sleep | Calculating Dreams

This fortnight, I have:

Slept 7.2 hours a night, on average. A slight improvement. Despite that, I’ve decided to change this goal again, to “get to bed before midnight”. Minus one point per minute I stay up into the next day!
- What I wanted from the 8-hour goal was to wake up before my alarm, and have a low-rush morning. Instead, I got up later and later, rushed even more, and still got to work late. Finished late. And so on until I got even less sleep.
Made seven things:
- Three pieces of D&D prep. One of these was scaling up the maps from the adventure I’m running, to use with minis. This took longer than it should, because (a) Linux, and (b) my printer refused to scan anything. It wanted magenta ink. Maybe I should have just scanned it in black and white 🙂
- A proper, posted letter to a friend I don’t see so often.
- Another fragment of fiction writing.
- More mending, and …
- … another email to the company I’m trying to buy new clothes from. This conversation continues…
But I did finish reading Masterclass: Writing Romantic Fiction, by Barbara Samuel. I’m not a romance writer in any sense, and this book opens with “if you want to write romance, you first have to read it”. So much for that? But no! It still inspired me to get writing again, and Samuel has so much generally-useful writing advice I had to keep going back and taking notes.

No D&D this week due to the continuing round of cold-season illness.

In the past fortnight, my goals haven’t gone quite so well. I have:

Slept about 6.9 hours a night, and I’m feeling the lack of it (hence the late update).
Made Things on about 7 nights:
- Prepared four bits and pieces for D&D, including a rough chart of several pieces of backstory. This got short change because of the left-over prep from last week, though if I’d had time and energy I could certainly still have done more,
- Wrote one sonnet, and one segment for a longer poem,
- Sent one (1) complaint to the council about them wanting to reduce library hours, (which managed to consume an inordinate amount of mental effort), and
- Nearly ordered a heating upgrade for my cold house, but learned at the last minute there was probably a better, cheaper option. Back to the drawing board…
And I completed Act 1 of Baldur’s Gate III. I’m not sure this counts as something finished: it did take me about a hundred hours, but a lot of that may have been my determination to look in every possible pot, chest, and cupboard in hopes of finding loot among all the junk.

In the end, though, the D&D game went well, so I’m calling this fortnight good enough.

I’m still railroading more than I’d like to, but it’s early days yet. My flexibility can improve.

Calculating Dreams