I did win at NaNo.  I finished later this year than usual, but if you follow NaNo at all, you know that doesn’t matter. You have until midnight in your timezone on November 30 to finish and win.  What are some other notes to commemorate the end of NaNo?

I used the Beta 3 version of Scrivener for Windows on my tired, six year old Windows laptop.  Beta 1 was CPU intensive for a couple of reasons, but Beta 3 was very smooth.  If you’re a Windows die hard and don’t want to switch to a Mac just to use Scrivener, this software is for you.

I finished and uploaded my file to the NaNo counter late Sunday night.  Monday morning, I removed the first half of the book, because I switched gears midway.  I now have about 27k of words that I may be able to use.  I saved the deleted words.  They’re just not in the draft.

I had to come up to Central TX today to pick up mail and arrange to have it held for a few more days.  We’re not quite done with what we need to get done in San Antonio.  As I was making the turn to come into town, the truck beeped with an error of “Transmission Malfunction.”  I stopped at the house, unloaded the truck, and drove it the 15 miles to the Ford dealer who was too swamped with work to even put the machine on the truck to read the code for the problem.  The tech did tell it me it was probably safe to drive.  The error code did not come back on during the trip over or back.

My original plan was to wait for mail delivery on Wednesday, drive to Temple, get my blood drawn for my doctor appointment next week, then head home down I-35.  I’m going to attempt to do that.  This is where I’m thankful for two things.  First for purchasing extended warranty.  At 53,000 miles, I’m 3,000 miles into it, and if the transmission eats itself, the warranty will have paid for itself. Second, I’m thankful it’s a Lincoln.  They have a toll-free number and will send a tow truck to get it to a dealer.  I’ve already used this service twice, and it works great — right after I bought it when the transmission cable fell off as I was backing out of my driveway and earlier this year when the battery died (new vehicles become boat anchors when the battery dies).  Both fixed were covered under the original factory warranty.

Naturally, I hope it makes it back to San Antonio where I can deal with my service guy (who is fantastic) at my dealer (who is also fantastic).

Did I mention that we’re keeping this guy:

We’re calling him Tarzan.  Hubby said he almost killed both kittens today.  Tarzan and his sister, Mugsy,  climbed to the top of their crate (from the outside) and demolished a jigsaw puzzle we were working on.  I’m pretty sure Mugsy was the ringleader — she is most adventurous.  Hubby said pieces were everywhere.  I avoided mentioning that he encourages them to be creative, so they must have figured this was one more toy he created for them.

Since my laptop is six years old and starting to show signs of maybe not being reliable, I’ve decided to replace it with an 11.6″ Mac Air.  The Sony has 1M RAM and a 40G hard drive.  The Air has 2G RAM and a 64G solid state drive.  The only thing it lacks to be competitive with my Sony is a DVD read/write drive, and in the six years I’ve owned the Sony, I don’t think I’ve used it once.  In every other way, it’s competitive with or superior to my Sony and cost 1/3 as much.  UPS delivers it tomorrow.  I’m looking forward to trying this one out.