2 March 2003

Well, so the first thing is that I sold a story yesterday. Yay! Raechel took my short story "The Un-Wisher" for the Eggplant Productions site. She's just recently started taking stories for on the site, and I was happy, because when I wrote this story (as day six of a week of short stories), I was really, really frustrated. I had come up with the idea right after her "Genies and Other Wish-Granters" theme issue of Spellbound, and I figured (correctly) that she wouldn't have another of those soon and (also evidently correctly) that she would like this story.

So. Good beginning to March, that. Now if we could go two for two today....

I read a little bit of Patriots and Liberators yesterday, but I didn't get through all that much of it, because Scott called (the one who didn't call on Monday), and there were things that needed doing. I got all of Mark's and my paperwork into the appropriate file folders, for one thing, and incidentally found a few that were obsolete and could be mostly emptied. (I kept some of the documentation from Kaiser in case I needed to demonstrate that I used to be insured with them for whatever reason, but their random mountains of almost-informative crap went away.)

Then in the evening we watched "Akira" on DVD, and I enjoyed it. Kind of fascinating to see who else has "borrowed" that general Neo-Tokyo look for their animation. Also it was a bit alarming that it seemed to continue the Japanese movie featuring someone being squashed/engulfed trend. Maybe we've just got a skewed set of Japanese movie experiences recently, and I suppose "The Seven Samurai" didn't have anything at all like that. Still. Odd. Anyway, we watched it in Japanese with English subtitles, and I was happier with that. I generally am, because then someone who speaks Japanese could check to make sure that it had been translated reasonably accurately, and also because there are things I can catch with my own very rudimentary knowledge. (For example, Kaneda-san, Kaneda, and Kaneda-kun were all translated as "Kaneda." Which I can understand: we don't really have equivalent terms. But I could get a hint more out of seeing who used Kaneda-kun, and when.) The only problem I had with the subtitles were that they were a little bit small and sometimes didn't work well when that portion of the screen was pale. (That was the only section of "Austin Powers: Goldmember" that really stood out to me, and I couldn't stop thinking of it watching "Akira" last night.)

Ages ago I promised I'd put pictures of the new chairs up so that people (mostly my mom) could see them. I meant it. Here they are:

Here's Mark in the Malung (the footstool is particularly nice).

And here's me in the Poäng. Wearing clothes like I've been wearing a lot lately: clothes that do not demand a lot of me. Big white shirt. Hangs all over the place. Dries more quickly than sweaters and doesn't require much ironing. I only have one of those, but it's the general "strangers, leave me alone; friends and family members, give me hugs" component of my wardrobe.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of you had one of these chairs. They're Ikea chairs, and they're comfortable for a wide range of body types (from me to Timprov at the very least), so I'm pretty sure we're not the only ones who like them.

Also, you can see the stacks of books by my chair. One of them is poor Evan's stack of Sandman comics. We need to get together with poor Evan at some point soon. But we've been kind of antisocial lately, and I'll finish DBM sometime soonishly and want to celebrate. So. Maybe then.

I'm really in the mood to edit this thing. I want to have it all laid out in front of me so that I can consider it all over at once. I'm absolutely sure that some things will occur to me that need to be addressed throughout, once I have a throughout to address. I suppose that's incentive to keep drafting.

And on that note....