blissmorgan

So, I am writing today's entry using the voice dictation capability found in a Google doc. I did not know that this was a thing, until I was posting on Facebook about what had happened to my hand and one of my friends said something about installing voice-to-text software on my computer I replied how great that would be and they messaged me privately to tell me how to activate the voice to text capability in Google Docs.

It has its ups and downs. It is really nice to be able to just talk clearly to my computer and see the words appearing on the screen in the way that I had dreamed of being able to do some 20 and 25 years ago when this sort of Technology was still either just a Daydream, or in process but extremely expensive to procure. And now, here it is. On my computer, for free, no big deal, just open the thing and turn it on and Away you go.

It has some Oddity to it in terms of what it decides to capitalize. I haven't exactly figured out what it's criteria are for when to capitalize a word in the middle of a sentence. Capitalizing Google Docs makes sense, of course - it is the name of the service I am using to create this text. However, technology daydream and Oddity as well as away are all just regular words and I'm not sure if they got capitalize due to Something in the way the program works or if it has something to do with my tone of voice ellipsis I just haven't figured it out yet.

It's weird trying to figure out what punctuation this can handle. Obviously, it handles commas and periods without a problem - it also inserts hyphens where I want them to. It's interesting to see that somehow my use of the names of those particular punctuation worked in such a way - maybe from the way I said it? - that for the purposes of that sentence I was able to talk about them in words as opposed to having them inserted. I haven't been able to get it to use quotation marks yet, and I don't know how to make it do a carriage return or how to backspace or delete a word or words. However, these are relatively minor quibbles that I still yet met figure out, and until then I am content to use the keyboard at least a little bit to make it happen.

For now, I am going to leave all this as written, with the odd capitalization and with whatever incorrect words the service has put in in place of my own words I I am wondering if it is learning software. That is, I am wondering if, the more I use it, the more it will train translating properly from my voice into the text what it is that I am actually saying.

for now, this is okay.

Anywho, the spawn are in school and hated, and I am basically ready for work. Showering with one hand is hard, but by the grace of curly hair and a stick of deodorant I have declared myself not in need of a shower today, and got dressed before I came down to get anyone up for school. This means that I have a little more time than usual before I need to go to work, and normally I would sit here, make this post, and then entertain myself for another half hour with personal Pursuits - be they online, physically creative, or both. However with my hand borked, there is not really a lot I can do in terms of creative Pursuits, and I'm getting really tired of sitting on my ass on my computer. Therefore, today I am going to exercise personal responsibility for my vehicle. I am going to stop at the car place down the street from my work, where they took care of my exhaust problem for $150 instead of several thousand dollars a couple months ago, and have them replace the bulb in one of my headlights. This is technically a problem that I could fix myself however I was not feeling super interested in doing it even before this flare up in my hand, and now I am really full of nope about it. I am hitting a point where I in my knowledge of how to do or fix things on my own, and picking certain things that I know on the list and finding it worthwhile to pay for someone else to do on my behalf. Clearly, All Things Considered, having somebody else do this thing for me is worth my money.

It is nice having enough money that paying someone else to do a relatively small vehicular repair for me is actually an option that does not require re juggling my entire budget for the next 3 months.

In other money-related news I got the texts yesterday from TurboTax that both my federal and my state return have been accepted by their respective agencies, and so now I am on deposit watch, waiting to see each of those drop in. I decided to throw them both directly into my savings. That is in itself kind of a weird feeling for me - not only is this the first time in basically a decade when I actually have a tax return that I needed to even do at all, but this is the first time I can remember ever where I have gotten a tax return and had not already mentally spent it on something - anyting - before it even showed up in my bank account. Not that it was very much in my early and mid-twenties, mind you. Those returns were always very small enough for a nice lunch and perhaps a pair of shoes, something like that. In my later twenties when I was married and filing with my husband our returns were bigger, and those returns always ended up going into bigger purchases such as a dining room set a living room set bunk beds for the children dot-dot-dot guitars... That kind of thing.

I really like being able to build up a savings, you guys. It's like every deposit I put in that account is rapping a sick blanket around the head of some tiny awful person who has always been in the back of my head screaming, and I don't think they'll ever stop screaming and I don't think they'll go away, but I don't have to hear them constantly all the time at least not right now. is this what people mean when they talk about finding peace? Maybe. I think this is what people mean when they argue that yes, money can, in fact, buy happiness. money buying happiness doesn't mean purchasing things. Money buying happiness means having enough to know that when things go wrong, it isn't going to ruin your entire life.

I just want you to know that this voice-to-text thing does not in fact translate sniffling noises into any kind of text, so that's cool.

I am still waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in this morning, but that is neither here nor there in terms of getting things done. I am going to go do the needful thing now, and then get myself to work, where I will continue to do my darndest to learn how to write left-handed. Happily, it is mostly just numbers plus a few brief letters that I really need to be able to write, so I think I am slowly improving bit by bit just through repetition. it would be a lot worse if I were supposed to be writing entire contiguous sentences.

Hello blisstopia.