you know it's bad when you have to crank up your font size

because your eyes keep going blurry.

i am tired but never sleepy. i know if i lie down i'll get heartburn because i didn't eat dinner and now i'm all stomach-acidy-digesting-my-brain. Bleah! And it's too late for ice cream to save me! I know! The horror! The horror!

I cannily posted my First Novel Chapter on the day before my 15-hours-of-work day, so that I wouldn't spend the whole day checking my email to see if anyone commented. The idea, see, was that I would come home and there would be this outpouring of, I dunno, adulation or something, in my inbox, from all these people who read my novel and couldn't wait for the next update and thought I was a genius and stuff.

Sadly, this is the real world and these things don't happen.

So I got home, dead beat after making just over half what I usually do in tips (sloooow day at the airport, busy at the bar but not busy for me, just busy for the waitresses, while I ran my tail off making their drinks and helping them bus tables and didn't make much by way of money. Oh well. Life is life).

And I had... One comment!!! Which is more than I had before I started!! So thank you to gyen_gaoltosing for a nice little critique of Chapter 1. You made my day, and I hereby friend you so you can read the rest. :)

OK, I have two days off now, and have a bit long to-do list. Among which is to finish revising Chapter 4 of Vikings Novel (you know, I now laugh every time I see a Charter 1 commercial, imagining it's One-Eyed Ivar or Olaf the Fat growling "Wot's in YER wallet?", and the bar patrons all think I'm laughing at the commercial, which isn't really very funny, and they think I'm nuts, and, you know, they're probably right but the irony of it is they just don't know how right they are)... Lost my train of thought. Oh yes. Right. Finish revising Chapter 4, so I can post Chapter 2 on Monday (hopefully I'll have time to revise more than one chapter a week so I can keep my regular weekly posting schedule even if I have a busy week or something), and also tomorrow learn the lj memories system so that people can read posted chapters at their own pace without hunting for them. I also plan to organize my website so that it will make sense. And the such.

And Dave's getting his new windshield!! So he can finally have his car actually street-legal and y'know, registered in the right state, and stuff.

Ahh... I am tired and almost sleepy, and wish i were cooler and had more friends and money. Hurrah for very-early-Wednesday-Mornings-After-Suicide-Tuesdays! What the world needs now / is more self-doubt... (Aw crap, now that song's stuck in my head. Amazing, it scans.)

oh my

What ever am I going to do with all these monkeys?

whoops.

It's time for one of those "this is good but also bad" kind of dealies.
This morning, optimistically, I opened a Word document into which to begin the composition of the novel I am hoping to co-write with Dave. I then spent an hour playing with the computer and attempting to find the short documents somewhere on this computer wherein I had jotted down my ideas. (Just now, six hours later, I have determined that I in fact took these notes by hand and thus they are somewhere else in the house.)
I then spent the day doing laundry, and lest you ask how one can spend an entire day doing laundry, I will hereby mention that Dave got two sets of new flannel sheets that had to be washed before being put on the beds, and also the sheets already on the beds were not clean, and besides that, the mattress pads needed a washing, and then I ran out of laundry detergent and had to get some more.

I wanted to clean the kitchen as well, in the meantime, but am having a bad eczema flare, in the painful, early, swollen-and-red stage, and cannot find the medicated dishwashing gloves my mother got me for Christmas. (Regular rubber gloves are as bad as soapy water for my hands, and I don't know why.) This flare is indubitably due to having spent all day yesterday wiping tables and washing glassware during the 15 hours of not getting much by way of tips bummer isn't it whine whine moan bitch my hands hurt dammit and my bills are too big.

Anyway. So, the kitchen's a mess, I haven't done any of my writing projects, and I'm sleepy.

I had tomorrow off and was thinking I could do all the writing I'd wanted to do today then instead. (Perhaps my hands would be better and I could clean then, too. And perhaps I could catch up on my sleep a little bit! *squees at the idea of sleeping more*) It would be kind of like... a weekend.

But then, while I was carrying groceries in from the car, the phone rang, and it was the manager from the airport asking if I could work tomorrow.

See, genius that I am, I gave him a note saying that as Local Bar hired me to work Thursdays but then has not had me work on a Thursday for over a month, I am available to work Thursdays at the airport instead. The genius part is that I put the note in his box just as he was taking the schedule down from the board to go in and make the new schedule, and in fact I met him at the door as I went out and he came in, and (cleverly) I verbally confirmed the contents of the note with him just to call it to his attention.

So, I no longer have tomorrow off. This is a bummer because I haven't worked on my website, haven't finished Chapter 4 of the Vikings novel, haven't started the novel with Dave, haven't remembered how I was going to finish the sentence of the Callonia novel that i broke off in the middle of to run out the door and be slightly late for work (i'll just write for a few minutes, I thought, and then the morning was gone), haven't finished the laundry, haven't gone and bought a box of cheap pens and a decent beer-bottle opener for work, etc. etc. etc.

