Let's see. Heather has a new car. (She updated recently, and talks about the car, among others things.) It's a Corolla, a mere eight years old. Which is amazingly new for us. (Our other car is a teenager.) Low mileage, too, under 100K. It was relatively cheap, though it needs enough maintenance-level work to make the total cost, after repairs, pretty fair.

We went to Costco today. We figured, as parents-to-be, it made sense to get a membership and start buying in bulk. Also, Costco has cheap tires and car batteries, both of which the new car needed, so we got that taken care of. And also bought enough paper towels and toilet paper and sponges and soap and chewing gum and pistachios (for banana-pistachio bread, natch) and tilapia and bratwurst and roast beef and root beer and biscotti and frozen berries and sunscreen and hydrogen peroxide and shampoo and dental floss and printer paper and etc. to last us for the foreseeable future. Expensive as all hell, of course, but, what with paying off that ginormous credit card, we can actually afford it. (Though paying car tax, registration fee, and getting the brakes fixed and an oil change and a new serpentine belt for the new car will wipe me out for the next month, alas. C'est la vie.)

Writing group yesterday was good. Sunny weather, nice to hang out in the back yard sipping cold drinks and talking. They had some good suggestions for fixing Dead Reign -- mostly regarding the slow beginning, some boring bits in the middle, and my reallyverymuchindeed rushed ending. (There are other problems, of course, but those are the biggest ones.) Overall it was a lot less dire than I'd expected. Some of my other first readers have told me this is their favorite Marla novel yet! I woke up at 3 o'clock in the morning last night and went to my computer and wrote a page of detailed revision notes. I'm still waiting on some other first readers for comments, but I did creep into the office this morning and start fixing a few things I know are wrong. Wrote a new beginning, though I managed to keep some of the good lines from the original opening. Combined a couple of infodumpy scenes into one much less infodumpy scene. Still lots to do, but I think I can get something decent together by my September deadline. I'm very relieved. I was afraid people were going to tell me it was a dead loss, a teardown job, in need of a page one rewrite... but it's not so bad as all that.

Otherwise, the weekend has been pretty quiet. Holly took away an old desk we had in the space that will shortly be occupied by a crib, so that's helpful. I read an ARC of Terry Pratchett's Making Money, which features the same con-artist protagonist as Going Postal. It's very enjoyable -- I read it in one night! -- but there's less confidence gaming in this one than in Going Postal, so I didn't like it as much. At one point I looked up at Heather and said, "Hey! Terry Pratchett is teaching me about economics!" So it's got that going for it. It also has chapters, which is unusual for an adult Discworld novel...

I'm pretty well exhausted now, though. My pericoronitis is still bothering me, though the inflamed gum seems to be healing, and the associated ache in my tooth has gone away. All in all, things are looking up.