No, losing the entire blog yesterday wasn’t nearly aggravation enough. My Sunday has thus far consisted of the following:

• Fitful, intermittent bouts of sleep…
• Fitful, intermittent bouts of wakefulness, punctuated by…
• Eruptions of cat vomit…
• Dead bird on the carpet (gift from cat, no doubt to apologize for vomiting)…
• Computer showing fewer signs of life than dead bird (took over an hour to boot; it’s time to reformat the hard disk and reinstall everything, sigh)…
• Deafening fire alarm going off for no reason throughout entire building for half an hour, and…
• More cat vomit!

What’s not to be thankful for?

If your childhood took place during the 1950s, you may be amazed to discover that the following 58 seconds of music are hard-coded into your brain and that you can hum or whistle along without missing a note or a beat. If you’re of a later generation, you may still recognize it, and there’s a decent chance you’ll laugh out loud when you hear it.

Everything got deleted.

Almost everything got restored.  The last couple of days’ posts and comments were lost, unfortunately.

I’ll have the place back in order shortly, I hope.

Thursday morning, I spoke to the transplant coordinator at the UCLA Heart & Lung Transplant Center.

Their committee was satisfied with the results of the latest angiogram and has approved me as a transplant candidate.

I am, however, not yet on the waiting list. That should happen next week, after the coordinator confers with Blue Cross.

I’ll keep you informed.

Everything I’m reading about the implementation of list- and outline-numbering in Microsoft Word is leading me to believe that there is no practical way to implement a truly automated comic book writing template for that program. I may already have taken the project as far as it can go in Word. One article *on Microsoft’s own site* claims the numbering scheme in Word creates so much havoc that some corporations have either refused to update their software beyond Word 97 or have switched to WordPerfect.

At the same time, I’m discovering that something may have gone wrong with the database for this blog — the database being the container for all the content — and I can’t figure out how to fix it. Whatever the damn problem is, it’s preventing me from making some changes and enhancements here that might really be fun for all of us. The solution may be to restart the blog at a new URL and just let this location continue to exist as an archive. Unless I can somehow import the current content into a new database, that’s what will have to happen.

Starting weight: 215

Previous weight: 205.5

Current weight: 219

(No, that’s not a typo; it’s the fucking prednisone. In one week, I *gained* 13.5 pounds. If my apartment weren’t on the first floor, I’d be jumping out a window right now.)

Very tired, so this will be short…

The way to make the Word Comic Book Script Template work is, I think, with a list-numbering scheme. It’s both much simpler and more frustrating than I realized. The setup is a bit crazy, because list number styles in Word are apparently *document*-based rather than *template*-based. They don’t seem to carry over automatically from one document to another based on the same template. On the other hand, once the styles have been set up in the document, they do seem to simplify matters considerably, and various users have made macros available on the net to accomplish the necessary setup. I may try putting together a prototype template that functions this way for the next Doctor Fate script, just to see if I can really make it work.

The prednisone is making my vision blurry.

I think I’m going to take the rest of the night off.

One word: prednisone.

Inflammation in the lungs.

I’m dreading Wednesday morning’s encounter with the scale.

Maybe.

The past few days, between pages and panels, I’ve been investigating an area of Microsoft Word that I never completely understood: its outlining and numbering functions. It was reassuring to discover that the *reason* I never understood these functions is that they operate in a very odd and anti-intuitive manner. They’re easy enough to use for bulleted lists, conventional outlines, or legal numbering, but try to apply them to a comic book script with enumerated story pages, panels, and balloons — each with different paragraph types and numbering styles — and that seeming ease of operation instantly evaporates into esoterica.

Esoterica — but not impossibility.

I think I’m *beginning* to see how these functions could be made to work in a comic book writing template that, unlike my previous efforts, would be truly automated, renumbering panels and balloons on the fly, with no input necessary from the user.

Since “the user” of my templates has typically been *me*, and I’m an incredibly lazy person, this notion holds considerable appeal.

I’ll let you know how the investigation and subsequent programming, if any, progresses.

Starting weight: 215

Previous weight: 210

Current weight: 205.5

(These first pounds are the easy ones, of course. I’ll be astonished if the weight loss continues at this pace.)