Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

...to ashi!!! Have a great one!!

Seanan's 50 thoughts on writing

From this post by cadhla comes a link to 50 thoughts on writing in her writing journal. Good stuff; well worth a read if you're doing anything creative, either as work or as a hobby.

Bad air

Don't know what's in the air, but whatever it is, I'm more allergic to it than anything else I've met. Itchy eyes, runny nose, sinus headache... It took a Claritin, timed-release phenylephrin, three aspirin, and Visine to get me to barely functional.

Colleen was little better; she had an appointment at Kaiser for a mammogram -- she thought at 9:45 -- and needed a cyclobenzaprine to just barely get out of bed. I offered to drive her. As it turned out, she'd rescheduled for 11:30; by the time we got out of that and had lunch, it was mid-afternoon. I called in sick. I may yet need a benedryl, and there's no fscking way I'm going out for a walk in whatever this is. Yeesh!

Spent the last hour or so investigating fares for the Wolfling's trip North: looks like the current optimum is Amtrak to Seattle followed by Alaska Air home from Vancouver. Works out to $175 for each leg.

Out of it

I'm feeling both tired and restless again. It's odd. I've probably felt this way most of the week. And I see that I was feeling much the same on July 4th. Then, I put the tiredness down to having taken a walk; today I could put the tiredness down to fighting an allergy, and the restlessness to not having taken a walk. My guess is that neither set of explanations is anywhere close to being correct.

Colleen said at some point last week that she thought it was a song trying to get out; I'm pretty dubious about that explanation, too. There are a verse or two hanging fire, to be sure.

Could be I'm looking forward to my travel week after next, though it's certainly early for that. Hmm... There is a certain... openness... there -- as though I want to spend all night talking; swapping songs and stories with someone I barely know. It's happened, what, twice in the last four or five years? Odd how things work out. Certainly I'll see people on this trip that I want to know better.

Wishful thinking, maybe. Or would that be "fortune favors the prepared mind"? In all my years of travelling I've never made a new, close friend at a software convention (which is the Portland leg of this trip), and comparatively few even at filk cons. Even there, the few times it's happened, it was someone who knew me through my music. But I've changed, and there's always a first time.

We'll see. It might just be allergies after all.