So, yeah, forty days ago there were 100 days left in the year. I said back then I had a bunch of things I wanted to accomplish. Some of it I wanted to have done by Halloween.

Well… I’ve gotten about half of it done.

No, that doesn’t mean that I’ve actually finished anything.

I’ve just got lots of things started and not quite half done. Each.

Including everything I wanted done by Halloween. (Which makes some of those things no longer relevant for this year.)

I’ve got sixty days left to polish off some stuff in some way or another… and I have little to no ambition to do so in most cases.

For example, it’s now November, which means it’s NaNoWriMo. I kind of want to revisit my former failed experiment of generating a story via Tarot cards. Of course, it’s now nearly midnight, I have work tomorrow, and I spent all the time I should have been writing doing other things.

Like reorganizing my closet.

Which, really, was something that desperately needed to be done–and still has a lot left to be done. But it leaves me wondering what the heck I’m avoiding regarding the NaNoWriMo project.

In my defense, it’s been kind of a crazy month, what with my grandfather passing away and having to run up to NY for the funeral. And then rushing back down to DC to catch a friend of mine’s album release concert tour stop. And the general work stress, of course. And all the new people I’ve been meeting.

Mostly, I’m just lacking focus, I think.

There I things I want to do… but nothing I really want to do.

I used to have things that drove me forward.

They’ve all been gone for a while now.

So, maybe… just maybe… by the end of next few dozen days, I’ll have something figured out that will carry me through the first hundred days of the next year.

For now, I’ll just keep flopping around until I find my way back to the water and remember how to swim.

Or maybe I’ll be tinkering with my inner workings. Trying to get things back into sync. Trying to find the right rhythm again. Getting things to properly tick… like fixing a broken watch.

Yeah, I like that better than being a fish out of water. Just having a gear or two out of place. Maybe a screw loose. Perhaps just an unwound spring.

I could go on and on about how utterly crappy today was.

Waking up to the news of the horribleness of that mass shooting in Vegas.

Ending the day with the news of Tom Petty possibly (probably) being dead (or soon to be).

All the other stuff that’s been chipping away at any chipper mood since back in November.

There’s no shortage of things that suck right now. Some of them are even more personal than the news.

So, yeah, I could go on and on about those things. I considered it. (Because, man, do I have things to say about a lot of it.)

But then I decided not to.

Why?

Because I currently have very little, if any, control over any of that big picture stuff that’s sucking.

And, in these last 100 days of the year (90 left!), I’m trying to focus on actually accomplishing things that I do have some control over.

Like following up on all the cleanup I did last week in my web hosting account by actually starting work on getting my main Durosia.com site cleaned up and moved to Drupal 8. (Not that it gets used for much… but it’s the principle of the thing.) And seeing if I can get Hat From Hell back up and running before Halloween rolls around. (Also updating that to Drupal 8… but not at all sure I’ll be able to salvage most of the content from the last iteration of the site–not that there’s a lot of content of note–since the database got corrupted somewhere along the way.)

That’s slow going, for sure, since while I can implement themes just fine (it’s kind of a big part of what I do all day), I’m not much of a designer at all. If you see an awesome site design on one of my sites, it means I got super lucky, hired someone else to design it, or found a really decent ready-made theme that I could do simple things like change colors on.

In short, don’t expect any radical changes in how either of those sites look (or, in the case of Hat From Hell, looked, if you ever saw it). It’s not going to happen.

Other little things since the last 100 day update:

• Finally finished Neuromance… I was only sitting a couple of chapters from the end for a few months. That’s the kind of book that, once upon a time, I would have torn through in a couple of days. I read more slowly now than I used to. And less frequently. (Well, I read fiction less frequently… I spend all day reading articles and forums and whatnot.)
• About ready to polish off my re-read of Everville… which I started well over a year ago now. It’s also spent a lot of time just sitting there gathering dust.
• Still pondering doing NaNoWriMo in November.
• Looking forward to the next set of sessions of the Apocalypse World games I’m running. I think both I and my players aren’t quite going as all in and hard as the game expects… everyone’s still mostly alive and there are long-term plans for infrastructure improvement going on. That’s not typical of AW games from what I’ve seen. But we’re having fun, so it’s all good.
• Skipped out on a few events over the past weekend because I was either wiped out from work or engrossed in other things. This weekend is for going out. Next weekend, I’m hosting a thing at my place. October is a very social month, so I kind of needed that one extra weekend off before diving in.

So, yeah, small steps forward.

That’s better than nothing.

Definitely better than lamenting the state of the world.

