So we found a tux for the wedding (for me to rent, not buy, of course -- I don't know when I'll wear a tux again). I'm getting this one: The Starwood Tuxedo.

I like it, even the name; "Starwood" was the name of a town in one of my early horror stories, a sideways allusion to "the Star Wormwood". Let's hope the wedding doesn't entail any apocalyptic experiences, apart from the delicious chocolate cake being destroyed.

There's something wonderfully civilized and comforting about drinking a cup of fresh-ground coffee from a nice mug. My wonderful mother got us 4 place settings of dishes (plus a platter and a gravy boat!) as wedding gifts; specifically, these dishes. The coffee mugs are nice, heavy, substantial. Coffee even seems to taste better out of them. It's all in my mind, of course, but so's every other experience...

It's my day off. (Which is nice, since I also had Monday off. It's a mellow week.) Plans include typing/revising "Jubilee" and sending it off to an editor (unless I discover some horrendous flaws that need more serious work), sending back my Twenty Epics contract, and starting to read Joe Hill's collection 20th Century Ghosts for review. Jonathan Strahan talks about the book a bit in his journal today. I loved Hill's "The Black Phone" and liked "You Will Hear the Locust Sing", so I'm excited about the book.

Jonathan also read Rangergirl recently, and told me that, if forced to summarize, he'd call it "the point where the urban fantasy of Charles de Lint meets Stephen King's 'Dark Tower' cycle." I can't argue with that -- both were pretty big influences, though I think I came up with something qualitatively different from what either of them would have done.

The long weekend was nice. We got the tux, as I mentioned, and chased after some other wedding-related stuff. Went to a barbecue/birthday party at Holly's on Sunday, where I ate grilled sausage and chicken, drank red wine, and played with the kid for a while. Holly had their lovely back garden all tricked out with candles around the little pond, and it was pretty heavenly, even if I didn't know anybody and most of my conversations involved picking Aleister up and twirling him around. That kid's a workout. Heather and I watched some Nip/Tuck and some Northern Exposure. We played World of Warcraft, our first weekly group with Matt and Susan and David M., and it went quite well. Lots of fun.

Saturday I got all my hair chopped off. It's shorter than I'd like, so that it will be grown out to a nearly perfect length by the wedding (we hope).

Gotta go grocery shopping today. We're down to tortillas and jelly and not much else in the house (Well, that's a lie -- there's rice and some soup and various staples. But nothing tremendously appetizing.) Heather and I are once again trying to be more fiscally and physically responsible -- eat out at restaurants less, cook healthier food at home more. We've made attempts at this kind of behavior modification before, and it never seems to last, but we're making another good-faith effort. We think the key might be to make things we can eat on for a couple of days, so we don't have to cook a meal every night (sometimes we're just too freaking tired), and have some easy-to-make options for those lazy nights, as an alternative to just ordering in delicious fried Chinese food or pizza.

Of course, this decision to eat better comes just as the "Food issue" of the New Yorker arrives, and just as I begin listening to the audiobook of Garlic and Sapphires, the book by longtime New York Times food critic Ruth Reichl. Both are good reading, and both make me want to eat. Fortunately, while the latter makes me want to eat in restaurants, the former makes me want to cook, and if we can keep the portions from being too huge, and lay off the cheese a little, cooking will be a lot more healthy than eating out. Fortunately I don't have access to a deep fryer. If I did, that would be the end -- some weeks later you would find my fat, acne-riddled corpse deliquescing beneath a heap of french fries and chicken fingers and fried calimari on my kitchen floor.

And I leave you, my dears, with that appetizing image.