Writing Update

I thought I'd start this post by diving right in and giving a writing update. In essence, I'm still trying to finish up Smoked, but frankly speaking, I've accomplished less on the writing front recently than I wanted, but the reasons are primarily logistical and technical.

On the logistical side, I found myself having to run more than the usual errands - including ferrying one of the kids regularly to basketball practice and tryouts, and going to pick up another one from college. (Yes - a road trip.)  On the technical side, I had a problem that I have seldom encountered: a bad computer mouse.  (In fact, I've only encountered it once before.)

Basically, we're talking random clicks, double-clicks, and so on. It may not sound that bad, but I can't properly explain how - in practice - it made it almost impossible to get anything done. For example, if I tried to highlight a passage to cut-and-paste, the mouse would extra-click and undo the highlighting. Or if I tried to left-click and open a file, it would right-click and open a context menu. And if I clicked on a browser tab to go to the internet and wasn't careful about where the pointer was, it would double-click and close the entire window. In fact, it was occasionally an effort just to place the cursor where I needed it.

Honestly, I never thought about how dependent I was on my computer mouse. On the one prior occasion when I had a mouse go bad, it was nowhere near this dysfunctional; then, it was maybe having to click multiple times to get the cursor where I wanted and stuff like that. My recent mouse issues were beyond the pale. I mean, just imagine trying to double-click on an email to open it, and you can't because your mouse keeps reading left-clicks as right clicks.

The solution that immediately comes to mind is to just go out and buy a new mouse, right?  Well, I didn't do that immediately, and here's the reason: Christmas is coming up, and I usually try to make it easy for the family to shop for me - e.g., I'll regularly stress things I'd like to have, what I've run out of, something I have that recently broke, and so on. (Ironically, it seldom works in terms of them taking the hint, but that's a discussion for another post.) In this instance, one of the kids specifically asked what I wanted, and I said, "I need a new mouse."

That was maybe a month ago - when the mouse first started acting hinky (and before I knew how bad it could get). Afterwards, the mouse's performance had a trajectory like a cliff diver: straight down. I initially tried to hold out, but it quickly became evident that almost nothing would get done unless I took action. 

Long story short, I broke down a few days ago and purchased a new mouse. Needless to say, I'm ecstatic. The sun is shining once more, birds are singing again... My family is probbaly a little miffed that they'll have to put some actual thought into a gift for me, but I've dropped enough hints that they should be able to come up with something. In the meantime, I've got some writing to catch up on...