Fun times, phone times.

So, our hot water heater shut itself off again sometime between Saturday and Sunday. Since this time it had the good grace to do it at a time that doesn’t coincide with an impending seaboard-paralyzing blizzard with attendant actual plumbing and heating emergencies plus travel impediments, it will probably take less than a week to get a plumber in. On the other hand, since this is twice in such rapid succession that the cutoff has been tripped, I presume it will call for more than resetting the breaker. So who knows what the situation will be there.

Also yesterday, my phone died on me completely. I had it in the pocket of my jacket. I looked at it just before getting up from the dinner table and it worked fine and had a sufficiency of charge. A few minutes later, I tried turning it on in the living room and got nothing. Wouldn’t tap on. Wouldn’t respond to the power button. Wouldn’t respond to a USB cord being plugged in. Wouldn’t respond to inputs from the headphones. Wouldn’t do a soft reset. Wouldn’t even come on for a hard reset. Left it charging for a while, no change.

Even though my phone, like so many phones these days, is not designed for the battery to be consumer accessible, the next step in my general troubleshooting flowchart was “remove and re-seat the battery”. So I figured out how to take it apart (that took some doing) and how to re-seat the battery (that took even more doing), and when that produced no change, I started delving deeper and discovered a loose connection, which I fixed. Lo and behold, it turned on.

I’m sure I voided the warranty seventeen ways to Sunday doing that, though I did plan on replacing my phone within half a year anyway. I feel like I might have to be prepared to move that timetable up a bit as my ability to patch up the interior of an electronic device does have limits. My phone is insured, so I could have gotten a comparable replacement for cheap, but I kind of have an inverse psychological version of the serenity prayer going. In order to accept that I can’t change the water heater, I had to have something that I can change, and I can troubleshoot an electronic device.

On the subject of acceptance and change: I have sold more copies of my D&D stuff with less advertising effort than I have ever sold of anything else in the same timeframe. Even ignoring all of the sales of the $1 “feat value pack” thing I made specifically to break into the top 10/top 5 (it’s still in the top 10, and has been intermittently in the top 5 for most of the days it’s been out), this is true. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this, as my most successful work has always been gamer-related, and I have spent the vast majority of my life immersing myself in RPG design for free, but it’s still  a bit of a revelation. It also does a lot to kick latent impostor syndrome to the curb. I’ve been a little apologetic about how much of my output right now is D&D stuff, but man… it’s fun and it looks like it has the potential to pay the bills. If nothing else, embracing that will mean that the energy and spoons and creative cycles I spend dithering over how much is too much will be freed up for other things.