9 September 2003

More paperwork hassles, or rather the same paperwork hassles continued. More phone calls to make, to make sure that the appropriate documents have been sent out, whether or not they've arrived. In addition to nerves over the postal service, we have to wonder whether a particular fax machine is working. Which is jolly fun and just what we needed. Our realtor verified that the sellers would be fine with a few days' extension to the time allotted for getting the stuff together, which is quite a relief to me, although I suspected as much. It would just be dumb to lose this house because a letter of credit experience took an extra day in the mail.

This house, that is. Right. This is why it's worth it to get on the phone again and try to figure it all out again. House.

I've got more pictures -- not house pictures, Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center pictures. They'll be here later this morning or maybe this afternoon, depending on how many things I have to do this morning.

Mark suspects fall has arrived. I'm dubious that you can tell in the Bay Area. When I heard from Bobbie yesterday, she made it sound like it's still summer, or at least Indian summer, back home. (Is Indian summer one of those terms we're not supposed to use any more? I don't know what else to call it.)

I figured out the Beauty and the Beast story, which is now called "The Beast's Apprentice." So now it's a matter of finishing it. Given the original B&B story, it shouldn't be a surprise that it has a love story as a major part of things. But...it surprises me anyway, because this is the second partial love story I've worked on this week. "Silent Teraphim" had a romantic aspect to it. I don't know. Maybe moving home is making a sap of me. Maybe I just needed to do a few of these. (And get them out of my system. Heh. Well, maybe.)

From the rational career analysis point of view, I should not be spending any energy on "The Beast's Apprentice" right now. I should be editing Reprogramming, finishing the Not The Moose Book, making a dent in my upcoming contract work, doing an anthology-ready story or two, working on my collab with my patient collaborator(s), doing some hard SF short stories because I currently have nothing in at Analog and that's very silly...I think I could go on here, but you get the point: if I sit down and analyze what I ought to be doing in the long-term, this story probably is not it. But then, alphabetizing the preserves in the fridge and staring at the walls twitching until the paperwork is all taken care of is not a particular boost to my career, either, so I think I'll go with "The Beast's Apprentice" instead, thanks. And maybe it'll get me through to a better frame of mind for working on other things.

Also, it might be good. Which is not anything to scoff at.

Mark and I got a few groceries on our way back from our date last night, so I don't have to do that today. I'll probably finish the first volume of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies. It's been more fun than I anticipated. The endnotes tend to sound a little snitty to me, and so I sit and giggle when he tears into the positivists or, mostly, Plato. Maybe he didn't mean to sound snitty, but it's still like he's doing a tarantella on Plato's head, which I find amusing.

According to the paper, I live sandwiched among three of the four most expensive metro areas in the entire country for renting apartments. San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland are one, two, and four, respectively. In the entire country. Good grief. Even Santa Cruz-Watsonville is number six. Four of the top six. I know that to some of you it's worth it for the money. But four of the top six in the country...man. That's just a lot of people spending a lot of money.

Well. It's about time for me to be doing something else, I think, and I have nothing profound to close with. Back to house stuff, back to work.