A Case of the Crazies!

What a crazy frikkin' morning!

Our IT guys did an archive of our primary database last night and I got in this a.m. only to discover that somehow, the archiving had actually DELETED the drawing data for all our projects! OMFG! The place went nuts and everyone ran about like it was the end of the world. I got into the database, restored it to a previous backup, and we were back to work in less than an hour but you'd have thought we were down for a month the way people reacted. Folks need to chill, yo! Go get a cup of coffee and a bagel, answer your e-mails and clean out your Deleted Items folder. That's an hour right there!

Anyway, I'm out of here early today. I'm camping with the Scouts this weekend (so no posts until next Crapday!) We're hitting D.C. to do the whole patriotic tour thing; it should be a very cool weekend. We're doing lots of walking but the boys and the adults who regularly camp should have no problems. We are taking a half-dozen or so parents who never camp with us so it should be interesting to see them doing the 10 mile Arlington Cemetery Hike (okay, so I'm evil!) The kicker is going to be the ladies going: we've warned them to wear sneakers and shorts, etc. but I'm betting at least one of them wears clogs or some other silly woman-type shoes because: "They match my outfit!" That will be ugly for them (and -of course- entertaining for me!)

Have someone coming in to refinish my hardwood floors this weekend in my Living Room and the following weekend, all out new furniture starts arriving. The house actually is getting close to being done (though it sure as hell still seems like a ton of crap to be done!) Once it is, I will have much free time to focus on writing. (I hope!)

I'm still working on the worldbuilding notes for "First". I've gone through the first 130 or so pages of the novel and I've got about six pages of notes on items to be fleshed out, mapped, or simply explained so that I know what the hell is actually going on. It's funny as hell actually: I keep hitting things that fascinate me and I don't know where they came from! For example, I found out that you can quickly tell the status of any person in one of my cultures by the number of ribbons they wear braided into their belt. Some old folks only have one or two, while some young women can have dozens and no one outside their culture understands why (including me, and I wrote the damn thing!) If anyone asks, they are dreadfully insulted and will refuse to speak to that person ever again. I imagine I should probably know why that is, even if I never explain it in the book. I have dozens of little oddities like this that just showed up while I was writing. Weird, huh?

Anyway, I'm still plugging away at it with the limited spare time I have and for once, I'm actually enjoying the worldbuilding process. Everyone I've read says this is the back-asswards way to approach things, but it seems to be working for me (no real surprise there, eh?)

Ah well, need to get some stuff done. Have a great weekend, all!

Later!