What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

I finished the zentangle! You can see it here. I should be able to get it sent out tomorrow.

In other news, I'm going to try working on my jacket pattern.

I successfully survived my visit to the gynecologist. Yay! All is well. Tomorrow, I will go to the neurofeedback place. Hopefully, that will also go smoothly. I have done all the zentangle on my sister's birthday card, so either tomorrow or Thursday, I'll finish that up with some painting. I'm gleefully enjoying another Mrs. Pollifax book. As always, it is great.

I finished up the painting with the path that I talked about. I'll hold off on posting a picture here until the recipient gets it. I've also decided to simplify the painting I was going to do for my uncle. I have a lot of work to do, and there is no reason to make something super complicated.

In other news, I started working on getting Claude to write me a story that will teach me statistics. The first chapter didn't have any statistics in it, but in the second revision, it was a perfectly acceptable chapter. It mainly had the problems that lots of writers have. I asked it to not use any tags except "said", "asked", or "replied" with dialogue and to not use any adverbs with dialogue tags. I pointed out that it was telling much more than showing ("Anna felt excited" instead of "Anna leaned forward, eyes fixed on the screen") and that there was almost no sense of place. The story was a bit rushed too. When it fixed those things, it was pretty good. I'm looking forward to the actual statistics.

Speaking of Claude, I asked it to help me organize myself, since I'm still having trouble getting things done. The biggest thing I've noticed is that it has me do all the quick, not terribly important things first. A lot of those things, like vacuuming, aren't a huge deal, but having a clean house is nice. Since they take little time, I feel like I've gotten a ton done and am not stressing at the end of the night over all the little things I should have done.

All is well here. Joel's family is in town, so I've been socializing a lot. We went to Évora on Tuesday, which was fun. We walked in a couple of parks, saw an ancient Roman temple, a bone chapel/ossuary, and the outside of the largest gothic cathedral in Portugal (I think). Anyway, it was nice to go do something. Since then, I've been focusing on painting. I'm getting a lot closer to having the painting done. Finally. Now, it is time for a walk.

I'm still painting the same image. It is still taking forever. Joel rode his electric bike and says that it all works correctly. He is now dropping off the rental. He also managed to get in touch with the company that sold us the refrigerator and has an appointment for them to pick up the old one. Thank goodness!

Oh, first, it turns out that .38g of magnesium is too much. I started having more nightmares and anxiety. So, I went back to .35g, and now I seem mostly okay again. A bit more tired and less hungry. That's fine.

I finished my cute fish painting! I have another painting that needs work, but I just am not feeling super motivated, so I figure I'll work on it on Sunday. There are _plenty_ of other things that need doing. I always forget that cute but busy paintings take a lot of work if I'm putting in a lot of detail.

I also pulled all the nails out of the upstairs wall (there weren't that many), so next I can fill all the holes and cracks before getting on to some painting. Joel also picked up some insecticide, so now we can deal with current and future woodworms.

I finished the tiny little side piece of the floor that still needed to be sealed, so as of now, the part of the floor that I can access is done. Yay!!! Also, after having been looking at five handkerchiefs that needed to be dyed for quite a while, I finally got that done too. Of course, the cat insisted on coming over to help, so I had to cover everything with cardboard, lift it up and apply dye, and then cover it up before he could put his paws on it. Happily, everything _seems_ to have worked out. I won't really know until tomorrow when I can rinse the handkerchiefs to see what the dye actually looks like. I'm really happy that I can cross these tasks off my list. Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll be able to work on socks. I did not sleep well last night (a week or so ago, waking up twice to go to the bathroom was an improvement. Now, I'm all like, 'Geez, why did I wake up at all?' Two nights of uninterrupted sleep spoiled me.). I'm going to stick to 0.25g of magnesium to see if it will get me up to the "sleeps all night" level or if I need to go back to 0.3g. I really like having the empty capsules. They make it super easy to take the magnesium. Assuming I don't spill it, which I usually do.

I got 1 hour of deep sleep last night! That is pretty much what I am supposed to get! It is a miracle! For reference, normally my watch combined with the health app on my phone says that I get something more like 8 minutes some nights. I don't feel hugely more functional or anything, but still I'm really happy about it. I'm going to increase my magnesium to 0.3g and leave it there for a while to see what happens.

In other news, I've been painting that shell painting, and it turns out that painting each grain of sand is super slow. Perhaps I already said that. However, listening to the book about Churchill is helping a lot. All the sand is now done, so I just have to paint the giant shell. I'll do that tomorrow. So far, I really like the painting.

