Song in Head: To Zanarkand from Final Fantasy 10

As promised from the last newsletter, here is a video of me taking a spoonful of extremely hot, hot sauce for not writing for two weeks straight, in front of my writing group. Notice that I only recorded the beginning and when I was drinking various glasses of milk. That was because I was in agony, pounding my feet on the floor. It was bad, I drank ⅓ gallon of whole milk and ⅕ of an ice cream tin. We all decided to just do a few drops on a chip when it came to THAT hot sauce, for future punishments (click on the newsletter sign up box to see the video in the post on substack).

Being a stay at home Dad again feels strange for me after 2.5 years working full time for the Forest Service. Granted, I will be going back to school in a week or so and won’t be home all the time, but for this short period, I am back to being at home. Being a Dad to 2 girls, 1 in diapers, and the other getting potty trained, is no easy task. Actually, it's harder than working the front desk at the Forest Service. It's definitely fulfilling though, seeing my kids grow and getting the usual Dad love from them is great, for example. I definitely need my sleep though just to keep up with them, as I’m doing chores, cooking dinner, making sure the kids get at least one outside fun event a day (park, bounce house place, splashpad, etc). 

I would like to say that the doordash/lyft, voice to text writing life hack works! I was out for a couple hours this last week, and when I was going from place to place, either picking people or food up, I had a bluetooth headset synced up to an ipad. I used a voice to text program and was able to get a decent amount of writing done. Granted, sometimes the program didn’t get the right words written, but the goal is to write, and that I did. I can always go in and edit everything afterwards. I will definitely be doing this even while I’m watching my girls, a sentence here or there is going to do wonders in getting my next book done.

My anxiety at the moment comes from getting into school this fall semester as an in-state resident. The bureaucracy of the school I’m going to is valid, but it just takes a while to get my application in because of short staff, I’m guessing. The short version of the story is, I put in an in-state application, out of state, a little over a year ago, but didn’t know I needed to do another once I lived in the state for over a year. And well, I just put it in a few weeks ago. I am hoping I can get in this fall semester because doing 6 credits every semester is going to take a while to get my bachelor’s degree in game design, even with previous credits from a former bachelor’s degree ( I don't have to do many generals, thank goodness). 

Here's to hoping you, and I, have a great week in the near future!

Sincerely,

Kurt Jensen