The time when I broke the rules that I had set

On Wednesday and Thursday I broke a couple of my rules, creating a slump like a sagging mattress in the middle of the week.

Wanting to do a good job on my first story for Healthline.com, I stayed up way too late Wednesday working on it, then ate ice cream, then wrote and rewrote the story in my dreams and woke up feeling terrible. Then tried to work on it some more on Thursday but had to go back to sleep, and didn't do any of the exercise I had planned.

So: Rule number 1, disregarded: Get off the computer at a reasonable hour because working on a computer at night can disrupt sleep. When I had a "real" job at The Republican, I might have taken my work home with me in terms of thinking about it or jotting some thoughts down, but I couldn't lug the computer home with me. Having a laptop is great but the downside is that it can lure you back in at all hours.

Rule number 2, disregarded: Get some exercise every day.

I felt like I had a hangover.

Actually, I had a headache, which is ironic, because my assignment was, "What to do if your teen has a migraine."

On top of all of this, I misunderstood the assignment. I covered all the information that the editor wanted but I didn't understand that the story was supposed to follow an exact format, which you can see from this example that the editor sent me. Instead, I wrote it as I would have written it for the paper, as a personal story-driven narrative. They want to do more personal story-driven narratives, but only if the assignment specifies that format. I stayed up late doing the wrong thing.

She was nice about it, though. She asked me for my bibliography, which I sent immediately, and said she would go over it on Monday and see what we could do about getting it in the format she wanted. This will be a good gig once I have figured out how to write each story according to prescribed formats. It's hard when you have been doing a certain kind of writing for 30 years. If I look at how much I made on the story, it was probably around a penny an hour.

Also, technical problems were making me pull my hair out and do a nervous habit that I have which is picking at the thingies on my hands. I was trying to hyperlink in Word to the websites that I was using. But it would not let me copy and paste. I did what Joe told me, looking up, I can't paste a live URL into my word docs and I tried the solutions...which didn't work. I sent her the text in an email so that I could put in the links.

I thought of making a Genius Bar appointment at the Apple Store but when I wrote in what the problem was, I saw that I can schedule a call. Last time I called, the phone genius solved a problem for me so that is on my list to do before tomorrow, unless George Delisle reads this and figures it out. I miss being at the paper and yelling, "GEORGE!" or walking out back and finding him and being so relieved when he solved my computer problems. I miss those days.