Heather and I have enacted a clever new plan. Because we both tend toward an entropic state in the evenings, and find ourselves lamenting, at midnight, all the things we wished we had accomplished that night, we have decided to embark upon a new routine (with variations as neceessary, of course; neither of us is OCD, you know?).

Our new plan: Get home. Have dinner. Go for an after-dinner walk in the neighborhood (this is both exercise and pleasant couple-time). Come home again. Do writing-work for at least an hour (write, revise, edit, answer Flytrap subs, or whatever, but no web-crawling or solitaire-playing!). After that, do whatever we want -- play computer games, veg on the couch, read, do housework, whatever. This way we actually get some exercise and some writing done every night, instead of sitting on the couch for hours watching bad, bad, awful, bad television.

We tried this last night, and it worked rather marvelously. Nice dinner, nice walk, got some work done (both of us fiercely revising stories to submit to Polyphony 4 -- I didn't finish a new one for that, but I had a good story that's been languishing on my to-be-revised pile for a while, so I got it into shape). We were done with all that before 8:45 -- and there was no guilt when we flopped onto the couch and later played Diablo II! No guilt! No nagging sense that we should be doing something else! It was grand. And, with both of us trying to maintain this, we have some reciprocity going, some mutual re- enforcement. I'm looking forward to repeating it this evening.

Maybe all it takes is a little structure. It also helps that this is so low- stress, low-impact. There's no taking the train to Berkeley to go to the gym, you know? We walk outside, and we're exercising. There's no set amount of wordage to crank out every night -- just an hour to work (it was a little more last night, but more is fine!), and hour that we'd otherwise spend watching King of the Hill re-runs. It's mellow. It's good.

And it's so nice to work, with Heather working beside me. So nice to walk, with her walking beside me.

So nice to cook, and make her wash the dishes.