One jab down …

Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay

… three to go.

Yup, the poet had the first of his two vaccinations at the weekend. His booking had got lost in the ether, somehow, but they saw him anyway, which was very good of them. Mine’s on Friday.

We didn’t manage as much as we would like on Saturday. First of all we had the weekly shopping to do, and on the way there we also stopped off to have a look at the MiL from her front garden.

When we got back, the plan was to catch up on some ghostwriting, after Thursday’s nightmare. But so that I could carry on working in the car park while I waited for the poet to have his jab on Sunday, I had to update the Scrivener on my notebook …

Ha! And I thought the defrag was a nightmare!

I couldn’t get Scrivener to work at all, either on the laptop or the notebook.

There was nothing we could do about the laptop, as it thinks it’s linked to a network and we’re not IT-savvy enough to do a complete factory reset. And besides, with Windows coming pre-installed on most PCs and laptops these days, we didn’t have any Windows disks either.

So we’ve pretty much retired the laptop. It’s heavy and clunky and old and slow anyway, so I was hardly using it. As soon as I can afford it, I might make a new laptop my next work purchase.

On the notebook, however, the error message I was getting was due to Windows updates being overdue. But when I started to do those, I was surprised to see that the last update was in 2015. Yup, I had six years of updates to wait for.

*Sigh!*

That took more than a day, but at least I got everything to work on the notebook in the end, although I did have to do a factory reset on that too. But as the notebook is a lot newer than the laptop, it was as easy as resetting a phone.

With all of these delays, I finally bit the bullet and sent off a the-dog-ate-my-homework message to the client …

No, actually, I told him the truth. I said that technological issues (now resolved) had pushed me back by around two days. Fortunately, he was fine with that. Probably because I told him two days ahead of the original deadline instead of two days after it.

I will get it to him sooner if I can but least that now means that I can breathe again.

Sunday was the run out to get the jab, and on the way back we stopped off to buy a petrol lawnmower as we don’t have any power cables long enough to mow the front lawns, and the sit-on mower was scrapped before we left the last house.

When we got back, instead of working, I took the rest of the day off, while the poet assembled his new toy and tried it out.

On Monday, I arrived at my desk fully intending to do just the ghostwriting, so I could take my time over the next four days. But an urgent proofreading job landed from Hong Kong that would only take an hour or so, so that one went to the top of the heap.

Another job arrived too, a little unexpectedly, from the Yorkshire client. This time for editing rather than proofreading. That one’s gone in the diary for next week, after the Easter weekend.

I planned my diary for the next two weeks, I did the proofreading job, and sent that back, and I did the revisions for the first part of the ghostwriting gig, and I sent that back.

And then I called it a day. I hope to get through a bit more today.