2021-12-18 — Hodgepodge

Today was… a hodgepodge. It didn’t go really at all as I’d planned it. I was supposed to go to Big Cedar near Branson today with my Hill Family for a Christmas dinner. But Thomas was sick and tested positive for Covid today, and I tend to get temporary sympathy pains when someone around me is sick, so I have to wait a handful of hours before I know whether or not I’m actually sick or whether it’s just sympathy pains.

It’s almost always sympathy pains.

And such appears to be the case today. The plan had been to do a quick emergency battery replacement, head on up to Big Cedar, doing my Modern English work in the car along the way, come back, and call it a day.

What ended up happening was that I didn’t do any cars at all, because I was trying to figure out what my circumstances were regarding quarantine and whatnot (gratefully, since I have had pretty much zero “close contact” with Thomas (as the CDC defines it), and as I have no symptoms I’m safe to go out and about and do my thing.

Wahoo!

What ended up actually happening today was that I realized O’reilly’s hadn’t refunded me for a $374+ purchase back in 2020, so I contacted one of the store managers nearby, and he totally took care of me. I had purchased a part and then canceled the order, but they never issued the refund–something like that. He tracked down what happened (it was from June of 2020), talked to the store that goofed up, and said it will be refunded and all taken care of on Monday.

Wahoo X2! 😊

I got another $95 from a refund that didn’t go through properly in 2020 from AutoZone as well. So… $450ish in refunds that didn’t go through that are back in my account. I guess going through all this paperwork has at least netted some positives. 😊

After finding out that the major bogging down that was happening with my computer was because of my computer being so weak on processing power, I went out and bought another computer today. I found a guy on Facebook selling a one year old Lenovo IdeaPad 3 with 12 gigs of Ram and an SSD hard drive w/touchscreen and whatnot that was in pristine physical condition, and I got it for $250, so I was happy with that. It’s a 10th Generation i5 processor, though I didn’t realize the ghz was so low, but it appears to be faster than my current computer, so cross your fingers. We’ll see how it goes.

I spent a good bit of time today working on my phonetic stuff, making it possible for me to get over a 133,000 word beta dictionary with both Legacy English and Modern English spellings (Although the Modern English is just a beta/test version and isn’t what the final version will be at all. Still, it’s progress, and it makes it possible for the programmers to build the transliteration engine).

What else… took my Z4 out to run some errands for Thomas, as he’s… miserable and in isolation–water, cough drops, and some orange chicken from a little Asian restaurant in Pea Ridge (Rainbow House).

I sent off messages to a couple of reading teachers, the dean of early childhood education at a university, and the chair of another organization that’s been around for over 100 years that wants to reform the English spelling system. I reached out to them like 5 years ago, but they weren’t interested in partnering with me then. We’ll see if they are now.

If not… I have a plan, and I think it’s a good one, for getting this to catch on and take root in our modern society. Cross your fingers. We’re gonna do this.

Anyway, time for bed. I’m going backwards in my bedtime. Gotta get my butt up early tomorrow, so I’m tired enough to fall asleep at the right time tomorrow night.

Goodnight, folks!

Lift the World.

~ stephen