Motivation to Catch Up and Awesomeness Abound

Day Nine: 570 of 50,000 words (eek!)

Note: This blog post was going to be about a clever strategy to motivate me to catch up. But instead, it’s more about how my boyfriend is in the Awesome League of Awesome.*

Yes, I’m finally feeling better after a week of being as good as dead. I don’t think I’ve been that sick in a long time – not even my month of swine flu in ’08 was a match. But I’m finally ambulatory, upright, breathing, and unfevered. And watching hours of Buffy never did anyone any harm.

I’m back and ready for action.

And oh, so very behind.

I decided today that I need a strategy to get caught back up – something to push me forward and make me want it. And if you’re a Mac fan, you know that the new iPad release was announced on the seventh of this month.

My boyfriend is basically the tech genius who helps me make decisions on all things, well, tech. So my thinking was this: I’d just hand my money to him and let him buy whatever he thought I’d need and could afford. That way, I can write and he can purchase the iPad to meet my needs and then hold it over my head (or post pictures on facebook of him licking it or whatever) and keep me writing. Until this month’s word count is in, no iPad for me.

As a bit of back story, I’ve been wanting an iPad since maybe November last year. Mostly, I want it to write with so I don’t dislocate my shoulder humping my macbook around busy cafes hoping for an empty seat near a wall socket. And thanks to some really generous Christmas contributions, earlier this year I found myself in a position of being able to afford one. Of course, I had to wait until the new model was released, then I could buy an old one on the cheap – unless the new iPad is just too sweet.

And of course, the new iPad is pretty damn sweet. Decisions need to be made, research to be done.

I have no time.

So I asked my boyfriend to take over, make the decision, then use my pending new toy as ransom for words – 50,000 of them.

He agreed immediately. (This is where I should have become suspicious.)

Anyway, we hung out tonight at Barnes and Noble reading magazines and books and the like, then dropped by my house so he could fix my wi-fi (he’s my tech guy, remember) and I could hand over the iPad cash before I lost my resolve and ran off to buy whatever iPad I could get immediately.

Wi-fi handily reconfigured, I handed him an envelope with around $580 inside. And he showed me a receipt on his iPhone. From the seventh. For two matching 64 gig iPads. (For those who don’t know, that’s as good as they get.)

He anticipated that I’d probably come to him for advice, and he decided to beat me to the punch and buy me an upgrade. He knew I’d go for the cheaper option if left to my own devices.

It’s not the first time he’s given me a surprise so awesome that I cried. Probably won’t be the last.

And that’s how I’ve been upstaged by my boyfriend.

Without whom, I probably wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing. More on that this weekend though – a writing tool I have to talk about: find a friendly bully.

Goodnight, all. I have some serious writing to do.

*If you don’t get this reference, find your nearest geek, have them slap you upside the head, and then go watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. You can thank me later.