A Good Day

I had a pretty good day, 2013 07 30.

It began with a couple of crises arising the night before, the main one being that I needed to pick up a parcel from the post office while, at the same time, having to attend a volunteer training meeting regarding the Mold Cape, an artifact which will be arriving in town very shortly, on a six week exhibit.

The folks, with whom I was in contact, asked if I could join them in town. They had some documentation which they believed would help me, should I need some form of ID to collect the parcel (a router and associated equipment for my new ISP, which goes live on Thursday). So they arranged to meet me in front of the sorting office in town.

Fair enough. Follow me now.

I had a problem the night before. OpenOffice 4.0.0. is dreadful. It keeps crashing at unexpected intervals, often right in the middle of an edit; worse, it was not saving my ODTs to PDFs. At all. Kept crashing, every time.

So, crises, one after the other.

While in the training meeting, one of the staff happened to mention PDFs. One of the volunteers asked if it was hard to create a PDF; the staff member replied that it was not, since they used LibreOffice - a lot better and more fun to use, even than OpenOffice. That, you see, got my attention.

I spent the day half in the library, writing the edit of my story, getting it up to 70,000 words - the minimum apparent acceptable novel length these days. The other half, I spent walking about with my folks - who did come into town.

So I got to the sorting office, and with Mum waiting outside for Dad to come over from where he'd parked his car, I just went in, presented my own ID, and picked up the parcel. By the time Dad had managed to get to where Mum was waiting for him, I was in and out, with my parcel, ready to rock.

So instead of hanging around the sorting office ... I decided to go with them to Asda for a spot of shopping.

As it turned out, I was a godsend there. For weeks, Mum has been trying to locate tofu and stir fry cooking oil. While she and Dad were chatting over a cuppa in the cafe, I went into the depths of the store, hunting tofu.

And I found it.

So. Some of Mum's problems solved. And I helped her and Dad solve some of the rest, basically, when they went into the car and headed off into the middle of town, so Dad could do his bank thing. I remembered that the main branch of my bank in town was kind of closed for renovations, which meant we had to park for the other, secondary branch. Which was fortunate, because the road outside the main branch was packed solid with cars, and the road outside the secondary branch was practically abandoned.

So that was twice I helped out the folks.

And later, once I managed to get home, I downloaded LibreOffice - and I am seriously considering removing OpenOffice, until such time as they can get rid of their horrible bug issues. In fact, I might actually just get rid of OpenOffice, permanently. By the looks of LibreOffice, I could get used to the interface.

So there you go. Out of crises arose opportunities. And as a result, I have made people's day; I've solved many problems, not just mine; and I'm now proudly using a brand new writing tool which is brilliant.

Also, what with my efforts in the library, I now have a novel, The Silver Touch, which I managed to edit to 71,000 words from just a little over 50,000.

So all in all, then ... a good day.