Pieces Of My Mind... Thankfully None Are The Last One

What is on my mind?  Things on my mind right now are my glacially slow progress on my book, my "i" conversion, and the sad state of the potential Republican presidential ticket along with the dismal prospect of four more years of the empty suit in the White House.  I'll address each of these briefly.

Where am I in my book?  Only 5,000 words further than the last time I wrote about it.  I crossed the 20,000 work mark a few days ago.  I got nothing done during the holidays except trying to twist the entire storyline into something I thought my potential readers (both of them) would like better than what I have now.  I finally rejected the idea, as it stole a core conflict from the midst of the narrative and the story became weak and uninteresting (to me anyway).  So I am back on my original track, and writing a little here and there.  I have revised more words than I wrote new in the past few weeks and that is bad, as I should be concentrating on putting words in, not taking them out or changing them yet.  I hope to pick up the pace soon.

And now my comments on the sad, sad state of the potential Republican presidential ticket.  We are left with (in my opinion) a somewhat electable candidate with whom I have major policy conflicts and LOTS of doubt about, and two mostly unelectable candidates that I have more common thoughts with, but still have serious misgivings about.  If I have to hold my nose and punch my ticket for Mitt Romney I will, but seriously, I lost all real faith that the empty suit can be tossed out of the White House on his ear when Hermann Cain dropped out.  That was a well-orchestrated attack from liberals and criminals (am I being redundant?) to push him out of the race.  I was excited for him as he picked up steam early on and I was ready to vote for him, but sadly conservatives don't get the free passes in their personal lives like liberals do, so out he went amid the firestorm of accusations.

If Newt Gingrich can gain the nomination, I would vote for him, but I am afraid I would be in the minority and we all would have to endure another four years of economic, political, and judicial failure.  Between failed "stimulus plans" (read tax increases), more weak, sniveling foreign policy, criminals and liars continuing to lead the Justice Department, and the possibility to swing the Supreme Court even further toward the left, Obama's second four years could be even worse than his first four and the bar is astronomically high there.  As someone has already said, Republicans may have to "take their castor oil" and vote for Mitt Romney.  Since there are no real conservatives left in the GOP field with Cain gone, I could almost say one is no better than another so pick the one that can win.

On a more positive and sunny topic, I have recently received an iPad and a MacBook Pro laptop at work.  I actually requested them.  I am VERY happy with my MBP and surprisingly I stay in OS-X most of the time.  I haven't even loaded Windows on it yet.  It is so much easier to do many things I need to do on the network in OS-X than in Windows.  Most of my management interfaces are web-based, so the operating system is not really an issue.  Full-screen applications, intuitive gestures, and excellent performance all have me pretty excited about my MBP.  I am similarly impressed, but not as excited about my iPad.  I requested it so that I could help troubleshoot network issues revolving around them (the number of which seem to grow everyday) and while some things are nice about it, my Viewsonic gTablet is still the tablet I use most of the time.

Well, I have ranted all I am going to for now.  I hope to update you soon and say I have gotten 5,000 more words into my book, but on my other major topic, we will all most likely have to wait until the RNC convention to find out if we have the possibility for a real president for the next four years.

P.S. You might have noticed that I didn't even mention chess... that is because I haven't played since late November or early December.  That is sad.