There are a lot of things I used to love about Mac that are becoming less and less true. At one time, everything just worked—but now I deal with stuck keys on my laptop keyboard (at least it is mostly usable! *knocks on wood*) and features disappearing from apps because Mac believes my laptop should be identical to my phone. Even worse, the Time Machine utility has begun failing regularly while backing up my machine, for who-knows-what reason. That’s bad enough—but worse, whenever it fails, it marks all of my previous backups as corrupt and irretrievable. So I lose all of that history, and I’m forced to create a brand-new base backup from scratch, which takes about 8 hours. A few days later, the exact same shit will happen for no good reason. I decided enough was enough, and switched to Arq. So far, it’s behaving as reliably as Time Machine used to. And, get this: if it fails on a backup, it just waits and tries again later. Your prior backups don’t get nuked!

Enough ranting. Onto progress!

Writing Updates

Still giving the first draft of Book 3 a final pass before handing it to my editor. As predicted, my progress got slower this month due to (a) holidays and (b) the middle of the draft being much less polished than the front. I’ve had to do quite a bit of rewriting, but I feel it’s been beneficial for removing cruft. That frees up words that I can potentially use to expand on other sections in good ways. At this point, 11 of 17 chapters have been reviewed; that’s 54K words out of 93K total. 39K to go! With even more holidays and rewrites coming up, I doubt I’ll get it done by the end of the year, but there’s still a good chance of wrapping up in January.

Current Goals

Well-rounded Latin practice. Still at it. Reading takes a good bit of effort, especially anything by Cicero, but I’m getting good enough that I can see for myself where translators have made mistakes or just plain made shit up.

Being a good Stoic. Here’s a bit of Seneca to keep in mind any time we stumble along the path to being better (and we all stumble): “There is no man to whom a good mind comes before an evil one. It is the evil mind that gets first hold on all of us. Learning virtue means unlearning vice.”

Listening to German. I spent some time watching YouTube videos in German. YouTube’s auto-generated subtitles leave a lot to be desired, but at least I know enough to know when they’re wrong. I’ve found that it can be more valuable to watch the same video multiple times than to watch a huge variety of videos. With each replay, I catch/understand more than I did the last time.

Civic Engagement. I voted in my state’s elections this month. The next election will be in May.

If you celebrate any holidays this month (or if you don’t), have a great time. We’ll meet again next year! :)