Monday, January 24, 2005
I think the cold almost did me in yesterday. That or the family of mammoths. I've managed to herd them out onto the front porch, which only left about thirty pounds of Mammuthus dung to contend with. My point being — brrrrrrr. I don't care if you have 71 frelling inches of snow and I have none at all, it's still too frelling cold. Spooky, being of hearty Yankee/Midwestern stock is well adapted to these Pliestocene conditions and has been quite sad that she missed the blizzards. She talked to her mom yesterday, and it was snowing in Saunderstown, RI. Her dad's back from Alaska, by the way. Spooky is pining for snow. I'm pining for warm summer nights. We'd move to Portland and call it even, only I refuse to live beneath a volcano that may blow at any moment. I think that's reasonable.
I'm rambling.
You'd think someone with frostbitten fingers wouldn't type so frelling much, eh?
I did 1,484 words and finished Chapter Two of Daughter of Hounds yesterday, despite the cold and the headache (the latter, at least, seems to have left me in the night). At this point, the novel stands at 166 ms. pages, 35,750 words. I might be a quarter of the way to THE END. I'm at least a fifth of the way there. I mark my life off in these increments. But now, I set DoH aside for a few days. I need the break. I have to fully understand what happens next. And I have other things that need writing.
Finishing a thing, even a chapter, which is only sort of finishing something, almost inevitably leads to depression or boredom or both. Last night I was lucky and only got the boredom. It was so bad that by about nine o'clock I actually tried to get back into Morrowind. That lasted for about ten minutes. Then I puttered about for about an hour, until a documentary about the Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas) came on the Discovery Channel. I am forever in awe of cephalopods. It is my hope that, when humans have finally done themselves in, there will still be cephalopods, who will evolve into terrestrial creatures of profound sentience, smarter than these silly, wasteful primates. Perhaps, fifty million years from now, it will be a cephalopod that first sets foot...er, tentacle...on Europa. That'd be fine by me. But I'll change the subject now, lest the sordid truth of mine and Spooky's tentacle fetish...ooops. Never mind.
After the Humbodlt show, I lay in bed and tidied up my iBook's desktop and many nested files (oh, I love nested files) while Spooky glued white hair to the head of her latest doll. I think I tidied for about an hour or so, after reading back over my blog for the last month, It's a wonder that I did not expire of tedium.
Here's a bit of good news, or at least potential good news: "San Francisco may become the first city in the nation to charge shoppers for grocery bags. The city's Commission on the Environment is expected to ask the mayor and board of supervisors Tuesday to consider a 17-cent per bag charge on paper and plastic grocery bags. While the goal is reducing plastic bag pollution...The whole point is to encourage the elimination of waste." With luck, the request will be granted and, with much greater luck, other cities will follow suit. And maybe people will begin to carry their own shopping bags to grocery stores, bags they can reuse many, many times. These are the gentle, little fairy tales I tell myself.
But the bad news (courtesy of Wired) is that Marvel Comics is suing NCSoft, makers of City of Heroes. Marvel's claim is that the MMORPG makes it possible for players to create unlicensed versions of popular Marvel characters to use as gaming avatars. Big green guys that might be mistaken for the Hulk. Storm clones. You get the picture. Personally, I think Marvel's shooting itself in the foot. But, hey, it's not my copyright.
After this week, we're agoing to be taking a week or two (or three) away from the eBay auctions, but there are still a few cool things to get up today and tomorrow, and cool stuff that hasn't yet sold. The next five people who use buy it now or grab something with the "fixed price" feature will get a FREE Kaiyodo prehistoric critter from my obscenely large and inconvenient collection of tiny prehistoric creature figurines. How can you possibly resist an offer like that? I'll even initial the little buggers, if you wish.
Okay. That's enough for this morning. Stay cool (ha ha ha ha ha).
1:23 PM
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