ALNM: 1000

[Just to be clear, the wordcounts on ALNM that I’m posting are my own production. Sarah’s been pretty much matching me, so we’re adding about 4K to the book every day.]

Sorry for the silence, pets! I’ve been having a great time with Sarah and we’ve been busybusy (or inebriated, or both), and I just haven’t had the chance to get it all down.

I woke up on Friday morning to find an e-mail from orbitz.com letting me know that “my” flight (because we’d bought Sarah’s ticket) from Virginia to Atlanta was in the air as scheduled. Soon thereafter I got an e-mail that the flight from Atlanta to Santa Ana was also on schedule. But then I got an e-mail saying it was delayed. Oh no! I thought. Then I read it carefully. It had indeed been delayed, by all of 10 minutes. Current ETA was…6 minutes early.

Oh, woe.

As I headed down the street, I noticed a light on the dashboard, one that shouldn’t be on, so I turned around and came home. I stuck my head in the door and told Ken. “What does it look like?” he asked. “Greek columns,” I responded, because that really is what it looked like. As he was under the hood and I was sitting in the car again, I added helpfully that it could also be interpreted as a circus pavilion. Turns out it was the radiator light (who knew?). Ken filled the radiator with water and off I went.

Although Sarah’s flight came in early, it couldn’t get to the gate, and she actually got off the plane late. Then the luggage took forever to come out. I was in the airport for more than an hour.

We made the mistake of getting on elevator #13, which would not take us to where the car was. We had to switch to elevator #17. It would have been creepy if we weren’t laughing so hard.

The Greek columns (excuse me: radiator) light flashed back on as soon as I started the car, and within less than a minute, the temperature gauge shot up into the red. So I pulled in across the street at the El Torito, because we were hungry, and I called Ken. It took most of the meal to get him to call me back (turned out he was in the garage), but he came out to rescue us. We added more water into the car and got onto the freeway, but had to get off again after one exit because the car was still overheating.

The three of us then sat for a couple of hours in a sports bar waiting for a tow truck. One finally arrived, and Ken headed home while we hopped into the truck of George the Repo Man, who wasn’t used to having people happy when he arrived. He was a total trip—absolutely hysterical. He made comments at other drivers, etc. By the end of the trip, we’d decided we wanted to go out on repos with him.

In all, the trip home from the airport took about 4 hours rather than 15 minutes.

Unsurprisingly, we spent the evening watching Styx videos. Assume for the rest of Sarah’s trip that every evening ends the same way, unless otherwise noted. :-)

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Saturday was concert day! We lounged about, showered, got ourselves ready. Tani wasn’t feeling well and told us to go on without her, but we insisted we’d wait. Thus, we left later than we expected and did hit some nasty traffic, but we got there well before the concert and actually a few minutes before everyone we were meeting up with. There were 13 of us total (Ken being one of only two guys, but he didn’t mind).

The concert was awesome, of course. We were in the front row, and Ken and Karen lurked with us, and the guards didn’t ask us all to sit down before the show started (which they did to several other groups of people), so both of them managed to be close to the stage as well. When the concert started, we all went up to the stage, of course. The security guards frowned and told us to go back to our seats. We did, but almost immediately Larry beckoned us forward, and like Pavlov’s bimbos, of course we did what we were told. (He can crook his finger at me anytime, and I’ll come a-running. I have no shame.)

The guards tried to make us sit down again, but by that time there were people 4 or 5 rows deep behind us, and Keith (Styx’s tour manager) was talking to the guards about letting us stay where we were. They did put up a flimsy barrier (like the kind in banks or Post Offices to keep people in line) so we weren’t right against the stage, which was annoying. Ken took lots of pictures, and eventually I’ll get them online. Despite the guards, we had an absolutely fantastic time.

We had a blast riding to and from the concert with Tani. And I do have to acknowledge Ken again as The Most Wonderful Husband in the World, for driving 6 hours total when he was sick and putting up with us raving, hormonal, and extremely silly fangirls.

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Sunday was a relatively quiet day. We stayed up late after we got home from the concert (watching videos), so we slept in a bit. I have little memory of what we did during the day. I’m pretty sure we read through ALNM (for those of you coming late, this is _A Little Night Music_, the Harlequin Blaze that we’re collaborating on) and made notes on what needed to happen next, up through the end. Yay us!

We watched several episodes of “Kingdom Hospital” (the Stephen King miniseries I’ve been recording but haven’t had time to watch yet) and some “Graham Norton”, and then we proceeded to drink many, many Margaritas. And yes, we did eat the worm (we each had half), and Ken got pictures of the process. A very, very silly night.

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We had to get up early on Monday because Ceridwen was coming over to give me a massage before my chiro appt. I also went ahead and had her give Sarah a much-needed massage as well. Now, the night before, Sarah and I had realised that our right forearms were sore, and we figured out that it was from the fist-pumping head-banging motion. (I can’t actually head bang, because it makes me dizzy, and besides, if my head is moving like that, I can’t see the band!) Ceridwen found a new, painful knot in my right side. Then she found the same knot on Sarah. It was amusing, really. Obviously we have to go to concerts regularly to get the proper workout…

After my appt, we dropped off my poor wounded car. Then Sarah and I settled down to write. It was a slow start, but then things started to pick up for both of us. I think we were well-satisfied with the day’s results.

We watched “The Banger Sisters”, which she and Ken hadn’t seen, and then drank and watched more videos, etc.

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Today we slept late, and Ken headed out for a long bike ride (practically up to the Bay Area!) before I was really coherent. Sarah and I pulled ourselves together and went out to lunch (Mimi’s Café, where I was decadent and had French onion soup and awesome linguine in heavy cream with asagio cheese), then did a little shopping at the needlework store. (I got another bookmark kit, because the colours were really pretty. Like I need another project. At least I was good and put back the gryphon project, which was far more complicated.) Over lunch, we talked about the sequel to ALNM, and came up with some good ideas. Hurrah! We’ll probably get a big chunk of it done when I visit her in June. Especially because we’re planning a road trip to Atlanta, which will mean at least 10 hours of driving, and I have a laptop…

Sarah’s taking a nap right now, so I’ve been puttering, doing things like putting away laundry and paying bills and straightening. I’ve also been putting together my To Do list for next week, which depresses me, because Sarah won’t be here. Sigh. Even the prospect of my birthday and my birthday party aren’t helping much.

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Today’s word count is an estimate; I wrote a scene that was more than 900 words, but I also wrote a few words here and there on other scenes. Right now we’re on Chapter 11, with a planned 15 chapters. We went out to dinner tonight (Claim Jumper, so we could gorge ourselves on the appetizer platter, and oh, we did) and ended up writing several pages of notes; the ideas were just flowing. Very, very cool.

Now we’re going to watch TV and movies and other silly things, so I’ll post this before I forget. Tomorrow I’ll talk about what we did yesterday, just to confuse myself even more.