What You Want, Baby I Got It

It's oppressively muggy outside today. It's only about 70 degrees, but walking from the bus stop to work soaked my jacket. Blegh. I guess I won't be enjoying a fine round of mini-golf with stickypawz again today. He'd absolutely melt in this kind of weather.

Went to Wal-Mart to pick up cookies that you can only get at Wal-Mart, unfortunately. And more tea, which you can never have quite enough of. My little tea cozy is stacked with 16 different types of tea and an 8-pack herbal sampler generously donated to me by prismo, so I think I'll be good on tea for oh, the rest of the year. I also picked up the soundtrack to "The Village," which has amazing violins. It's the best score I've heard for a very long time, actually.

Got the usual "This needs work." update from Charles. He gave me the go-ahead to increase my hours at the Bookshop, so starting next week I'll have a full 40 hours. If I can get that raise he dangled in front of my nose in a couple weeks in addition to that, my financial situation should be looking up quite a bit here in a little while. Who knows, I might even actually be able to start saving money again! *knock on wood*

My throat feels wrong today, which is always the sign of impending illness. I'm going to be sticking to tea and soup and beans and rice maybe to see if I can fight it off before the weekend. The very *last* thing I need is to head up to Kansas City coughing my lungs all over the back of Traf's seat. ;)

I was kind of down last night/this morning. Think it was brought on by the periodic dissatisfaction I get for all of my story ideas (and there are a lot of them). I keep switching back and forth between "they're so good I don't have the talent to pull them off the way I want to" and "no, really, they're all just crap." I keep...piddling around with them, but it's always half-assed stuff that I'm never quite satisfied with. The only cure I've found is to plow on through anyway, which is precisely what I'm doing. Maybe my mood about it all will pick up eventually.

I finished reading Johnathan Lethem's "Amnesia Moon" last night, which is just...brilliant. So much so, in fact, that it shamed me into a feeling of gross inadequacy. It really does remind me of what "Serial Experiments: Lain" might read like if it were thought up by a Western writer and put in a novel format. Amazing, amazing stuff. I hear he's skewed away from dystopian sci-fi now, though, and writes stuff that wins National Book Awards ("Motherless Brooklyn," I believe?). Which, hey, more power to him. He's rapidly gaining a place among my revered artists list. Hesse, Vonnegut, Lewis, Beagle, Bradbury...Lethem. :)

"Middlemarch" is slow going, but now that I'm jacked into Eliot's writing style things'll go smoother from here. I'm compiling a vocabulary list of funky Victorian words that no one uses anymore but are hellaciously fun to say. :D Dorothea and Celia strike me as really endearing, but I'm only past the first chapter so they might fulfill their potential as ice queens yet. Anyway, I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

Tonight, Chaser's starting off his "Promised Sands" game. It's post-post-apocalyptic desert-world type stuff. The system is going to take a bit of getting used to, but hey, I get to play an 8-foot anthro horse. And I get to be *vain* doing it. :D We've got a good group together (arlekin, whom I've almost forgiven for snubbing me on the Changeling game ;) ), so I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do with it. Character creation is going to take millions of years, though.

See you guys in the new eon.