Holy crap, how did it get to be September already?! I’m not prepared for this!

Yesterday was busy and fun. We got up, puttered, then ran errands to prepare for the luau. We bought tons of food and some decorations; picked up pool floaty things, a toothbrush holder and bathmat, shirts, and beach towels at WalMart; and I mailed the three stories plus the WBG proposal. We got home at 2:30 and ran around getting ready. At 3, when the party was supposed to start, Meg and Matt showed up. At 3:30, we figured “fashionably late” was over and ate almost all of the sushi by ourselves. More party-goers showed up at 4, and continued to trickle in after that. I think we had about 15 people. There was a bit of a panic because the person bringing the grill, who said he’d show up at 3, didn’t show up until pretty late, but someone else had brought a tabletop grill, and we used that, going in stages. Folks swam, drank, ate, laughed. Some of us ended up in the sewing room talking about garb and heraldry and other SCA stuff (we had a couple of relative newcomers at the party). The final folks left at 1 a.m. Boy, were we exhausted.

I didn’t sleep well due to a headache, but I’ve finally conquered it. Jackie and Marty came over this morning so Marty and Ken could work on the electrical stuff for the sewing room. They’ll be running the 220 electricity for the industrial machines, and also setting up the hot tub plug. They spent hours just figuring out what previous owners of the house had done; the wiring is truly screwy in places. Then they all went off to Home Depot for supplies. At that point I dove into the computer room, caught up on e-mail and journals, made a final pass through the BH proposal for Soulmates, and have just printed it out. A quick cover letter and it’s done. Hurrah.

Teresa’s finished her vignettes for “Under a Double Rainbow”, and I have those to read over, as well as another story of hers. I also, today or tomorrow, have to do the revisions on “Testing the Waters”, as I want to mail it before I leave on vacation.

After everyone came back, Jackie and I headed into the pool. A little while later, Meg and Matt and Julian and Hobbes the Greyhound showed up on their way home from San Diego, and I enticed them to stay and swim and eat dinner with us. It was too hot to cook, so I put out a salad I’d made the other day and we ordered pizza. After they left, Jackie and I watched “Charmed”, and she fell asleep on the sofa, so I came back to the study to do some more work.

Bah. Rejection from an erotica antho for “Artistic License”. He says he made the decisions in May (the deadline was the end of April). He was responding to my _second_ query about the story. Grrr.