Monday 9 October 2023: a new week

I spent a lot of time on Friday revisiting my workload and my diary. I’ve been filling my days with so much stuff, I’ve not been starting all of it, let alone finishing any of it. So now I’m dedicating mornings to writing, blogging, admin, etc, and the afternoons to the last client I chose to keep, household chores, etc. I’m prioritising, and whatever I don’t have a time slot for is being deleted for that day.

We had another busy weekend. On Saturday Monkey Dust had a gig and the poet was driving the van because the van driver/lights man had a night off for his birthday. I dropped the poet off at the van and followed on a couple of hours later. I could have got in the van too, but we don’t want to leave the dog longer than necessary at the moment.

Because the lights man(/van driver) had the night off, they asked me to do the lights. (They do pay me.) But the lights are playing up at the moment and no one seems to know how to get them to work. It took me all of the first set to work out what they were doing, so the second set at least was better lit than the first set.

About three songs into the first set, bearing in mind I was already battling with the lights, I noticed the sound wasn’t quite right. So I left the lights on what I hoped was auto, and went to investigate. One entire side of speakers wasn’t working. If I can stand right in front of them without flinching, they’re not working, and as soon as I did that the bass player knew something wasn’t right.

Everyone kept on playing and the bass player even carried on with his backing vocals, but further investigation showed that while there was power to the PA (speakers), they still weren’t working. “Try flicking the switches,” mouthed the bass player. “Will it blow up?” I shouted back. He shook his head and carried on singing. So I went for it and, lo! The speakers came on and I couldn’t stand in front of them anymore.

Yay! Just add sound engineer to the other jobs I do! (Marketing, PR, manage the gig diary, chauffeuring, sound check, lights, fetching drinks.) (Sound check is just where I tell them what it sounds like and hope they know what I mean when I say something doesn’t sound right or something sounds like something else, like they’re all in boxes, or something.)

At the end of the gig I headed home, collected the dog, and went to meet the poet at the van.

The poet made ginger cookies on Sunday, cut the grass, and made a ramp for the dog to get up and down one of the steps more easily, and I started the A5 journal for The Secret of Whitehorse Farm. We bought a pumpkin, with which I hope to make a pumpkin cake traybake with orange cream icing (frosting), and the poet might have a go at making a lantern…

Despite my intention of doing the right work at the right time, I missed the opening times for ordering a repeat prescription this morning. I’ll have to order it tomorrow afternoon now instead. Other jobs for today are:

• today’s blog post
• The Secret of Whitehorse Farm NaNoWriMo project (novella)
• A Winter Promise call for submissions (short story)
• The Mucky Duck call for submissions (short story)
• The Fool (novella)
• Monkey Dust admin
• Diane’s gig list admin
• the Vietnam book…

I’ve broken down the tasks for each of the projects further on ClickUp and on Focus To Do. But in the diary they all get a general entry just to remind me to do something. Tasks for the above range from:

• planning
• brainstorming
• outlining

The blog post is now the first job of every day, but I’ll still start it at least on the day before.

See you tomorrow!