My Game Show Failure

I'm in my usual post-convention lag. I didn't even have to travel far, and I didn't stay up all that late at night, and yet I'm still more or less in zombie mode today. I feel like I ran a marathon over the weekend. My muscles are even sore, like I was doing a lot of physical activity.

I'm giving myself today to rest and recover, and then tomorrow I think I'll take care of some business-type stuff that I need to deal with, as well as my radio scripts, and then Wednesday I'll hit the new book hard and go into serious writing mode. I want to do a fairly fast first draft -- the "figure out what the book is really about" phase -- and then I get to take my vacation when it's done. I'm already stockpiling books to read on the vacation.

I'll probably write up more of what happened at the convention later in the week when I'm less tired and more coherent. I will say that I tied for last place in the Just a Minute game. That was hard. The talking for a minute isn't a problem. The problem is doing so without repeating any words beyond things like "a" or "the" or the subject and without hesitating at all -- no pauses, ers, ums, or anything like that. It also didn't help that I wasn't being very cut-throat about it. It was the other panelists who were supposed to hit the buzzer (yes, we had real game show buzzers!) when the person speaking broke any of the rules, and then the person who hit the buzzer had to finish out the minute (or try to). Most of the time, I didn't even want to attempt to talk on the topic at hand, so I wasn't about to set myself up for that. I suppose it says something psychologically about me that I preferred not even trying to trying and failing, but I must also admit that I was having so much fun listening to the others attempting to talk on these topics that I forgot to listen for rules violations. I think I was also being terribly southern and feeling like it would be rude to interrupt.

I did continue my run of having something somewhat worrying to deal with come up during the convention. Last year, I got home from the first day of the convention to find a message from my credit card company saying that someone unauthorized had attempted to use my card. This year, my car gave me a minor scare. I was driving home Friday night when a warning light came on the dashboard. It was an exclamation point framed by a sort of squashed half-circle. I had no idea what it meant and assumed it was a pictograph for "check engine," since I'm used to that being just about the only all-purpose warning light. That's not something you want to see at midnight, and definitely not in a car that's only a little more than a year old and with less than 7,000 miles on it. I pretty much prayed my way home, then when I got home, I looked in the manual to see what the light meant. Apparently, I need to learn to speak Ford because it was merely an indicator that my tire pressure was low. That makes sense, as I last had my oil changed and levels of everything checked when it was about 100 degrees, and it had become dramatically cooler quite suddenly. All I needed to do to fix things was put a little more air in my tires, so crisis averted, but it made for a tense drive home that night. However, I am now reassured that my car will warn me before a tire goes flat. I didn't realize it was quite so high-tech. I'm sure with my old car I frequently drove with lower-than-recommended tire pressure and thought nothing of it, but having a warning light makes it seem so much more urgent. It's something that must be dealt with NOW.

And now, even though I swore that I wouldn't leave the house today, I must go to the grocery store, as I'm almost out of milk, and I could probably use a few additional food items. Yesterday, I didn't get a proper meal because I had back-to-back panels around lunchtime, so I grazed in the hospitality suite, getting stuff like cheese and crackers and grapes. Then when I got home, I realized I had nothing quick and easy to have for dinner. All the food in my house would have required real cooking, and I just didn't have the energy for that. So what did I have handy? Cheese, crackers and grapes. I may pick up a couple of frozen pizzas for low-effort meals.

Television note for tonight: It's the season premiere of House, and I suspect I won't enjoy it as this episode is entirely about House, with none of the other characters, and oddly enough, House himself is one of my least-favorite characters on the show here lately, as he mostly acts like a bratty toddler. Because I know this one is meant to be different, it won't count on the "probation" of the series, but I far prefer the House who served as a vicarious mouthpiece who said the kinds of things I sometimes wish I had the nerve to say to stupid people to the more recent bratty, selfish and "damaged" House.