Decembuary

So here we are at last. I am posting this on Decembuary eleventeenth, after another round of consultations with ‘all sorts and conditions of famous physicians’, to see what is to be done about my excessive fatigue. The consensus is that I need vitamin D, activity, and a bit of sunshine when I can get it. I have been gobbling vitamin D tablets and making myself get outside more, and it is indeed beginning to have effects. Then, too, now that we are past the dark days of Decembuary (that infamous double month, relieved only by Christmas and Hogmanay), the light is visibly beginning to increase. We are having our usual mild patch in the middle of the winter, and I find that I am starting to improve.

I have yet to get any copy written, but I have tackled one related job. I have figured out how to get my ancient copy of Adobe Illustrator to play nice with the file system in a shiny new version of Mac OS X. The other day I spent considerable time drawing a map in Illustrator, and when I finally got to the point at which I thought I had better save my work, the machine went

*blink*

and Illustrator crashed, leaving not a trace of my work except for a full screen of bug reports to be auto-sent to Apple. I went into a funk and stayed there until the smoke coming out of my ears turned from ominous green to a safely neutral white. Some of this language is figurative.

It turns out that it is the modern OS X dialogue boxes that are incompatible with Adobe CS3. If I check the option to ‘Use Adobe dialog’, it saves my file without complaint and does not crash. So I have been messing about with maps just for practice (and also for a spot of tabletop gaming that I have been doing on Saturdays). I should soon graduate to actual writing, D.V.

And to those of my Loyal Readers who dream dreams, a joyous St. John Bosco’s day.