Bad News, Good News

You wouldn't think that a little plastic fairing that fits over the front bumper of a Mini -- a bit that I cleverly tore off my car on Thursday last, and I wasn't even drinking so I can't use that as an excuse -- would cost all that much to repair.

You would be wrong in such thinking.

As soon as the replacement gets in from where in the U.K. it has to come and gets painted, I get to leave my car there for a couple days for them to fix it. Seems the whole front end has to be taken apart to do the job, so the labor is going to be a bitch. Talking here the cost of a couple-three house payments, and a thousand-dollar deductible on the comprehensive policy ...

Ick.

The good news is that it can be repaired, good as new, and that we can -- eventually -- pay for it ...

I will drive more carefully from now on ...

More in the good/bad news department: It seems that I have a new book upon which to work. Can't tell you what it is until contracts are signed, but it will be another hoot to write and I am looking forward to it. So much so, in fact, that I started writing some set-pieces even before the outline has been approved. Not much risk there, but some -- they could decide to go in a completely different direction. I doubt they will, and I can rewrite what I have to fit a wide range of applications, that is the joy of a set-piece.

That's good.

Bad part is, I managed to cleverly save an older file over a newer one, thus losing ten pages of material that is simply gone. The new Macs have an autosave to a separate hard disk that backs up everything every few minutes, so even if you trash everything on your desktop, you can get it back. I, alas, have an older Mac, and when I not-so-cleverly went to back up the file -- and still unsure how I did it -- I overwrote today's file with yesterday's back-up

Ick.

This is going to result in a new procedure with back-ups, involving a fool-proof method that I am even now trying to figure out. And hoping I'm not the fool to prove it. Saving it, sending it offsite, then backing it up on the flash drive, maybe.

Rewriting ten pages from memory, even that which is only a couple hours old, is tricky business. It's happened to me before, and the rewrite is never exactly the same. Sometimes, it could be better, but you'll never know for certain, since you don't have the old version to compare to the newer one, and the assumption is always that it is slightly worse and that you left something out ...

So, my output today was twenty pages, but only ten of them count ...

Never a dull moment.