8 August 2002

Happy birthday, Bobbie! Once again, I had a hard time finding birthday cards that said, "You're just like Timprov's mom to me." But I hope you have a happy one anyway.

The internet connection went down just as I was finishing my journal entry yesterday morning. It's been down ever since. They're supposed to have a guy out this afternoon, which does Mark and me very little good, although I do want the connection up and all, so that our server can start grabbing messages again, and so that Timprov has a nice, connected weekend. Mark's and my flight leaves at 1:00 this afternoon, and we'll be back late Sunday night. If the internet connectivity is not restored by then, well, things will not be happy for some folks at our DSL provider. But if you do manage to see this before then, and you've had messages bounced, please do re-send them.

My SF YA project, which will get called The World Builders if I don't come up with a better title, is now 19 pages long. Given that it was 1 page long on Tuesday morning, I think this is a decent sign for the project, especially because I honestly didn't focus that hard on it yesterday. I worked, sure, but I also read Six Years in the Malay Jungle and packed my stuff and talked to Ceej and hung out with Timprov and got some groceries and experimented with dinner and so on. So it's flowing pretty naturally right now, and if I get work done on it on the planes, it will probably end up feasible to do this. I've been telling people, I know it sounds like a lunatic idea, but that doesn't mean it sounds like a bad idea. So. When I thought it might be a grown-up novella, I was calling it "Three Characters and a World," even though that sounds a good deal more postmodern than it actually is. But I don't think that's a very good YA title.

Six Years in the Malay Jungle was hysterical. It was written in 1923, and the Brit who wrote it was perfectly willing to proclaim not only the Malaysian people wrong when their way of life differed from his, but also the Malaysian fauna and flora. I think a modern visitor would pause before proclaiming a kind of water fowl wrong. And the whole book went on like that.

Our cooking experiments...well, we learned. We learned, for example, that our sink is not fond of cabbage leaves (I know, Mom, you don't think we should put anything but eggshells down the drain, but we have nowhere to put our trash except right out in the kitchen -- we'll see). We learned that there's a reason people don't put ginger through a garlic press, and we learned that ginger juice in the eye doesn't hurt as much as you'd think it would. We learned that one of the kinds of wraps for egg rolls is very small and shreddy and frustrating (they ended up the size of gyoza -- and at that point, why not make gyoza?). It's good to learn things, I guess. Oh, and we learned that the egg roll recipe Timprov used makes a boatload of egg rolls. Possibly two boatloads, depending on how big the boat is.

We will have enough egg rolls to last us awhile. Um, yes. Timprov ran out of wraps last night and had to store the filling until he can do more. It essentially fills the fridge. Between his egg roll and my satay, we used up most of the big cooking pots -- two Dutch ovens, two large skillets, and a wok. We also got ideas for further experiments, like putting my mushroom-jicama satay sauce with a whitefish of some sort. I like having cooking ideas, even if sometimes I just want to throw pasta on the table and forget the rest.

The headline on the sports page of the Merc is "Bonds still at 599." Sigh. A couple of announcers were talking about how hitting 600 home runs would really ensure Bonds' place as one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Whereas if he's one of those mere 599-home run slackers...? I mean, come on, people. It's a big, round number, yes, but one hit is not the boundary between greatness and mediocrity. I'm not sure if it would annoy me more if they kept making a huge fanfare deal out of every homer after 600 or if they stopped at 600 -- the one way dominates baseball news constantly, and the other makes a big deal about a very arbitrary cutoff point.

Ah well. Either way, I'll survive, and with minimal personal inconvenience, too. I'm going to start Pär Lagerkvist's The Dwarf (borrowed from David) if I have any time before we leave this morning. Plenty of books in my back to read, and a couple to write. (And, I notice, between setting a novel in Finland and writing my new YA SF project with a main character named Noë, I've gotten very good at the shortcut keys for an umlaut. Control-shift-;-vowel! In my sleep, even. I really like the name Noë, "thought." I was all impressed when Ceej first mentioned his friend Noë, figured her parents must be awesome. Turns out he said Noey, short for Noelle. Sigh. The geekier you are, the more obscure the ways the world can disappoint.)

If the internet doesn't come back up before we leave this morning, I will go all weekend with three of my stories not sent out to editors. Gasp! Horror! More than a 24-hour turnaround? Whatever shall I do?

Make myself a lunch to take with, I guess. I already have fruit leather in my backpack for the just-in-case moments.

Ah well. I'm going to go get showered and dressed, and there's plenty to do around here before I leave. If the connection comes up, hooray, and if not, well, I'll clean up some more of the kitchen and take out some of the recycling, mop the moose and feed the bear.

(I really hope you guys know I'll Teach My Dog 100 Words, because otherwise my occasional references to mopping the moose and feeding the bear are personal eccentricity rather than juvenile literary eccentricity, and heaven only knows what you'd make of the references to Uncle Abner's underwear.)

(Or are you just used to me Being Like That?)