I get lazy and decide to not do that, I’ll just say “Bye for now” and close this post. So, until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and stay warm. I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.