This weekend, I didn't work. It doesn't sound like much, but for the previous three, I was putting in 20+ hours over the weekend to keep up with some estimating mistakes I made at work due to imperfect understanding. I dislike making mistakes, which is why I put in the hours to correct it. But, it also meant that death march drive that sucks the life out of you and prevents anything else from going forward.

So, I got a chance to rest, recover, and let go enough that I could dream again and maybe write. So, got some house cleaning done, a bit of shopping and laundry, wrote a 5k word short story, a little bit of programming, and a few hours of raking leaves. I also read a book (gasp), well a third of a book but I only took about an hour over three days while interrupting myself to talk to SMWM.

Normally, my life is organized in sprints. They start on Monday and end on Sunday. I usually know my major focus by then and it seems to give some order and organization. I haven't been able to do that recently, which meant I didn't really get anything done since I was trying to do everything.

This week, I have two goals. The first is to finish critiques. Normally, I have 2-3 submissions for the writing group to go through, but I also have ICON 38 coming up and I've submitted the first five chapters of Sand and Blood to the group. It also means I won't go to the benefactor's breakfast (pout) and won't be able to chat up some of my role models, but trying to improve my writing takes precedence.

The other is prpltwtr. Some months ago, I realized that I really dislike Trillian's interface (again, for the fourth time) and I wanted my Pidgin back. But, no one appears to have stepped up and switched over either microblog-purple or prpltwtr to Twitter's new JSON API. So, I decided to take a shot at it.

Working in code designed by someone else is never easy. Working on a plugin for an API I don't entirely understand makes it hard. Not having anyone to ask questions is even harder. I'm mostly taking pot shots in the dark, slowly getting success, but I need to really dive into it to figure out the last of the bugs I have left. The nested callback system is brutal for debugging and I'm not entirely sure where anything goes. But, I got the basics working over the last month so I just think a week (or two) will get me toward the finish line.

Author Intrusion is on the back burner until after ICON, though if I finish the critiques, I'll probably jump over there since I have no Internet connectivity in the lunch room (and working on a Twitter client kind of requires connectivity).

Other than that, SMWM has a doctor's visit on Friday that I've been requested/begged to go to and the usual work, family, sleep that happily consumes 80% of my days.