The end of the summer is really here; I've had to move out of the basement I was living in in Northampton. My friends have been unbelievably generous with their home, and aren't kicking me out, but I'm kicking myself out. They need their lives back! I'm hoping to still be able to stay over one or two nights at a time so I can schedule two or three flight days in a row rather than limiting myself to once per week or less. I am a bit worried that this will slow down my progress, and that worry has been making me a bit low recently, but I think this actually might increase my flight frequency - because there will be so much more pressure to actually fly every day I can manage to be in the area. Also, while living with my Dad is less of an imposition (hey, I have a room in that house), there is the inevitable stress that arises from sharing space with parents and that house is 2.5 hours from the airport - so that will encourage me to both be in Northampton to fly, and to get the whole thing done as soon as possible.
I swore I wasn't going to move back to NYC until I was finished. I'm still holding to that, although the logistics got more complex. I will probably have to be in NYC for 1 or 2 weeks in September for work (and for a wedding), which makes getting in multiple flights the other weeks even more important.
My car is mostly fixed. The thing I really wanted done, fixing the air conditioner, is not - because it turns out that yes, it's a dead compressor, and getting a new (non-knockoff) one and installing it will be more money than I can afford to spend on the car right now. Hopefully I can hold out the month or five weeks until the weather cools off again, and put off the AC compressor until next spring. On the bright side, the car now has new brakes and new suspension bushings, and drives much more tightly; in addition, the damn driver's door lock has been fixed, albeit at what (in retrospect) is a pretty steep cost. Turns out the actuator for the electric lock needed to be replaced. Ah well. You buy a used luxury car, you accept the cost structure, right?
Things to do, in no particular order.
eBook edits:
- Remove font specification to allow default font on ereaders
- Prune CSS to remove unused styles and combine dupes if possible
- Convert all single/double quotes to proper HTML entities
- Ensure all centered text has both <p> and <span> centering to cope with different devices
- Ensure all centered styles have text-indent: 0em to ensure centering is consistent
- Add full frontispiece?
- Get ISBN?
- Check image tags for closing slashes for epub validation
- Do content edit based on feedback expected from ARC readers
- Poke zeph re: cover :-) :-)
Flying:
- Schedule FAA written test. A week from Monday, perhaps? Not going to fly much this coming week, school/instructor busy and no slots available
- Schedule hood time and getting checked out to fly to other airports solo
- Schedule night flight?
Dad's house:
- Clear area for workbench.
- Find/build workbench surface.
- Find a gun cabinet or safe, install in new basement.
- Find a lockable cabinet for reloading supplies, install in new basement.
- Redo house WiFi infrastructure (new routers, new cable modem)
- Start centralizing what tools I have which are spread over a couple of states. :-/