Dude. I live. Nothing bad to note (other than one hell of a windstorm last month, which tore back the roof membrane at work and let all 6.5” (16.5cm) of the rain that fell into the HVAC ducts and down the walls and yes that’s even worse than it sounds like it would be, but it feels like every time I reappear out of the woodwork I have some fucked-up weather event to share and at some point I’m either going to disappear off the face of the earth into some tornado or another, or y’all aren’t gonna believe me any more. But hey, did you see what the windstorm did to the Nebraska Penitentiary?? At least we still have our roof!), and I was going to say nothing exciting has happened but then I went and typed that parenthetical which would put that to lie.
Anyhoo.
I’m poking at my fic again, although not quite in the traditional manner. I’m not going redo the whole damn thing this way; I don’t even know if I’ll make it through the first chapter. But I got the silly thing cleaned up and fixed, and it seemed appropriate to type my story.
(Just ignore the damn mess, I know perfectly well it’s there. 😝)
For the curious, this was my grandfather’s typewriter. I think he used it maybe twice, based on the complete lack of dirt & etc. It’s a Hermes Rocket (you can find some info about it here and a bit more here), which is a portable typewriter. If you know much about or have handled the old typewriters, you’ll see how small it is.
One (well, several) of the things that got sacrificed to make it small are some of the keys. You might notice the complete lack of the number 1, although there is a key for ½ / ¼. Which confuses the heck out of me, but maybe halves and quarters were really important to people who used portable typewriters? There’s also a cent symbol (¢) which is fucking cool. Don’t get me wrong, the ½ and ¼ are cool as well! But I have to type a ', back up, and then type a . to make an exclamation point. And the ' is on the 8 key, so I randomly end up with a ¢ instead of '.
However, my finger strength is gonna be hella good if I do this for long. I’d forgotten how heavy the act of typing is on these things. O.o
