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Ugh. Coffee with whole milk and stevia is pretty disgusting. Neither the milk nor the stevia mellow the coffee anywhere near enough, and the stevia adds an extra layer of ick on top— I had a swallow of coffee more than five minutes ago, and I can still taste the stevia. I haven’t managed to choke down even a quarter of my cup, and it’s been an hour.

I have no idea what other options I have for getting this much caffeine without sugar or artificial sweeteners (pure stevia is the only one I can have). Black tea might be possible, but I’d need a heck of a lot more of that to get the same level of caffeination. At half an hour a mug, how much time would I need for that? I’m also suspicious that caffeine without sugar won’t do anything to help me wake up and think.

The last time I stopped caffeine was right after my gall bladder surgery, six or seven years ago. I did that deliberately because I was pretty sure that I’d be too out of it to notice the withdrawal headache, and that worked. The thing is that without drinking coffee (with sugar!) every morning, I ended up having to nap every morning, losing about three hours out of my day every single day and running into problems with doctor/dentist appointments because the best time to schedule them was late morning, at least in terms of getting home in time to pick Cordelia up from school. I also didn’t do very much writing because school day mornings are the best time for that. Afternoons involve lunch and exercise time and are generally broken up into pieces too small for me to use. Also Cordelia comes home an hour earlier now than she did then.

Right now, I’m wondering if I could manage being awake and doing things in between when Scott gets up and when Cordelia leaves for school and then nap because I’m pretty sure the fact that I seldom get much sleep during those three hours is a big factor in my needing either coffee or a nap. The biggest problem is that I’d be stuck in the bedroom for most of that time because Scott naps in the living room and because Cordelia really, really doesn’t want me awake while she’s getting ready for school. I think we could compromise in terms of me being awake as long as I keep the bedroom door closed.

Tumblr sent me a we’re about to give away your user name email to get me to log in. I debated whether or not to bother but ended up doing it just to keep my user name. I don’t know that this will make me visit Tumblr with any regularity because I find it overwhelming. I’ve thought about trying to disable the images there, but if I do that, is there any point in Tumblr at all?

We turned up the ceiling fan in the bedroom last night. That helped some but not as much as I’d hoped. I slept middling well. I’m still really exhausted (and the lack of coffee/sugar isn’t helping). I think that I’m going to have to push for changing the AC at night.

Cordelia spent most of yesterday with Scott’s family. They didn’t end up going out in the boat because it rained, but they played a lot of Telestrations and some card games and had dinner. Scott and I met his sister in Brighton to retrieve Cordelia and bring her home.

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Okay, I’ve been groggy all day, but I had eight ounces of orange juice with psyllium husks about an hour ago, and I’ve slowly started to feel better. I can’t have the psyllium within one hour, either direction, of taking medicine, though, so that’s not viable as an early morning thing.

Scott has been on the phone with Comcast for about three hours now. The difficulties getting our service going appear to be entirely bureaucratic and rather Catch-22 in nature. Scott’s talked to three or four different people without getting things sorted and is currently on hold. The impression I’m getting from listening is that the support people really don’t have any clue what to do with someone who’s trying to set up a bundled service.

Now Comcast is telling us that they thought we were at a different address (we’ve lived here for twenty years) and that we have a request for some sort of service on the outside line at this address. They also seem to have not closed our old account (which we asked them to do in June) even while they opened the new one, and the equipment got put on the old account and so couldn’t be activated under the new account.

We have an hour and a half left before the library closes. I have one hold to pick up, and it doesn’t expire until Wednesday, but I’d still like to get it today. We’ve got two DVD sets that must be returned before the library opens tomorrow, but that’s easy to do even after the library closes.

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I have two writing dilemmas. The first, I think I just need to sleep on because making decisions is beyond what I can do right this second. That’s about the pinch hit I signed up for. I had settled on a story idea and started research, but now the moderators tell me that someone else has offered for it. I had told them that my canon knowledge was not all that firm, and they’re giving me the option to keep the pinch hit or to pass it on. I’m torn because I have a story in my head now, not in detail but still there. If I don’t write it for this, I probably won’t write it at all. On the other hand, maybe I should pass the thing on to someone else who has a better grasp of canon. Would that be better for the recipient?

The second has to do with figuring out how to extricate myself from my Iddy Iddy Bang Bang story. The problem there is that I never had any sort of end/goal/direction in mind. I probably could keep writing forever with the characters having the sorts of conversations that I enjoy writing (and reading) but that will make most readers want to throw rocks at them to make them shut up and *do* something. There’re also some issues of consistency in characterization that I have no idea how to fix in the time I’ve got. I didn’t bother being too picky about it as I wrote because, well, this is the idfic equivalent of… I’m not sure what, actually. I was going to say an infodump, but that’s not it at all. But I just came out with whatever occurred to me in the moment. When a story’s only in my head, that doesn’t matter.

At any rate, I think that the central character question of the story is, ah, tangential to most of what I’ve written. There’s a good bit of porn, and it doesn’t actually connect very strongly to the decisions my POV character needs to make. It’s just there because I had fun writing it.

( Babbling about an Amber AU fic. Darkish with non-specific references to bad things happening. A lot of noodling about characterization decisions. )