3 May 2002

Good morning! I started the morning (after a weird dream about car shopping) with a sale to Rogue Worlds. They bought "Instead of Glass Slippers." Yay! It's not a huge payment, but it's not a huge story, either, and I'm quite glad to have found a home for it. One day after I sent it out, too! Whee!

Not one day after I sent it out for the first time, of course. I sent it out for the first time a year and a half ago, when we still lived in Concord. Since then it's been rejected nine times, lost once, and had the magazines to which it was submitted close while it was under consideration twice.

It's a very good way to begin my mom's birthday.

Also, for my mom's (and your) viewing pleasure, the pictures are really up this time from C.J.'s visit. That link goes to Mt. Diablo/Rock City pictures. There's also Pt. Reyes, San Gregorio Beach/Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Mt. Tam and a few more, and the Monterey Aquarium, in case you're interested in one thing or another but not all of them. They do link to each other, though.

Yesterday, mostly I Got Stuff Done. Work. Housework. Grocery shopping. Etc. I talked to Michelle for a good long time (and kept her up way past her bedtime since she had to go to work this morning) and then folded laundry before going to bed. Somewhere along the line, I became a person who can single-handedly fold fitted sheets without batting an eye. I'm not sure when this happened, but I think it's part of becoming The Mommy, which starts long before pregnancy if you're lucky.

The first time I noticed becoming The Mommy, we were living in Concord, and ants had invaded our utensil drawer. I hate ants. Hate hate hate them. And now I think of Zed praying for all living souls "except those #@*$ ants!!!" Anyway. We don't have ant invasions like this in the Midwest. If you keep your house reasonably clean, you do not have an army of ants swarming over your garlic press there. It was my first fall in the Bay Area, and this was totally foreign to me. But, swearing and shuddering, I dove in to kill the ants and wash every utensil clean. I had a million things to do that day, but there were ants in the drawer. And it occurred to me that I could no longer go, "Mooooooom! There are ants in the drawer, MOOOOOMMMMMMM!" That I was the person who took care of the ants, the fitted sheets, whatever, because it needed doing.

Very strange feeling, that.

It's not about not freaking out, sometimes. Oh, trust me. I freaked out when there were ants in the drawer. (I really freaked out when they got into my oatmeal sugar cookie bars.) But I dealt with it anyway. And I remember my mom, when something was particularly nasty, going, "Oh, ick, oh, ick, oh, ick!" as she cleaned it up or removed it. But she did it anyway.

Efficiency. Coping. This grown-up thing. I'm just not so sure about it.

I'm almost done with 'One Hell of a Gamble' (the book about the Cuban Missile Crisis), and there was a throwaway tidbit that just charmed me: "Johnny Prokov was a favorite of journalists who frequented the Tap Room in the National Press Club. A Russian émigré from the Baltics [so, likely not Russian, then? Sigh], Prokov had worked as a barman since getting a job at the club in 1959. He was famous for disliking the Kremlin. At the slightest opportunity he would describe the trials of his native region, under Soviet occupation since 1940. Years later, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, he regaled patrons with a story about how when Gorbachev was ordering the disarming of all Baltic households, Prokov called up the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street to offer his own rifles, if a Soviet diplomat dared to come to Reston, Virginia, to pick them up." Hee. Um, yeah.

Well. Many things on the list for today, still. I tried to make potato salad. The Miracle Whip had gone just far enough south that I couldn't smell it over the tang of the mustard, but I could taste it. My yes. So no potato salad for me. I put some of the stroganoff from Sunday over toast, as we are out of egg noodles, and that was lovely for lunch. I have no idea what, today. The calzones soon, yes, lest the spinach go the way of the Miracle Whip. And we have lovely avocado for BATs (or BALTs, as Timprov prefers), and I got a big bunch of asparagus now that it wouldn't torment the Ceej. Big errands of the day, woooo. I now have errands in Milpitas, Emeryville, Berkeley, and the City. Berkeley, sadly, is at the bottom of the list (sadly because BART goes there) -- I probably won't get there until next week at best. I don't particularly want to go into the City (no no nooooo!) especially as it's not a very BART-accessible location, but I need my book. And I don't particularly want to juggle BART and MUNI, and I don't even know if MUNI goes where I want it to (although I'd imagine it goes close). I'll probably have to drive down to Milpitas soonest. Drat. But I can probably do other things on that errand, in Fremont or thereabouts.

In the meantime, work. Short story work, and then I'll let Avery fly her plane to Norway in a storm, or maybe Iceland. I'll have to figure out how long it would take to get from Helsinki to the coast of Norway in a little plane. This book has the strangest details. And I love them.