Monday morning began with me finalising the outline for THE MYSTERY AT HORTON EDGE on Story Plotter on my tablet, which I did straight after breakfast while still in my dressing gown. There then followed much faffing trying to work out how to get it to work with Google Drive.
I love Story Plotter, but I don’t think it’s worth nearly £3 (nearly $4) a month just to synchronise devices. I’d pay a one-off much smaller fee, but not £3 every month. Not when that’s the only benefit. So instead I had to find a workaround, and Google Drive seems to be it.
I hate using the cloud and I won’t use any of it for anything sensitive, but it’s a good way of being able to access text files at least and then copy and paste them into my Story Plotter app.
The Novelist app works fine. For free. You can push the book you’re working on to the cloud and you can pull an existing book from the cloud, and work with them on any mobil device. I can’t get it to work so well on my Mac, though, and I know it did work on my old Windows desktop/laptop.
Every time I uploaded the text files to the cloud, it created a brand-new document with the exact same name. So I worked out where to see the timestamp and deleted the older versions. For backup, I also managed to email the Story Plotter file to myself.
Once at my desk, I finally accessed my Google Drive from the Mac. I’d tried last Friday and it wasn’t having any of it. But yesterday, it worked straight away. Very odd. I grabbed the text file for the outline of THE MYSTERY AT HORTON EDGE, saved it to hard drive, then added it to Scrivener.
But then my Scrivener froze. It wouldn’t let me select anything in the binder, or save it, or anything. But it did let me close Scrivener down and reopen it. I logged a bug with the Scrivener community, and finished yesterday’s blog post.
Last week, when my blog post auto-posted, it didn’t load the image on Facebook. I tried refreshing the attachment on FB. Nope. I went into the blog, added a smaller version of the image, and tried again. Nope. I updated my JetPack plugin. Nope. I checked the other shares, and they all worked fine. So I logged a bug with FB.
I’d logged a bug with FB the week before about some groups being too dark on my desktop. There was no pattern, it wasn’t just private groups or public groups, it was random groups. I could see the posts in my feed and on my phone and on the tablet, but on the desktop, once I went into the group, it was all dark, but find on the mobile devices. So I logged it. It took them a week, but it’s fixed now.
Another bug I logged with FB was historic events not letting me remove myself from guest lists. They don’t seem to have fixed that one yet.
Anyway, yesterday’s blog post auto-posted to FB, but this time it loaded the image too. So either they fixed it or WordPress/JetPack did.
Then I started today’s blog post.
Last week the hospital made an appointment in Dermatology for me without checking I could attend. I followed the stupid link in the text and was only able to ACCEPT the appointment. There was no option to DECLINE or REARRANGE. On Friday I phoned the number on the link to say I couldn’t make it, but there was no one available to take my call.
On Saturday, a letter arrived telling me about my appointment. Again, there was nowhere to say CALL THIS NUMBER IF YOU CAN’T ATTEND, and I put it to one side.
On Monday morning Rotherham Hospital called in response to my answerphone message last week regarding me trying to cancel an appointment they made. I told them I couldn’t attend that day and she was most put out, trying to convince me that I’d have to wait months for an appointment.
Well, they told me that in the first place and I was quite surprised to get one through so quickly. But I said it was fine and I would wait. She reiterated that the department was Very Busy and wouldn’t be able to fit me in until early next year. Once again, I said that was fine, and she hung up.
Next job was Monkey Dust admin. I already had the poster for this weekend’s gig, so all I had to do was create the event, share it, and add it to Diane’s Gig List. I had a quick dinner, and started work on this week’s diary. I also fired off a query to Vocal, asking how long my withdrawal request would take to hit my bank account.
Several hours after the phone call, I got a text message from Rotherham Hospital telling me that I had asked them to cancel an appointment. No, dearies, I called to decline the appointment, I didn’t ask you to cancel it. You shouldn’t have made the appointment in the first place without checking it was convenient.
The poet called to let me know he’d not been able to order his monthly prescription. Our GP branch closes at 12 noon, but he’d been in the queue for 15 minutes. When he was connected, it was to a different branch, who said he couldn’t order a prescription to be delivered to a different branch. Despite them all being part of the same practice.
When we moved here, we were impressed with the service we received from our new GP. But this year they’ve gone down the pan. We can’t call the surgery to make an appointment, we have to use an app, but the app is only available when the practice is closed.
I’ve used this app twice, and both times it insisted on me going to the other branch, in my car, where there’s no parking, and not the one I can walk to in less than 5 minutes. When we called in to collect the poet’s prescription a few weeks ago, the place was empty! It seems this app is pushing everyone to one of the other surgeries in the practice, and if we’re not careful, we’ll lose the one in our village.
I tried to use the app again to book an appointment regarding my possible spondylitis, but they’re either full to capacity or not open. Perhaps they’d sooner I go to the emergency department, which will cost them a hefty fee…
I didn’t have the time or the energy to get mad about any of these things, so I pushed them all to once side so I could crack on with work.
My 5-minute tech declutter was next, and then I was back to CATCH THE RAINBOW. But before I knew it, the poet was home and it was time to finish work.
Today I need to get the first draft of THE MYSTERY AT HORTON EDGE done, and I must get the client edit printed off so I can crack on with the proofreading.
I’m so tired of medical establishments acting like we are all in a position to arrange and rearrange our schedules to suit them.
Oh! How lovely to see you! I didn’t think I would this week. 🙂
It’s the same department I had to insist on seeing a doctor too. Needless to say, those ‘months’ of waiting on the list she threatened me with turned into less than 2 weeks. They already sent a new appointment through and I accepted that one.