Summer without summer

13 degrees. I didn't go anywhere on my birthday. But I can't complain. I had champagne with strawberries, strawberry curd, strawberry cake, concerts to watch and games to play. I'll have to go party some other time, when the weather is better and I'm feeling better. If that ever happens.

 

 

I bought myself the game Squirrel with a gun as a birthday present, I've wanted it for a long time and it happened to be on sale.

Great summer. It's July and I haven't had to wear summer home clothes, such as dresses, skirts or shorts. I haven't had to take the fans out of storage. It's still better this way. I got traumatized last summer when I felt dizzy after a run, and it was "only" +22 at the time.

This summer I've mainly focused on growing pumpkins, and okra has also been a byproduct. So in the game Dreamlight Valley, that's my happy place.

There was a power outage on the evening of July 1st. Luckily I had time to shower and grease my feet, otherwise it would have been more difficult in the dark.

 

Writing

LibreOffice has strange ways. The last time I complained that I couldn't hyphenate in it. Well, the next day I just had to open the text file in question, and LibreOffice hyphenated it automatically. Of course, I had opened it quite a few times the day before.

And there are always new problems. They claim that it's worth using something like a line register. Using it just increases the number of pages in the book a lot (the first time the number of pages increased from 326 to over 400), and thus the price.

When I added page numbers, the style of the entire file was then some kind of Grid8. Then try changing the style settings.

It's an endless battle with LibreOffice. I save the file with certain settings, and it has 350 pages. When I open the same file again, it only has 325 pages. Did the line register get lost somewhere? Does LibreOffice hyphenate the file again every time it's opened? There are lot of mysteries, and nothing will ever be finished.

You can enable the line register in at least three different settings. And when you enable these, each one results in a completely different number of pages. And the question is, can LibreOffice even do line registers/baseline grids? At least with one of those settings, the lines are just randomly in some places.

I have set the page height to 21.50cm. But it always changes by itself to 21.52cm. The same thing every time I open the file: the line register has disappeared from use, and an extra two millimeters have appeared in the page size.

I forced myself to take several days off from fighting with LibreOffice, because it's nerve-wracking and eyes-wracking, and the stress is devastating.

I also don't understand why BoD's instructions tell you to save the fonts in that Word text file, if the book has to be sent to them as a PDF file.

And then I started playing with Books on Demand's cover editor. Luckily, there is one, so you don't have to do it yourself. I've had the cover image for my debut novel chosen for a long time. Although BoD suggested this.

 

 

 

ER

Carter has really started to annoy me this time watching ER.

Season 9: Tells Abby he's not going anywhere. Leaves for Africa soon.

October: "Dear Abby" letter from Africa.

January: Returns to Chicago with a new pregnant woman. Someone might say that's fast action?

There's a reason why some people hate Kem. And then you are supposed to cry when the child dies. I LAUGH.

And it's all Carter's actor's fault. He was said to be a pretty shitty person. He hated all the new actors who came to the series, especially Kellie Martin. He hated that the new guys got screen time. Didn't want Carter and Lucy together. Wanted Carter and Abby together. Wanted himself off the show. As a result, the plot of the series changed from what was intended.

 

 

47 years

I've been scared that I'll be sick for my birthday. In the last seven years, I've been sick twice on my birthday. When I turned 40, I had pneumothorax, and in 2022, I had coronavirus. And what's so great about this time? The endometriosis pain started a week ago. My birthday is now at a bad time, both in terms of health and weather. There's a thunderstorm and heavy rain expected today. And yet I'd like to go out to party.

 

 

I was a big F1 fan in my teens, and at that time the drivers used Moët & Chandon to spray champagne. Ever since then I've wanted to try that brand of champagne. I thought it wouldn't be possible for me because of the too high price and sugar content. But then I found out that the brand also sells smaller bottles, and even a low-sugar version. The smallest bottle isn't available here, but the second smallest (0.375 l) is. 33.58 euros. 

 

 

I didn't dare to go to buy alcohol until I got a valid passport. And then of course they didn't ask for any ID, outrageous.

I'm afraid that sparkling wine will make me feel sick (again). But I still have to drink it, from morning on.

 

In recent years, I've played my favorite game Friday the 13th: The Game for my birthday. That game is basically dead now, but in practice it's still possible to play it on PC and Playstation. Even though I've already downloaded the Resurrected mod for that game on my computer, it'll still have to wait.

