22 May 2004

Last night, oof. Mark's plane was delayed, and they kept swearing different things to him: that he wouldn't get out of Denver last night. That of course they would hold the Denver flight until the San Francisco passengers were on it. That it was fairly likely they wouldn't be able to. Etc. He did get home last night, much to our relief.

Stella has been having the week from hell at work, so it looks like instead of going over there for a picnic, I'll be taking her some homemade chocolate and making our visit much briefer. This is fine -- better to be good company for a short visit than a pain in her butt for a longer one -- but it leaves me a bit up in the air about dinner and whether anybody is having it with us. If nobody is and it's not raining, we'll probably have Mark put brats on the grill, since brats were on sale and he likes his new grill (and can maybe get it to start).

It's one of those days when the to-do list looks like a rat's nest -- which phrase, by the way, was alarming to me as a child, because there were too many playmates and classmates I could imagine swarming with rats. I know I just need to grab an end and start disentangling the whole metaphorical mess. Right now that feels much harder than it sounds. Or rather, it feels fairly easy, except that none of the ends I've grabbed have actually felt like they got anywhere. Pay one bill. Okay, but then, one bill, so what? It's off my desk, but there are enough things still on my desk that my brain wants to run in circles keening.

Actually, my brain really wants to read this Fred Pohl book and work on my own book. What I need to do is errands, house chores, lawn/garden chores, and contract work. Note that these two things have basically no overlap. Crud.

The Way the Future Was is entertaining me, though, and it's got me really interested in tracking down a copy of Emily Pohl-Weary's Judith Merril book. I'm really, really interested in how the Futurians looked from the perspective of the only woman among them. I don't know if the Merril bio goes into that, but I hope it does.

I keep sitting here thinking, "I surely have something else to say before I run off to do something." And then my brain says, "Run off to do something!" and opens a file to jot down a paragraph. Or finishes an e-mail. Or adds an errand to the list, or lays out clothes on the bed. Okay, brain, I give up. Run-off-to-do-something it is.