Baked goods, bads, and morally ambiguouses.

First week at ConHugeCo seems to have gone well, though slowly. There's a delay in getting me onto the appropriate systems, so I can only do a little until that happens. Still, I've been advised to be patient and enjoy the slow time I have now.

The schedule of writing in the morning has worked, though there are problems. The first is that I need to swear off LiveJournal in the mornings, or I cut a chunk out of my writing time. So I'll be disappearing even more. The second is that although I got up at 6:15-6:30 for my old job regularly, I seem to be incapable of getting up until 7:00 now. I hit the snooze button and then don't hear it recur -- and this is the sort of alarm that's supposed to go off for a full minute before it shuts down. So either that's broken, or I'm sleeping through a full minute of beeps. I may switch alarm clocks and see what happens.

I'm looking into getting a gym membership, since I'll be walking less with the shorter commute. Any advice from Boston people on a good gym for an overweight woman with body self-image issues?

And now I'm going to read through the novel, decide whether I've fixed the major problems, and begin a polishing edit. I've already played a merry game of "cull the adverbs" with half of the draft. Here, little adverb, let me find you so I can STOMP ON YOU!

If you've tried to reach me recently (or if you know people who have -- I'm looking at you, sal_sal), then you know just how disconnected I've been. Our phone service is still down, and DSL might -- might -- be up next week. Maybe. The saga of How Verizon Sucks is something you should hear from thomascantor, who's been dealing with them with much more grace than I would have had.

One major downside is that because of the disconnect, and because we don't watch much tv, I've only had a blurry idea of how horrible it's been in New Orleans. I think I'll try to give blood, though I may get turned away because of my time in England (yes, I ate beef over there during the BSE trouble, and I don't think they have a test for that yet). Like many others, I want to help, have little money to spare, and don't know how else to help. And I can't think of anything to say that doesn't sound glib and lame in the face of this horror.

In other, much less important news: ( Small things that have happened to me )
I'll be up in Maine this weekend, being a total geek. With any luck, I'll have scrawled on three chapters' worth of work and be able to plow through some more when I get back.