Lazy writer is lazy

Not really; I currently churn out fanfic at an alarming rate. Seriously, I've produced about 70,000 words since August, so I feel no guilt whatsoever about ignoring all the NaNo mails. Even less guilt if I actually use November to finish and revise last year's NaNovel, which is Original and, I hope, will at some point be publishable.

But I've been writing very little about real life. So I'll throw a couple of bulletpoints into the ether. I may expand on them later on, or not, or in comments, or whatever -- but at least that way, I won't really forget it.

-- Desaster in the boiler room. The ventile on the exhauster of the heating system burst, which made the heating system drip water until the exhauster came off entirely, flooding the boiler room.
On the plus side, we're having a warm October so we're not desperately dependent on the heat. I mean, it could've happened in January. On the minus side, the same system is responsible for our hot water. Not so bad for us, because we have an old electric boiler in the downstairs bathroom so we can still take hot showers; worse for the tenants, who have no electric boiler and only get cold showers. (Lukewarm while the solar system on the barn roof is still in action.)
Really bad: It's not just the exhauster that needed repairing, because thanks to the flooding, the electronic control panel gave up its ghost. It has now been replaced, but now it's turned out that the compressor has also suffered damaged and also needs to be replaced -- well, it's not over yet. Hurrah.

-- Swimming teacher drama. Felix is currently taking a toddler swimming class, which doesn't actually mean swimming but fun game-like exercises in the swimming pool that will supposedly help kids to save themselves or at least keep themselves from drowning until help arrives, should they fall into a swimming pool. Sensible enough.
It's just that Felix doesn't (yet) care for most of the exercises. Unfortunately, the swimming teacher is convinced that a two-year old must follow unfamiliar instructions and if he protests, that's just a tantrum. After a particularly dramatic teacher-induced tantrum, she spouted some pseudo-pedagogic bullshitand made a lot of suggestions that I knew I could not follow (I'm not gonna ignore my kid when he's panicking in the swimming pool, even if I know that he cannot possibly drown
Fortunately, the week after that, she agreed that if Felix didn't want to do the exercises, he could just sit on the stairs and watch. Felix spent the entire hour walking up and down the stairs, squatting down and very slowly submerging his hands and wrists and elbow and shoulders, clearly experimenting with the sensation of different depths of water. Whenever the swimming teacher came closer, you could see his face twist... but she left us alone for the most part. I hope it stays that way, until Felix decides that he'd like to try the "fun" games too.

-- Varroa infestation. In summer, my bees were practically varroa-free; unfortunately, the darn mites have increased insanely in fall. I've already treated my colonies with formic acid, which made them shed dead mites like crazy, but there shouldn't have been so many in the first place. Damn. Now I can just hope that they still have enough intact winter bees to make it through, well, winter. :(

-- Computer argh. Jörg's computer has been slow and stupid for a long time, but then it suddenly stopped working altogether. Normally, Jörg has enough computer parts lying around for makeshift solutions, but now he hadn't, so we actually had to take the computer to a local repair shop. Well, it turned out that the graphics board had committed suicide, but once that was replaced, Jörg also found a friendly virus (which explains why the computer has behaving more stupid than usual in the past weeks, haha). It ended with the full format-and-start-over routine. Particularly helpful since there are a lot of bills that need to be paid and the tax declaration to prepare. (Well, the tax declaration has been waiting since at least March, and Jörg never got around to doing it, so I suppose this was the universe's way of telling him that he waited too long.)

-- Oh, and we're again/still broke. Have been ever since the big renovation in the tenants' part of the house last year, which I also didn't blog about, and holy crap, that was a bloggable piece of drama that really should be documented somewhere, but I can't be bothered now. Suffice it to say that it completely blew our resources, and to make matter nicer, the old tenants afterwards decided to move home, and it took us half a year to find new tenants, which means half a year of no rent, which isn't helping if you're already broke. Well, it isn't helping if the heating system breaks down, either. Or if the computer acts up. Or if I'm too stupid to parallel park and make a dent into our car's bumper (fortunately, the opponent was a brick wall, which didn't take damage). The bumper is plastic crap, so it broke in one single spot, which means the entire thing has to be replaced. -- Actually, now I remember why I haven't posted about most real life stuff, because it's just too frustrating to think, let alone write about.

-- Oh well. At least the bout of hormone-/whatever-induced out-of-breathness and exhaustion is mostly over. That is, I need a lot of sleep, but at least I feel awake after that. Seems to have been fixed by a combination of sunlight and more meat on the menu. Maybe it just was last week's cleaning spree (on Sunday, we had visitors who'd never seen the house before, and I didn't want them to get too horrible an impression). And a lack of iron, of course. ;)