I just put the second coat of the sealant on the test area of the kitchen floor. So far, so good. Joel also removed all the loose grout so that we can put in happy, new grout soon. Then, we can clean and seal the rest of the floor. I also finished listening to Murderbot book 6, which seemed out of sequence with book 5 and 7, but whatever. I ran out of books to listen to on the service that I was using, but I could use the real library to get the last audiobook, so I did that. Also, I finished painting this birthday card. Now, I'm going to go on a walk.

I have two new paintings I'm working on.

Actually, first, I should mention that yesterday we went to sign some paperwork for the house. This is the paperwork Joel has been working on for almost a year. It would update all the information that the government has about our property. The previous owners had been working on it for years. Anyway, instead of getting to sign the papers, we were told that everything we were doing was very suspicious, that there were things that were obviously wrong with our application, and that we would need to bring a whole lot of proof with us to get this stuff signed. Of course, that proof was submitted years ago. Anyway, after that, Joel called the realtor, who said that he will have the agency's lawyers look at everything again. Probably we will have to ask him to come with us next time.

Today, I went to the gynecologist as a followup to the surgery. He says all is well, so that is resolved. I want to get a urine test to make sure that the bladder infection is gone, but since I have never had a clean test at the hospital where my gynecologist is (and have also never had any symptoms), I decided to try going to a private testing place. I'll do that soon.

So, back to painting. I wanted to paint one of the lavender clusters of flowers on the jacaranda tree in our yard, and yesterday, I finally got a photo of it with a bumble bee on one of the flowers. So, I will use that as my reference photo. I also am going to paint a jungle picture (for a friend who hates the cold). I downloaded a bunch of "fantasy jungle" images with a plan to make my own. I talked to Claude.ai about how to go about making my own image, and it was really helpful with very very basic instructions on how composition and contrasting light and dark work. The most interesting thing was that when I used the rule of thirds, as it suggested, I discovered that almost every "fantasy jungle" image had an opening or a path that led to the point where the bottom horizontal rule and the right-hand vertical rule cross. The right-hand vertical rule almost always was over an area that was lighter than the rest of the image, and the top horizontal rule was generally on top of a bridge or arch of some kind. There is almost always a giant tree in the middle. So, I took a photo of a giant tree growing over a ruin and a statue of a lion or dog that we saw when we visited Cambodia and threw those into the painting plan too. In almost all of the "fantasy jungle" images, there was also a figure looking away from the viewer. I decided that he should be looking at the dog statue. Joel suggested a troll under the bridge, so I made the troll be waiting for the guy who is looking at the statue. I've always liked pictures with weird, bright colored mushrooms in them, so I plan on throwing some of them in too. I sketched all this out, and it seems like it should work. I painted the background of the flower picture and the basic structures of the jungle picture, and they both seem okay so far. Of course, they will need a lot of work. I'm going to focus slightly more on the jungle painting, as I would like to send it out this weekend if possible, while the flower picture will go with me to the US to be sent out when I get there, so it is a bit less urgent.

Oh, and in other exciting news, I have been wishing that I had the timeline for my Mass Effect story in a database for a while now, as I have all these entries that are related to all kinds of different plotlines and characters. I have been copying them into different pages in my wiki, but it is kind of a mess to have just tons of copied lists of what happens on which day, because of course, when you change one, you need to then change all of them. Also, the copying is annoying. Anyway, the answer is to make a different page for each timeline event and then link the other pages for plotlines, characters, and timelines to it. I worried it would be too much. However, last night, I finally gave in and did it.

I decided to only worry about doing it for the stuff that hasn't happened yet in the story, so I gave that portion of the timeline to ChatGPT and Claude.ai and asked them to take the date format that I had for the events and change it (in a way I described) to make those dates into links to wiki pages. ChatGPT isn't great at this, but Claude.ai did a great job. I discovered after, though, that the date format I was using wasn't going to work quite right, but I was able to fix all of that this morning. Now that I have worked with it a bit, I like having the timeline in this format. Because one day is a page rather than just a couple of lines in a larger list, I can transfer all my notes and thoughts about what happens on that day onto the page. There was a lot of stuff that I either hadn't taken into consideration or didn't know about that I have been able to clean up because of this. I have quite a bit more still to do, and I don't have the bad guy's plotline done by any means (I think I have part of it organized and then "and then they are stopped" at the end, which isn't enough). However, as I go through the main plotline that I already have written and flesh out my ideas, I am coming up with more and more opportunities to tell my story.