Two days ago I created the storyboard for the final pages of my third book. I can post the pictures now that I’ve finally figured out how to use the Mac Screenshot tool. My frustration level is now so low that I’ve stopped quivering and whining about macOS.

My job as a part-time, temporary substitute project manager will be ending on May 31. It won’t start up again for three months. During the hiatus I’ll be free to finish the book I started writing and drawing 18 months ago. Hardly a day has passed that I haven’t given it some time, my daily inch of progress. In those 18 months I’ve created a monumental number of sketches, experiments, and failures. I’m hoping those failures have been my Art School of Hard Knocks. I’m optimistically believing that I’ve learned something that will help me work more efficiently on my next Jimmy Jay book — Jimmy Jay and the Dolphin Who Took on the Robots. That’s going to be the working title that will inspire me for the next year.

I’m going through Windows withdrawal as I’m moving Clip Studio Paint over to my Mac. Pain, pain, pain…

At least I’ve got Emacs and VirtualBox working. Photoshop is okay, and Clip Studio Paint EX is here, but all of my settings didn’t make it through the migration. Pain, pain, pain…

I tried to make a screenshot using the Mac screenshot tool to show my storyboard for the final pages of book 3. Tthough I was told the image would be saved on the Desktop, it ain’t there. Pain, pain, pain!

Enough whining for one day.

My right eye doesn’t seem any better today than it was yesterday. I’ve been told it may take up to two months to heal. So be it…

Switching from Windows to macOS is driving me nuts. Programs that are supposed to “just work” are not working. Emacs, which I rely on for technical writing (nothing to do with my art projects) is giving me a depressingly bad time. To regain my sanity, I decided to install VirtualBox and run Emacs in Linux…but Monterey doesn’t support VirtualBox in a simple way. It took 2 hours of hacking to get it working. Monterey is so paranoid it’s putting me into a bad mood.

On the other hand, while my eye (the right one) is healing, I need a temporary pair of glasses with a special prescription. Unfortunately, simple dollar store reading glasses won’t work. I eventually decided to buy some prescription glasses online from Zenni.

I want to do more work on my iPad and iMac. Although I’m happy when working with Windows, just moving an image from the iPad to the Windows machine is a pain. Understand, I have a 2017 iMac with an awesome 27-inch screen to work with. It may be slightly slower than my PC, but I can airdrop images to it, which saves me the time that I would spend uploading an image to iCloud, then downloading it to my PC. In other words, the simpler workflow saves me time and lowers the aggravation level, which makes me a happier, though struggline, novice writer.

Today I had cataract surgery. The ophthalmologist removed the cloudy lens in my right lens and replaced it with an acrylic lens. I had been dreading this surgery for years. The thought of someone cutting my eye with a razor-sharp diamond scalpel was more than I could deal with.

Afraid as I was of surgery, I was also afraid of not being able to drive at night. Night driving had become a frightening ordeal .When you have a full blown cataract, the glare of oncoming headlines turns the darkness into a wall of white light, which is not fun when you’re driving on a two-lane highway.. I scoured youtube for cataract surgery videos. As my ignorance of cataracts diminished, I was able to schedule surgery for my eye.

Lots of chores this week. Because I’m having eye surgery tomorrow (Monday), I have to get a head start on the workflow of my part-time job. I spent most of this morning loading two days of work into the system so that it can be released automatically Monday evening and Tuesday evening. I should be able to work by Wednesday, if all goes well.

esides preparing stuff for my job, I did some cooking for next week’s fine dining. The main dish was a vegan “loaf”, what some vegans would call a “no-meat loaf”. I prefer to simply call it a loaf. My loaf is actually a kind of moist bread made with oatmeal, walnuts, quinoa, and kidney beans. Beside the loaf, I made a tomato sauce and a cheese-y sauce. There I go — breaking my own rule. I use cheese-y because it’s a lot easier than saying onion, red bell pepper, and nutritional yeast based sauce. /p>

Today’s chore were:

• weeding the backyard “lawn”. I call it a “lawn” because the ground is covered with weeds that look like grass until they become obnoxious weeds. Today we used brute force to dig them out. My fear is that all of the billions of tiny roots they left behind will have their revenge next spring.

• doing laundry

• washing clothes

That’s it for today.

Still trying to make my characters cuter. It ain’t easy…for me, at least. The formula seems to be big head, big eyes, rounded features, no straight lines, short noses. What i’m really missing is cute gestures!