Fowl Play, the ninth Dewberry
Not the most productive week
So last Sunday, my e-mail downloaded twenty-three-thousand e-mails to my inbox. Yes, that’s right. Twenty-three thousand.
I called the stupid internet company and they told me that it was because I had (somehow, while sleep-walking, perhaps), changed the settings on my mail server, and it was downloading every message I’d ever gotten since 2001.
So I deleted all of them — I have some sorting to do, because it wasn’t until I got a few thousand of them in that I realized I should relocate the contents of my inbox — and the mail server started working correctly.
Until the next day, when it downloaded all twenty-three thousand of them again.
It seems to be taken care of now — and no, evidently it was not due to my sleepwalking that it happened, it was a problem with the Yahoo! server — but between that and the fact that one of my kids was home with a fever most of the week, making me a bit short on sleep and working time, I haven’t gotten quite as much done as I’d hoped.
However, I finished the rewrite today, am planning to review the rest of my page proofs tomorrow, and plan to dive into the home stretch of this book (ON THE PROWL) on Monday. Hopefully it will be done ahead of schedule.
Oh, and I read a book called Arctic Homestead and made a batch of yummy blueberry preserves, but I already blathered on about all of that over in Jam making and cabins on Cozy Chicks.
BTW, I was thinking about how many hours of my day get swallowed up by cooking and ferrying children around and emptying lunchboxes and doing laundry and taking out the trash, and realizing that I don’t consider that ‘work’, but I think I’m wrong. What do you think?
P.S. Just found out this week that my editor at Ballantine is moving to England. That’ll make this the third editor I’ve had for this series… and the first book isn’t even out yet! Can you believe it?
I try to console myself with the thought that all the hours I spend with the kids are hours my subconscious gets to chew on work.
Egads. I hope you told Yahoo where they could put them. My week has been about the same, except that it isn’t my inbox that has to be weeded, it’s my garden. Yesterday, I took out two gardens, as in utterly destroyed. Today, I’m working on the third. Grrrr.–Susan
EGADS. I belong to a couple Yahoo email groups and I’ve run into situations where Yahoo will multiply a message and send it out ten times. To which, of course, there are replies from everyone in the group, each of which arrives ten times. And, like an idiot, I feel the need to be sure they are all the same, so I open every one. But at least it’s not twenty thousand!
Oh! I emailed you. If you need me to re-send it, just holler. I doubt I will have much Internet connection for the next week, but I will pop it back off when I get a connection.
That’s like someone’s just-back-from-vacation nightmare. At least it didn’t happen a month or so ago when you were, in fact, just back from vacation. If the email I sent you last week got lost in the confusion just let me know.
Sorry your week wasn’t the most productive, but hey, you got the (current) rewrite done, which I think is amazing considering what your week must have been like. And yes, cooking and chauffeuring and doing laundry and all those other things are definitely work. I speak from experience. 🙂
Day 2 in Austin and I am very, very happy to be here. 🙂
Talk to you soon,
John
I’ve been waiting for a new ISP for my website (taking longer than I’d like because it’s Dad’s job to find it and he’s busy), and for my old email. I shudder to think how much spam might have gathered on it in the last several years. At least I know that everything past a certain date is spam and can be mass deleted.
Things like that are why I’m slowly building my spam filters. You know, I never got spam until I turned 18. Think there’s a coincidence?
Also, I hate YahooGroups!, even though I’m on four different groups. I loved back when it was… Oh, it was two systems ago. Not fun since eGroups (or whatever it was) was acquired by the big bug Y.
Good luck. With everything.
23,000! How long did that take? What a nightmare, a double nightmare. Bless you.
Yep, housework and taking care of kids is definitely work.