Procrastinate!

I'm still waiting on that water heater door. The contractor called yesterday to ask if I'd heard anything because he hadn't been able to reach the guy who was getting the door made. It was supposed to be ready on Monday. I just want this all over with, but at least I have hot water in the meantime.

Yesterday was my official procrastination-busting day, in which I took care of a number of things that have been sitting on my to-do list for a while. One of them was making an appointment for an eye exam. I'm way overdue for a couple of reasons. One was that I ordered some contact lenses after my last exam via the WalMart optical shop. When I'd heard nothing after a few weeks, I checked on it, and it seemed that the order had been lost entirely. So they gave me a few samples to tide me over, cancelled the old order and placed another order. The lost and cancelled order showed up at around the same time as the new order, so I had lots and lots of contacts (I have the monthly disposable kind, but I don't wear them every day, so they last even longer). In the meantime, my contact lens use declined drastically because I'm getting old. I reached the point where if I correct my distance vision, it's difficult to read. I've never worn contacts at home. I just keep a pair of glasses on the coffee table and wear them to watch TV. Because of the reading thing, I mostly just wear contacts now if I'm driving long distances, dancing or hiking. If I'm going to have to read, I wear glasses so I can take them off or look under them to read. My usual cue for getting an eye exam is running out of contacts and realizing the prescription has expired. It took me a really long time to run out of contacts, and now I suspect my prescription has changed. I don't know if I'm quite up for bifocals because I read perfectly well without my glasses. It's just that issue of being able to see up close and far away at the same time. I give myself extra space in dance class because when people get really close I lose the ability to know exactly how close they are. This wouldn't be a problem if certain people paid any attention to where they were in relation to other people and made any effort to stay in their general space or lane, and it's more diplomatic to say my eyes aren't working right than to say I have to allow extra space because I'm afraid you're going to blunder into me without looking where you're going. The teacher teases me about having my comfort zone near the wall, but the wall isn't going anywhere. I know where it is. If I'm in the middle of the floor, I have to worry about people moving around.

My other bit of procrastination turned out to have a penalty for waiting this long, but then that turned out to work in my favor, so win! I'd been putting off making my hotel reservation for WorldCon because I hadn't decided when I would arrive and depart and I hadn't picked which of two convention hotels I really wanted. I figured I still had time because usually they'll post messages about how their room block is filling up and there are only X number of rooms, etc. They hadn't said anything, and I was worried that might even be a bad sign. So then I went to the site to make a reservation and it said the room block was full. They still haven't announced that other than on the hotel page. But it turns out that the overflow hotel, which has the same rates, is one of my favorite San Antonio hotels. It also has in-room mini fridges, supposedly is giving free wi-fi, and I get frequent flier miles while staying in this chain, which should give me account activity so I don't lose the zillion miles I've been hoarding to maybe upgrade for going to London next year. I was going to have to either take a trip between now and March or find some other way to have activity on the account. It's not that much farther from the convention center, and I can usually get someone to walk with me from the party hotel at night (or that gives me an excuse not to stay at parties too late). If this had been offered as a hotel option from the start, it's the hotel I'd have chosen, so in this case, procrastination worked out for me.

Strangely, taking care of all the procrastination triggered a massive procrastination fit in everything else. I sat down to write and just couldn't make it happen. My brain was all over the place. Part of the problem may be that the story is veering in an unexpected direction, and that new direction isn't quite clear to me yet. I also may not have found the right working conditions for this book yet. As I recall, when I wrote the previous book in this potential series, instead of working in my usual absolute silence, I put iTunes on that computer on shuffle and worked with music. Maybe I'll try that. I was also strangely tired. I'd planned to go to a ballet class but instead I was in the shower by 9 and in bed with the lights out (after a little reading) by 10, and still slept to my usual time. I should feel rested, but I think I could go to sleep right now if I let myself lie down.

On an entirely unrelated note, is there any interest in t-shirts and related items (coffee mugs, etc.) with the Enchanted, Inc. series artwork on them, like the frog or the fairy? The cover artist has raised the idea, and I wanted to gauge interest. However, I haven't been impressed with the quality of stuff I've seen from Cafe Press, so if you know of another on-demand kind of print shop, let me know that, too. I wonder if there's something via Amazon, so it could be linked to the books somehow.