The last 24 hours have been much, much better. Not only did I manage to sleep through the night (no thunderstorms for poor Maya, hooray!), but I absolutely love my new haircut, and I finally got some insight into my tax worries - thank you so much to the people who emailed me about this! Incredibly, I even finally managed to get through to the IRS office in Philadelphia (although admittedly, this was after 25 minutes on hold, at painful international rates). Bizarrely, the tax advisor I talked to sounded exactly like Daniel Pinkwater - not just his voice, but his exact style of speech, too! I was irrationally but deeply reassured by this. (I LOVE Daniel Pinkwater! And he's a writer, so he must be on my side, right?) At the same time, though, I was also irrationally disappointed because I kept waiting for some quirky Pinkwater weirdness to come along - I was really kind of expecting our phone call to turn out like a conversation in a Pinkwater novel, where someone starts off seeming perfectly normal and then starts talking nonchalantly about lizard alien rock music, or else turns out to be wearing a chicken under his hat. Anyway, and perhaps not surprisingly, the IRS conversation wasn't actually quite as useful as the emails I got, but it did confirm some of the information other people sent me, so that was reassuring.

And today has gone really well, too. Any day that starts with baking banana muffins (mmmmm, so good!), moves on through a really good writing session (I wrote more of my new KbS Chapter One, and it felt really good AND Patrick liked it, so whew!), and ends up with a trip to see Wall-E is by definition a good day. Not surprisingly, I loved Wall-E - it was such a beautiful film, and so moving. The only downside was that the entire audience was packed with 2- to 7-year-olds, which wouldn't have been a problem in itself (and really, they were remarkably well-behaved, considering), except that of course they had NO idea what was going on for huge chunks of the film. Wall-E really isn't aimed at young kids, so they were really confused and bored and restless through a lot of it. It was a pity for them, and a pity for us, because all the whispering (and the loud requests to go home now???, which always came at the quietest and most emotional moments of the movie) were really distracting. I'm looking forward to seeing it again at home when it comes out on DVD. (And we'll learn from our experience and not expect the baby to enjoy it with us!)

Now I'm going to settle into the Dorothy Sayers biography I just checked out...

...and just in case anyone's curious, here's a picture of my new haircut, taken with PhotoBooth while I was procrastinating - er, taking a moment out to clear my head - from my writing session this morning. (As usual, more photos of me, Maya, and Patrick are up on Flickr.)