I've been thinking about watching some concerts, like NKOTBSB's London concert in 2012, it's already been 13 years?!

 

 

So I want to go out to eat and drink. The last time I went out for my birthday was in the summer of 2020, when I was exceptionally able to eat at Wanha Satama when there was no Wine Festival. Now I can't.

Storm

I've been following the weather forecast diligently, it's been quite a roller coaster. Example: one day, according to the forecast, this day would have been the warmest in a 10-day period, and a couple of hours later the forecast had changed completely to the opposite, meaning this would be the coldest day of the week. So it was worth stressing about the weather forecast for 15 days. Then on Monday I was told that there would be a storm in Finland today! When I want to go somewhere for the first time in five years, this is what happens.

We'll see how badly I'll freeze. How badly my feet freeze. And I definitely want to put on my silk dress. And that's a problem if it rains because silk doesn't withstand water. Maybe it will melt off in the rain? Was that dress actually on me then in the summer of 2020? Anyway, the last time I used it, it had a stain that looked like a drop of water, but it didn't go away with time. Now that I've checked the dress many times, I just haven't been able to find the stain. I wonder if I'll find it when I put it on.

There are exactly two shoe options. I'd really like to wear peep-toes, but is it too cold? Of course, closed-toe heels warm the feet (calves) much more. If only the heels wouldn't affect me like they did last time. The prognosis is pretty bad because my feet have been affected by other things now, burning pains + joint pains.

 

 

 

The forecast is pretty bad if I go out partying in cold stormy weather while feeling unwell. The backup plan is of course to stay home, order some food, and play some game while drunk.

 

Depression and pain

I finished the latest round of editing on my debut novel, and I started looking more closely at Books on Demand because I would like to publish my book through it. I can't help but think that BoD's website and instructions have always been terrible. Previously, you could publish just an e-book for free, but now you have to pay a fee and get a physical book. Previously, the cheapest option was 69 euros, now it's 79.

I was playing around with BoD's book sizes and the problem was that the smallest size would have a suggested retail price of 30 euros, which is way too much. Who would buy a paperback from a self-published author for thirty euros? I had thought the price would be maybe ten euros, but that's impossible because it would be in the negative.

When I first tried those so-called paperback settings, my book ended up being 470 pages long. I didn't know that 82,000 words is that much for a paperback. But it didn't feel right, because there would be so little text on one page compared to real paperbacks. I don't know how small the font should be, now I used size 10. Well, when I changed the font size to 8, the number of pages was only 230, and the recommended price was 17.90. But all online sources say that the minimum font size is 10. Why then does BoD claim that it could be even 8?

But then I realized that you shouldn't choose the smallest book size, even though it is a traditional paperback size. If the number of pages decides everything, then you should just choose a larger book so that the number of pages is smaller, and the price is therefore cheaper. I can't get the price under 20 euros, but the font size has to be at least 10. And some fonts work better in a smaller size than others, I think my choice is Georgia, even though I don't like it myself. I have used LibreOffice's default font when writing.

The price was too high and I was starting to get really depressed. Once again, you could ask, what's the point when I'm working on my texts? And at first I couldn't find all the settings I needed to publish a book in Libre Office. For my studies, I use Word, but I hate it. It's like a web browser these days, no thanks.

And then I fought for a couple of hours on Saturday to get the page numbers in. I can only imagine how impossible it will be to make a book cover by myself.

And I also ran into a problem where I couldn't get LibreOffice to hyphenate words. All I had to do was open the same file in Word and it hyphenated right away.

 

 

 

But then my poor health started to get depressing. When the blood doesn't circulate in my legs. I thought the situation would get better the more time passes since covid, because that's how it seemed at the beginning, the first autumn was the worst. But now that I go for a run in the middle of summer, my legs burn when the blood doesn't circulate. But the worst thing is that I've had the same thing in my hands. And then I also have endometriosis pain and joint pain, so it's nice. And I started to feel dealing with all that text in my eyes, and playing Dreamlight Valley in my neck.

I don't know if the joint pain is due to menopause. I've been thinking that it must be nice to have endometriosis pain, heavy bleeding and menopause symptoms at the same time.

Being unwell is especially depressing because my birthday is coming up soon, and I'd like to be in party shape then.

 

It also annoys me that I'm stressed about (those?) things, my jaw is constantly in the wrong, tense position. In the middle of summer, when I should be on "vacation". Last night I had a bad panic attack, I thought I was really dying again.