I was all set to have myself the kind of writerly day that would make up for so many indiscretions–and there have been many. Hot baths that took so long they ended up using two entire hot water tanks full of water. Unplanned trips to the movies “to remind myself how plot rhythms are supposed to work.” Even the small, virtuous, innocent task of wiping off the kitchen counters that so easily turned into scrubbing the sink, recalking the tiles, and taking the bottom of the refrigerator apart to get every last dust bunny and dog hair and Lego out from underneath it–because, let’s face it, how can a person concentrate on writing a novel when there is dog hair underneath the refrigerator? Such a thing is laughably impossible.

Today was going to make up for all that.

I woke up feeling productive. It was raining outside, which is good, because then I wouldn’t imagine that I should go out for a short round of Healthful Exercise and end up walking five miles to the water, then needing to have a glass of iced tea as a reward, and then, because a person can’t walk five miles alone, sitting and talking to my friends downtown while I waited for my heart rate to stabilize, and then, as long as I’m downtown, I might as well pop into the bookstore just to see if they still have copies of my other books, and also check out what other books I might need to read to give me, you know, inspiration that books can get written…

None of that. Home all day.

At 9:30 a.m., I turned on the computer, only to be met with a screen that said I’d had this new computer for 14 days, and wouldn’t I like to create the Backup Recovery Disks now, so that when horrible things start to go wrong with it (and we all know they will, even the computer screen admitted as much), I will have something to fall back on, unlike when my last computer died, and I was left with nothing?

That sounded like a very nice idea, I thought…but no thank you, I have this novel to write…

Do you want to LOSE your novel when the next crash comes?

No.

It said: Okay then. Turn around three times, arrange 18 CDs in a row on the countertop, throw some salt over your left shoulder, salute, and count from 100 to 1–and prepare yourself to run back to the computer approximately every 10-20 minutes for the rest of the day, when you will be required either to put in a new disk, or to hear the bad news about how your last disk was inferior.

I called my son and whined. “Do I have to do this?”

He said I did. He is a Computer Genius, and he is very organized and mature, and he reminded me how much I lost on my old computer crash, and wouldn’t it have been swell, really really swell, to have Backup Recovery Disks on hand then? He thought it would only take an hour or two–and just think of how glad I would be, he said.

I am all for things that will make me glad later, although nine times out of ten, I will tend to vote for things that make me glad Right Now, which this did not. But I went anyway to the hardware store and bought the CDs required for this massive, very-good-for-me backup project, and then I came home and started feeding them to the computer at the proper intervals. I wasn’t sure if the computer was up to doing this hard job and working on my novel at the same time, and I didn’t want to risk its imploding on me prematurely by asking too much of its CPUs and hard drive.

And anyway, once you embark on one virtuous project, it’s difficult to know just how to stop, so I set to work cleaning and buffing all our scratched-up music CDs with toothpaste and a cotton pad.

 Yes, I know how weird this sounds. But I learned it from reading Real Simple magazine, whose editors make a habit of trying to clean things with any weird substance they can think of and then urging the rest of us to do the same. And they are always right! They are geniuses, these editors. Kool-aid can clean a dishwasher–but only lemon Kool-Aid. DO NOT TRY THIS WITH LIME KOOL-AID. Mayonnaise can get rid of those annoying adhesives. Vases dirty? Try throwing some eggshells inside them! Emery boards can get rid of stains! Chalk can keep your silver from tarnishing!

And it turns out that they were right! Scratched and battered CDs can be actually healed by placing a little dot of toothpaste (not gel kind, for God’s sake, the editors haven’t okayed the gel kind yet!) onto a cotton pad and then buffing the scratches of CD with it. I tried this first, just a desperate experiment with my Jack Johnson CD that I love, which was a total wreck, skipped all over the place–and now it plays beautifully, and so then I had to repair all the other misused CDs as well. (We have a lot of misused CDs because I cannot be trusted to put them back in their cases when I am done with them, and I let them ride around on the floor of the car, or I squeeze them in places with other CDs so they grind together. My children are always scolding me for this.) 

Six. Hours. Went. By.

I spent the entire time running back and forth to the computer and its incredible hunger for its required 18 CDs (and its judgmental barking: “This CD is inferior! Find another!”)–back to the kitchen sink, where I was making all the music in our house minty-fresh and tartar-free.

When the computer finally decided it had saved itself from potential sudden death, I got back on it and wrote three pages of my novel–which is all I really ask of myself in one day.

But it did seem, long ago this morning, as I was lying in bed thinking how productive this day could be, that I would be–oh, twenty pages farther along than I am right now. If you’d asked, though, if I expected to have such sweet-smelling, non-skipping CDs, I’d have had to say no, impossible.

One has to take one’s victories as they come, I suppose.