But. I also worked on my bills today, and don't have enough money to pay them all. So, working tomorrow is good, from that point of view.

I'll be ungrateful and make a little wish: Let them please please please put me somewhere besides Club Nobody-Comes-Here or the Torture Bar. Please please.

so anyway. Now I'm up to 35/week at the airport, and 42 in total. Maybe I can make a living at this. And if this continues, I'll be eligible for union membership and subsidized health benefits in another 10 weeks or so.

But I will be forced to focus on just one novel if I ever want to finish one. Nooooo! Attention span? Hisssssssss.

(Also, I'll never have two days off together again. How the heck am I supposed to get to Melrose and back, to give Dad and Mom their Christmas presents, in just one day?)

But I mustn't complain, lest Karma punish me for my complaints by removing hours until I am forced to take yet a third job that I like even less. Noo! I just washed my spare work shirt! I love work! Give me more! I want to spend my life in the airport! Please! Yay!

uh-oh, the laundry's done! (Actually... one more load.)

Meme. Because, why not. I'm all pressed for time, and so it's time to waste it on something silly.
Seen in amyjessica's journal, while I was figuring out who she was. Hi!

( i presume you're meant to bold the ones you've done. So, like, never-ever without the drinking. )

not a list-maker but i can try.

So.
Now that I'm done with laundry and cooking, and am sitting with heavily-gooed hands, and am trying to write, nothing's really coming.
So.
Made a new icon, of the line I wanted Theoden to say that Saruman took instead.
Was thinkin'.
Might make me a top-ten-style list of all the kickass lines from the book that didn't make the Lord of the Rings movies. I know they didn't, that's fine, and there were most likely reasons they didn't. But, lines I wanted to hear. And lines the movieverse fans may eternally miss out on.

Anyone else have any favorite moments that either didn't make the cut, or got so mangled in making the cut that what you loved about them didn't come through? I'd love to hear your favorite bookverse quotes. Conversely, if anyone wanted to comment with their favorite movieverse moment, especially if it's straight from the book, I'd love to hear that. I had my share of triumphant squeeing to see a great moment come to life exactly as I'd imagined.

This isn't a critique of the movies, or me saying I'm a more thorough fan than anyone else. If you read them, they're hardly a representative sampling of the books. They're just a few of my favorite moments. I think it will be easy to tell which parts of the books I read most often.

( Just an excuse to get my book out and sit for a little while with it. )

nope, still not being productive. Hey, it's my night off.

So. Dave and I are hanging out and listening to records. Except of course we don't have a record player, so we're listening to his Morphine CD's ripped to iTunes. Of course.
Dave's decided he's going to listen to his iTunes library sorted by the song release date. Which would be interesting. A sample:
1976:
The Chieftains 6: Buonaparte's Retreat
Wild Cherry: Wild Cherry

1979:
The Clash: London Calling
The Muppet Movie soundtrack: The Rainbow Connection (Kermit The Frog)
Pink Floyd: The Wall

1983:
Yo-Yo Ma: Six Suites For Unaccompanied Cello by J.S. Bach
Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble: selections from the Vaughan boxed set

1985:
Big Audio Dynamite: This is Big Audio Dynamite
1986:
Paul Simon: Graceland

1988:
Motorhead: No Remorse
The Talking Heads: Naked

1993:
Moxy Fruvous: Bargainville
Us3: Hand on the Torch
Violent Femmes: Add It Up
Blues Traveller: Save His Soul
Metal Detector: Winter '93
Morphine: Cure For Pain

1994:
Bon Jovi: Greatest Hits
Bootsy Collins: Greatest Hits
Canned Heat: Greatest Hits
Green Day: Dookie
John Spencer Blues Explosion: Orange
NoFX: Punk in Drublic
Offspring: Smash
Pizzicato Five: Made in Usa
Rusted Roots: When I Woke
They Might Be Giants: John Henry
Tori Amos: Under The Pink

You know, precious little has been done since '95 that's worth mentioning anyway.
But the transitions are humorous. I suppose listening to the whole library that way would be entertaining, if some of the id3 tags on the mp3s weren't screwy.
But it makes me think of High Fidelity where he goes and re-organizes his record collection chronologically by date acquired. Heh, iTunes, come up with an id3 tag for that. "Date Created" isn't the same.
But, in the future, when people begin their record collections electronically, instead of everything having an import date of the day you brought the iMac home (20 GB of my collection has a creation date of July 12-17 2003 because that was the week I spent importing all my CDs into the new computer)... In the future, your record collection will be able to sort itself by the date you acquired it, if you so chose. It can already alphabetize itself or sort by track time or release date.

Sort of... a different world, from the time when I carried all 24 of the CDs I owned in one of those little wallets, alphabetized by artist name. (That was trauma, when I bought my 25th CD and it didn't fit.)



In other, unrelated news, we think God is trying to communicate with us, but tragically we have no idea what He's saying because we don't know Morse code. And so the world can't be saved.