So, another weekend came to a close. It was rough in a few ways, we're still dealing with the damage of the miscarriage and two of the three people in the household are sick. In other ways, it was a fairly productive weekend that I can honestly say "I got things done."

Miscarriage

The Internet is great for a lot of things, but it doesn't have the ability to tell you how one person will respond to a something as serious as a miscarriage. The simple questions, like how long will the bleeding last, are so individual that there isn't a good way of telling either one of us when this will be over. SMWM is going in for the blood work every week or so to find out if the "levels" are zero, which means we can start over. But, there is now this doubt that she may never have a child again (I know statistically that she can, but there are other factors like age and stress and the state EDM left her in).

The doubt and unknowing is probably worse than anything else.

Plague

Both SMWM and EDM are sick (still). And, as many people know, a sick child is just a normal child who screams a bit more while running around the same. Last week, when SMWM thought she was feeling better, she went back to the gym and over did it. So, this weekend, I pretty much confined her to the bed or couch and took care of EDM myself.

Every time that happens, I feel like I'm a bad parent. I try to get out of the house more, but I'm an introvert in general. We did a little, including last night when he asked to go outside. We got cleaned up and went outside. I drew truffla trees and mushrooms across our driveway in chalk, along with an illustration of three of the five houses I lived in. He drew random squiggles. We both had fun so that was a ball.

Household

For the first time, I repaired a toilet. I've never done it before, but it involved taking apart the tank from the bottom and replacing all the gaskets, screws, that water thing, and the stopper. Previously, it was getting louder and taking longer to fill after flushing. I knew that it wasn't a problem before, but I suspected that if I dealt with it know, I wouldn't get the question "why didn't you do it earlier" three years down the line when it became a problem.

We had the same thing with MC's house. SMWM's mother had a toilet that never quite worked well. No pressure and it flushed poorly. So, for at least five years, they've been struggling with it. I finally decided they had enough and, between me and SMWM, we bought them a new stool and paid for the installation. And now, they are ecstatic that things work.

There is something to be said about just fixing it.

Since it was only an hour of my life, I'll probably do the same repair kit on the other toilet and then be happy that things won't suck for a while.

Along the way, I also repaired two of my garden hoses and sprayed the back yard with ant killer because I nailed three large ant mounds with the lawn mower while mowing.

Ouya and my new toy

On Saturday, my Ouya finally came in. This is an Android-based gaming platform that I threw some money at last year in a Kickstarter. I've been actually pretty excited about this for a while and anxious to try it out. Of course, there were a few problems like I didn't have a stereo downstairs to play it on.

It also took a long time for it to show up on the tracking system. I got an email two weeks ago that it was on its way, but it took ten days for DHL to register it. And then I anxiously watched it winding its way past me twice before showing up.

Knowing it was going to be delivered, I headed over to my mailbox about ten minutes before they closed. Nothing in the box, but I asked and they found it there (kind of annoyed that they only enter Saturday mail in after they close for the day). I grabbed it, opened it up to check it out, and then headed over to the Audio Room. This is a small A/V store that I said I would go to when I needed a stereo.

So, I found out that my preferred budget ($200-$400) was below their minimum stereo ($500 minimum with most of their "low end" being in the $800 range), but they had a floor model that worked out pretty well for my liking. Both guys in there were very nice to me, despite me obviously being below their target market.

At home, I spent a few hours getting my basement home theater working again. That ended with some frustration. My Roku XS, which I got for Christmas, wouldn't work with the theater. The Roku 3 (next model) did though, so I'm going to have to pick up a new Roku (which is annoying). The projector seemed to be choking a bit on the Ouya, but I don't know if it was overheating or if the five year old project can't handle the HDMI output from that system.

I also couldn't figure out my login. As a Kickstarter, I had my login name reserved but my standard passwords didn't work. So... I sent an email and then couldn't play it for the rest of the weekend.

At least it looks pretty.

Author Intrusion

The other big thing was Author Intrusion. I'm working with a four one-week sprints and Sunday was effectively the end of the second sprint. This last week was dedicated to the first of the two large things remaining on the system, file saving and the GUI. I spent the week working on file I/O and I think I have it at a fairly solid point now. It seems to save all of the needed components in either a single file (for neat files) or a directory (for isolated changes). I haven't done the zipped version of the archive and all the files are still XML, but at least it writes it out and reads it back in.

That leaves only one big thing left for the 0.1.0 release: the GUI. This is easily going to take the week, but I think I have most of the components from the last time I worked on Author Intrusion so I'm hoping it won't be that drastic to implement.

In two weeks, I'm going to be working on something (a 20k piece) for a friend. This is going to be a "dog food" round since I'll be using the program I wrote. It's a novella and relatively long, so I'll quickly be testing this against a "medium" project. That will point out exactly what doesn't work and what does, the things that need to be critically fix. Since, according to unit tests, auto correction and spell-checking both work, I should have everything I need to do this.

It's going to be fun.