I should be finishing up Dark Tower II: The Drawing Of The Three tonight. It's taken me longer to read the second book than the first, but I enjoyed it twice as much. The pacing is fast and great, well-drawn characters.

I'll be taking book III and IV with me when we go to Cleveland next week, and we'll be there for eight days. It's that time of the year again. It's time for Kat's soup party. We went last year and had a good time. This year we're going to spend a little more time there.

I ordered the rest of the Dark Tower books from Amazon. They'll arrive in January. I hope I timed it right.

The title of this journal is from The Drawing Of The Three. For anybody who has read it, how can one forget the lobstrosities?

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I now have a laptop. Julie Nordeen, a new Wordo member and Portlander, had one to get rid of and she let it go for free. Every computer I've had here has been hand-me-downs.

This laptop will come in handy next week in Cleveland and various workshops I plan on attending. Now, I'm kind of computer illiterate. I just need something to write on and I only know enough to get by and do my thing. I don't even know what numbers are important and what a good computer (or laptop) should do. But here's the info I have:

The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite. It's a '97 or '98. It's heavier, of course, than anything you can get today, but certainly portable.

It has Pentium, 32 MB Ram, Win95, 97 Word, a USB, 3 hr. battery, PC modem w/dongle, serial port, parallel port, monitor port, and infra red port.

I guess I don't know how fast the modem is. I'll be trying that in a day or two. The laptop also has a thing called a cat's tongue (although it looks nothing at all like one) which can be difficult to use. I might get used to it (to move the pointer) or I might use a mouse. I have have an extra one or two.

I'm looking foward to hanging around coffee shops and writing and drinking dark, dark coffee. I think I'd like to plug the laptop into an electrical outlet while in a coffee shop, so I hope that doesn't choke my style. I don't know how many places allow you to plug in. Again, I'm so nieve when it comes to computers.

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I'm at a slow point with the novel. Thinking about things more than writing. And some avoiding. This won't last long.