This will be a random entry, full of tidbits and musings and little coherence as a whole. That's the plan, at any rate. It may well be very, very boring. Or I may be unexpectedly clever. Probably a bit of both. We shall have to see.

I am in a better mood this morning than I have been in about a week. Thank gods. I hate hating everything -- hate it! :-)

Dealing with little things lately. I keep getting renewal notices from the DMV for the car I no longer own. I finally looked up what I can do about it, and hopefully I kept enough info about the guy who bought it that I can deal with it myself, without having to email him again. Stupid DMV lost my Release of Liability form.

Finally made a dentist appointment to get my root canal crowned so I can eat when I get my other root canals (on the other side of my mouth) done. I managed to squeeze them in before the end of the year, using up the last bit of my insurance before it resets in 2004. Stupid dental insurance doesn't roll over.

I got new slippers! Yay slippers! They're greener than they looked on my computer screen (which I'd been hoping for) and softer than I'd thought possible and sooooo comfy! I come home and wash my feet so I can keep them nice, that's how much I love my new slippers.

I cleaned off my vanity and now Marzi (you know, the cat from the infamous entry last week) has taken to jumping up, sitting in my jewelry dish and eating my earrings and necklaces. The last thing I want is to search for shiny treasure in the litter box. Yick.

We sulphured the cats last night for the 5th time. Only three more to go! Whoo! No matter how sneaky we are, Marzi has instinctive hiding tendancies on Tuesday nights, and last week it was just awful trying to get her -- first out from under the stove, then she ran past us and ran under the table in the dining room (which is clogged with boxes and hard to get her out of). She was hiding there last night, and would not be enticed by treats or feathers on a string. Tim and I were having a cranky night anyway, and I was starting to get stressed when Tim (without telling me what he was doing) started up the dirt devil and stuck it down near the table. Sure enough, an orange blur darted out, and I nearly missed her as she came towards me, but I got her. Yay scary vacuumy thing!

Zanzi, by the way, waits outside the bathroom while we sulphur Marzi, so all we have to do to catch him is open the door and pick him up (with our stinky gloved hands). He's such a good kitten! We think he'd suplhur himself if he could just lift the jug.

I'm always on about my kittens, aren't I? I'd apologize, but they bring me so much joy I can't see how I'm sorry about them at all :-)

I started a new story last night on the BART train and I have *another* new story idea that I'm really excited about. This is a good thing, as I only have three good stories out (that is, recent and representative of my current work; I have 6 or 7 out total, but the rest are really old or vingettes) and, you know, hopefully those will sell sooner rather than later and I'll need more stories for circulatioin. This is a bad thing, however, as it lets me procrastinate even more on my novel.

Yeah, I haven't been talking about it here for a reason. The good news is that I know what happens in the last half of the book now; the bad news is that I'm still only halfway done. I did finally finish typing in the rest of my handwritten stuff last night, but my RSI started acting up, so I didn't try to write any more of it ...

Oh, have much guilt about the novel thing!

Anyway, I'm going to end this entry with a picture of me taken while I was trying on outfits for my "naughty librarian" outfit that I wore to Folsom. This one turned out the best of all the ones we took, which is why I'm posting it here.

Shhhh!