In which she is hot and bothered

[zeborah]

In battling with my RSI I've resorted to a mixture of wonderful amounts of catch-up reading, ridiculous amounts of TV, and rare amounts of gardening.

I've nearly finished weeding the cracks in the bricks that run a path around the roses in my back garden. Granted the cracks I weeded first are now sprouting new grass again, but in the meantime I've discovered bricks I didn't even know existed for being buried under the encroaching lawn. Also in the meantime the plums, peaches, and grapes are ripening - I even ate a particularly early plum yesterday. But it got to 32 degrees outside (my thermometer claims 29 inside) so even my usual practice of going out for a few minutes then coming back in seems insufficient to avoid sunstroke.

(A flannel with cold water helps, though it dries amazingly quickly.)

So I read more than usual today, lounged on the bed in the coolest room in the house while the cat attempted to aestivate on the windowsill. I finished two books (an easy and fun YA and a classic that alas didn't have a plot to my taste but nevertheless told its plot extremely well) and... well, one gets tired of reading. Especially because holding the pages open anything less than carefully actually places a certain strain on one's wrists which one doesn't notice when one isn't battling RSI.

And unfortunately today I ran out of Boston Legal DVDs (need to visit my sister to borrow the next season) and the TV's marathon of Queen Seondeok has expired so I only get one hour a day instead of four. (I could rave about both series but even with my microbreak software on high my wrist is protesting.)

I would also love to be writing right now, but, well, I may have overdone it a bit yesterday.

[Software-enforced break during which I make the bed]

<remembers some video files my brother copied for me>

<on reflection, turns microbreak software up even higher>

Comments

[keieeeye]

My rabbits found new lengths of flat to accomplish. It was slightly concerning but they seemed to be comfortable.

[(Anonymous)]

I love "aestivate".

We used to have a black cat we could use as a thermometer-- her record was 90 centimeters nose-tip to tail-tip, at about 38 degrees in the sun.

[irinarempt.pip.verisignlabs.com]

Er, that was me.

[llygoden]

I know what you mean about only being able to read so much. I hope you manage to find some interesting TV to watch.

Apologies if you've explained why it won't work for you and I've missed/forgotten it, but have you ever tried voice recognition software? I bought Dragon Naturally Speaking when I had a touch of RSI some years ago and found it very useful, if annoying.

[zeborah]

I sometimes use the inbuilt voice recognition commands on my Mac, but they're unreliable due to having been created for a US accent.

I've considered proper speech recognition software in the past but the price put me off. (The MacOS version of Dragon is 2-3 times the price of the Windows version, depending where I buy it. Granted it includes a microphone headset, like my cat needs more cords to play with.) Especially because I tend to write in a very nonlinear fashion so I don't know how useful it would actually be. Uncertainty creates dilemma.

[llygoden]

I find the fact that you have to dictate punctuation makes it of limited value for writing fiction. I really can't get into the flow when I have to say things like:

Open quote I love you exclamation mark close quote he said full stop. New paragraph. Open quote do you really question mark close quote she replied full stop.

Though I did discover when experimenting with recording things on the digital recorder and then feeding the file through Dragon, that as long as you say "comma" and "full stop" occasionally, you can use it to get down a kind of stream of consciousness style draft which you can then edit into shape later.

It does work well for typing up hand written drafts, but if you don't hand write first drafts, then that's not much help. It's also probably fine for writing more mundane stuff like emails and hence you can use your limited typing time on the trickier stuff like fiction.

[zeborah]

I think I'll be able to cope with the punctuation, even the quotes. It's been awhile since I've really been “in the flow" anyway;These days I'm writing painstakingly sentence by sentence. The pressure to think ahead, dictate the sentence perfectly, and not have to go through the hassle of correcting it later, might be good for me. the time the computer takes to process what I say between when I say it and when it finally appears on the screen is actually more disconcerting.

And using it and navigating around and even just scrolling down when reading a long document is great for keeping my hand off the mouse button ever tensed.