Well, another week of summer is done.  Means I’m inching closer to the school year, which is promising to be exciting.  I think.  I’ll get a better idea this week when I go in for two days to get some special training.  Not sure how professional I should dress because I don’t know the air conditioning situation.  That’s become a really important thing to consider as I found out this week.  More on that later.

The big event was that my son had his 13th birthday.  I was nervous about it, but it ran very smoothly.  The kids enjoyed the video game truck and then enjoyed playing around while we handed out pizza.  There were some ‘no shows’ and surprise appearances, so things kind of evened out.  Only a few parents stayed, so I was left with 6 out of 10 pizzas once the party was done.  Two friends were given full pizzas as extra goodie bags, but it still left me with another entire fridge shelf of slices.  Made my way through this as best as I could.  Got half a cake left too.  That came out really well:

The day after the party, we went to see ‘DC League of Super Pets’.  It was me, my son, and his godfather, who made it for the weekend.  The movie was a lot of fun and had us laughing a decent amount.  They gave out free comics to the kids.  My son’s first one fell into the reclining seat though.  We got another and then it was back home for lunch and more video games.  It was a great and exciting weekend that I knew I was going to pay for later.

Surprisingly, later wasn’t Monday.  I was doing okay for the first three days of the week and got a good amount of Darwin & the Avenging Elf done.  I’m currently on Chapter 4 of 16 and I should be able to get up to chapter 7 before I go in for training.  I’ll be happy if I can get up to chapter 8 before the weekend.  That would leave me with 11 days needed to finish, but that’s only if I can do 3 sections per day.  At best, I’m going to come up 3 days short by the time the school year starts.  Probably going to be closer to 5 because I want to hang out with a few friends.  That has me a little upset.

The big reason I’m upset is because I gave myself a 10 day cushion at the beginning of the summer.  What went wrong? Fucking LONG COVID put me on my back far too many times.  The training days, special events, and days given up to hang out with friends would have been nothing.  The thing that killed me was that I had so many days where I simply couldn’t function.  For example, I woke up Thursday feeling like my head was encased in Jello and barely able to move.  I had to sleep the morning away and got a little writing done in the afternoon before I went to get my son.  I lost nearly an entire week back in July like this.  I learned this week that hot weather makes long covid worse and we have a friggin’ heatwave here.  This is why I sometimes wonder if the universe has it out for me or at least wants me to quit writing.

Speaking of Darwin & the Avenging Elf, it’s difficult to write even when I’m not suffering from brain fog.  Darwin’s newest ally isn’t the brightest and he’s more interested in charging in first.  Yet, the story calls for them to be tricky.  So, I had to make the guy a little smarter or at least have a reason to behave.  Without going into details, he’s a vengeance-fueled berserker and Darwin has promised to help him get his revenge on a warlord. I should be getting to the actual infiltration of the enemy organization tomorrow while today is the last part of bungling preparations.  Still, Darwin and this guy aren’t supposed to be able to make intricate plans.  Yet, I need them to make progress enough before things go wrong.  It’s a pretty frustrating headache at times.  Maybe I’m only saying this because the last section I wrote didn’t always feel right, but I needed it to explain why they are about to do something stupid.

Television has been limited.  Writing this Friday night before I watch ‘Prey’ on Hulu.  I’m curious to see how that movie is because I’ve heard good things.  Beyond that, I watched an anime called ‘Jobless Reincarnation’.  The story is that perverted jerk (who it’s revealed was bullied into isolation) dies and is reborn in a world of magic with all of his previous memories intact.  It was an interesting story where several characters were despicable, but would try to be better at times.  The main character kept having an inner monologue that would be perverted, which threw me off.  I can see why this is a controversial anime as well as people saying that they ‘loved the story, but would never recommend it’.  There really was a good story and 3-dimensional characters in there.  Just many of those dimensions were morally wrong or questionable.  I heard the creator wanted to get people to think about the concept of redemption by showing these characters be terrible, suffer, and try to be better.  At least it’s done and I’m rewatching ‘That Time I was Reincarnated as a Slime’.

So, goals of the week:

1. Write as much of Darwin & the Avenging Elf as possible.  Hoping to finish 4 chapters before next weekend.
2. Training for 2 days.
3. Son’s art show at the end of the week.
4. Time with him whenever I can get it.
5. Rest.
6. Try to do biking a few times.
7. Prepare stuff for the one week I get my son this summer.
8. Video games?