Photo by Jennifer Burk on Unsplash

As I mentioned last time, I try to do something in the last 100 days of a year. This time around, it’s nothing terribly specific, more a mundane determination to just get some lingering things done than any grand plans.

One of those things was cleaning up my web hosting a bit.

See, a bunch of years ago, when I was planning on doing a lot of freelance work, I bought a reseller account. In short, that means I have a lot of web space. I won’t say “more than I could ever use” because, well, I have enough ideas that I could probably fill it up. But definitely more than I currently have any use for.

Not having any use for the space doesn’t mean I plan on getting rid of it. Nope. I’m still hosting sites for friends and I really like having the ability to, whenever I want, just spin up a new shared hosting account for any project I want.

Heck, I’ve spun up more than a few accounts.

Accounts I never really did anything with.

Accounts for former clients who haven’t used my services in years.

Accounts that I can’t quite tell you what I was thinking when I set them up.

Over the last five days, I wiped nine of those accounts, flagged two more that I need to double-check on to make sure they’re not being used by anyone, and fully disconnected a domain name from a service I stopped paying for ages ago, but was apparently still serving the mostly empty site (I kept getting notices of WordPress updating and of spam comments).

That cleans up the management interface of my hosting account, stops useless update emails from coming in, removes out of date installs of things, and generally just makes better use of resources all around.

So, that’s progress.

Rollin’ Dice

Aside from that bit of digital clean up, I’ve managed to continue running a couple of role playing games. For the first time in years, I’ve got games running mostly regularly. In the last few months, I’ve managed ten sessions of one–which, compared to the last game I tried to run, is amazing (that one took me a year and a half to run ten sessions)–and six of the other.

The big difference? I’m running these games on Roll20.net… so it’s all online in a virtual tabletop setting. That means no one has to travel to get to my table, which opens up the possibility to play during the week. Seems that’s the key.

Even better, people seem to be really enjoying the games. Always nice when you’re running a new system for the first time and your players haven’t played in the system much (if at all) either.

The games are using the Apocalypse World rules. I’m realizing now that I’ve probably been a little too forgiving and generally nice for Apocalypse World. Have no fear, I’m getting meaner. 😉

Mostly it’s just good to have a regular creative outlet again.

Next

Not bad for the first five days out of 100.

Up next is October. Which means some Halloween flavored things. Possibly the re-launch of my Hat From Hell site. And the Spooky Game Day I’m hosting here at my apartment. (Which means I really need to clean and rearrange things.)

How are the last 100 days of the year going for you?

Today makes the beginning of the last 100 days of the year.

In the past, I’ve done, or tried to do, something special for the last 100 days.

A couple of years ago, I kicked off a vlog a day. I succeeded in that, but the more important lesson was… I’m really not cut out to do a vlog a day.

Last year, I threatened to do 100 movies in 100 days. That didn’t quite pan out. Heck, this year I’ve been keeping track and I haven’t even watched 100 movies in the last 265 days. There’s no way I’m going to watch and write about 100 before the end of the year.

And then, via good ol’ Facebook’s “On This Day” feature, I was reminded that about seven years ago this was one of the best weekend of my life… and the last really solid one before a lot of things started fraying.

Around that same time, I kind of started a 100 day countdown challenge thing. Bought a URL and everything to spin it up into “A Thing”…. that went nowhere. Which is exactly where most of the other projects I’ve started in the past decade or so have gone.

So for the past week, I’ve been wracking my brain trying to decide if I wanted to actually try something again. Knowing full well, of course, that I likely wouldn’t succeed… and that it would stress me out (that volgging thing certainly did).

I’ve decided that, no, I won’t be doing any one big thing. I don’t have the time, energy, or mental bandwidth for that. There’s still too much about my life that keeps me from functioning at 100 percent for regular stuff, I’m not going to promise myself or anyone else anything that’ll degrade that even more.

Then what’s the point of this post?

Well, first I think it’s important to make note of things. Even if they’re vaguely unpleasant reminders of how little actual progress there’s been. Even if they can be downright depressing. They’re still a marker along the path that you can measure progress–no matter how meager–when looking back later. And at worst, they let you realize you’ve slid backward… which is a super useful thing if you care enough for that to bother you.

What I am going to do in these next 100 days is a handful of little things.

Cleaning up various websites of mine. Fully decommissioning others (every now and then I’ll get a notice from a WordPress site I launched back in 2011 or 2012 as part of some grand plan that I completely forgot about). Maybe I’ll really try NaNoWriMo again instead of just signing up and accepting failure out of the gate. I really should finish a book or two that’ve been sitting not quite done next to my bed for ages.

Little things.

Like grains of sand.

They really add up when you gather a bunch of them in one place.

What are you going to do over the next 100 Days?