February 17, 2001

This is going to be a short entry, I think. I don't feel particularly great, although I'm going to try not to go to bed right now (it's not even 9:00, not bedtime at all). Timprov seemed happy with his birthday presents, which is always good, and we had Italian food and ice cream. And then we visited Trader Joe's.

I discovered Trader Joe's a week ago. And wow. I think this makes me a hippie or a yuppie or something, but I love this place. It's got everything you don't really need but sure would like. This time I came home with fruit leather, gyoza, wild rice, and Nutella. We still have some of the Cheese from the last time. Trader Joe's is evidently where people out here go if they want Cheese. See, when you're from the upper Midwest and intend to go back there, you need more choices for dairy products than your average Safeway will offer. You need Cheese. Or at least I do. Every once in awhile, I need to go into a store and buy interesting cheese. Dill havarti is my favorite result of these ventures. Cambozola is...interesting. I want little wedges of things I've never heard of or never thought of combining. I want Cheese. In Minnesota, you can go to the store and buy Cheese (or cheese curds, also good but they make your teeth squeak) just about anywhere, which is to say, in Cub Foods, the ultimate in affordable grocery stores, or Byerly's, the ultimate in expensive grocery stores. But that's in Civilization. While we don't live in Civilization, at least we have found Trader Joe's. (And maybe next time they'll have pomegranate juice for Mark or peach nectar for Timprov. Or both, ideally.)

And then we came home and played Settlers of Catan. What I like about this game: well, it's interesting. While at the end somebody wins, nobody really loses before that. You don't get kicked out like in some strategy games. You don't take over each other's stuff, essentially. You're playing the populace rather than the government. They also have the thief and the army represented by the same piece, which recognizes the essential use of force behind each, making my little libertarian heart sing. And if someone proposes to trade with you and you don't want to, you don't have to. Or you can make trades as outrageous as you want to. It's a very nice little capitalist game for nice little capitalist me. (Well, maybe neither so nice nor so little. But definitely a hippie-haired capitalist-and yes, I'd love to argue about it.)

So that's the trading. I also evidently traded Gordon Van Gelder one for one: I sent out a story, and he sent back one I'd sent last week. Nice of him, I suppose. And this way we both stay busy.

I feel like there ought to be something deeper or more profound to say. I enjoyed hanging out with Tim Pratt, whose journal you should read if you didn't find mine through it (the most likely thing, I'd guess), 'cause he kicks butt. (Like Timprov's, mine is a family site, with the same definition: my parents may be reading it. I had a problem when I started writing, because not all of my characters did or said things my parents would particularly like. But they don't even do stuff I particularly would like all the time, so I got over worrying about it.) Now Timprov is lying on the living room floor listening to one of his birthday presents, and Mark is playing a computer game, and I don't know what I'm going to do next, but it won't be work, and it won't be this. Probably a big ol' envelope filled with the story GVG rejected. Wheee, Saturday night.