As Days Slide By
It’s been quite a few days now since I have posted a new blog entry. I’ve been working on my novel, revising and moving things around to align events in better chronological order. Disaster struck yesterday after about 7 hours of work, when my iPad froze - just seized up like it had been exposed to fire. I had to restart it, which wasn’t easy, but I managed. It turns out that all the changes I had made during the entire afternoon were unfindable. I now have a recently scaled-down version of Word on my iPad, even though I just had to renew my subscription to Office at the same price as last year that offered a much broader Word platform. I spent hours late into the night and this morning trying various ways of finding some of the reworked chapters. They would show up as a download from One Drive only to disappear if I clicked on Word in order to keep editing. By some miracle, I was able to find the one file that had been been partially saved by Autosave to One Drive and that I was then able to somehow save and find intact in Word. If I had to do it again right now, I wouldn’t be able to. I’m very angry at Microsoft.
This experience has felt a little like Groundhog Day, doing the same things over and over and getting the same results. Or, to put it another way, doing the same things over and over and expecting different results. I’m glad I did not give up, though, because eventually I did get a different result.
So, too, do the days that flow by feel pretty much the same, one to another, yielding pretty much the same results. Maybe seen through a wider lens, one could postulate that much of life is like this. It’s good to become aware how important it is when possible to move out of one’s comfort zone, to take a few risks, and to try something new and challenging. It feels like those opportunities can arise less frequently as one gets older - or not. Thus, I self-published a children’s book recently, moved to Meudon, and am working on a novel that I recognize has statistically zero change of ever being published unless I do it myself - which at this point, I’m not inclined to do. And oh yes, I started this blog that I don’t think many people read but that I enjoy doing.
We have been very lucky to have a fairly long string of days where it hasn’t rained. We have been getting out to walk and to go food shopping - mostly along the same routes and in the same few shops. But when we have the inclination, we have gone to other nearby towns - on foot - to stretch our horizons just a bit. I guess I keep patting myself on the back for being so adventuresome - which, in the global scope of things - is quite tame indeed. If necessity is the mother of invention, then so in some very scaled-down ways, is confinement.
