This is really, really hard for me to do.

Yesterday I banged out 15 pages or so of a special project (you’ll hear more about it in a month), and forgot to ice my arm.

I. Am. An. Idiot.

My wrist and hand hurt so bad last night that they kept me awake. I finally fell asleep when I told my arm “fine, I’m listening to you. Tomorrow I shall draw NOTHING.”

My arm feels better today, and I want to finish that project, but instead I’m going to take it easy and work on non-hand tasks like “pricing t-shirts” and “pondering accountancy.” The good news is that typing seems to have no effect at all. I could blog for hours if I felt so inclined.

Tonight is RPG night for me down at Dragons Keep. I’ll go in early, and maybe I’ll bring the hot glue gun, some pick-foam, and see about building trays for miniatures. But only because I know I can drive the hot glue gun left-handed…

It’s possible that I’ll be taking a hand-break until the middle of next week, or even later. Fortunately I have a big old buffer for just this kind of occasion. Unfortunately the Bonus Story for the next book isn’t going to draw itself.

This morning was spent verifying my existing backups and creating new ones. Long story short: I dodged a bullet.

My Retrospect Backup probably would have worked for a volume restore (volume data in the database looked up-to-date), but file-level backups weren’t showing anything newer than late 2005. Screw THAT. I want my files backed up as files, thankyouverymuch.

So… I purged some high-density clutter on the hard drive to free space up, then defragged the hard drive to accelerate things. Then I wiped the Retrospect backup and uninstalled Retrospect Express. I then manually copied my data from C: to F: — there’s about 90gb of the stuff. 30 gigs is music, and another 32 gigs is Schlock-specific files.

With that complete I grabbed my layered Photoshop files — “source code” if you will — for all the Schlock books and backed those up to a series of DVDs. Thanks for that link, johnridley! I decided to go with DVD+R, rather than the stack of 40 -R discs I’ve got kicking around. Those -R discs are destined to have Doctor Who episodes burned onto them by a friend.

The crisis has been averted, but I’ll be needing serious hard-disk space in the next six months. Fortunately, I now have time to relax and plan for it, rather than panicking.

(I did all my panicking last night.)

There I was, zipping along the freeway at about 70mph, minding my own business, keeping my eye on the road, and all of a sudden the road gets kind of rough. I crane my neck and see that some damn fool has gone and laid an entire brick wall across the road, not five gigabytes from my current position.

End of metaphor.

Yeah, I’m almost out of disk space. I’m down to 5gigs on a 140gig drive. Yeek!

Apparently I chew up a whole pile of the stuff every time I crank out a new Schlock image in Photoshop. Fortunately, I’ve got cycles tomorrow to burn some things to DVD (twice!) and then purge them from the hard drive. I’ll be starting with all the files I used for Book I and Book II (the stuff I need for creating the next book has already been copied to a new folder).

It may be time to upgrade the hard drive to something larger, but that means also upgrading the backup drive to something similarly larger, so that each week I know there are at least two copies of All My Hard Work.

Anyway, while I’m backing up things I’m deleting I’ll also be backing up things I’m keeping, and hauling one copy of each down to the safe deposit box. It’s been 18 months since I last did that. Time to do it again.

Blah, blah, blah, I hate being sick, blah, blah. You’ve heard this before. Many of you have said this before.

Today I jacked myself up on Dayquil, Vitamin C, and caffeine, and proceeded to color a Sunday and a half, script a week, and then pencil a week. I even went out in public, doing the pencilling at Dragons Keep.

At the time I left for the Keep I was exhausted, but I really WANTED to keep working. I fooded, drinked, and then knuckled down and got to work. I LIKE working. I don’t WANT to be sick. And before long I didn’t really feel like I was.

I also iced my arm twice during the pencilling session — that has little or nothing to do with the sick, and everything to do with the tendonitis. It helped a lot on that front. Also, the naproxen seems to be working better than the ibuprofen did.

I’m home again, and I’m probably going to finish up that last Sunday strip. I’ve taken to coloring with episodes of Tom Baker’s Doctor Who playing in one corner of one of my two monitors. It slows down some operations noticably, but it keeps me in my seat.