(no subject)

Still no rain. Seems we got some all around Kent, but not in Kent. And it ticks me off, because my flowers really need it. We've had the sprinklers going for 15 minutes every 12 hours for the past couple of days now, so the grass is greening up again, but the flowers in the front are starting to wilt.

It looks like rain again this morning, but I'm not getting my hopes up. It looked like this all day yesterday and...nothing.

Lance had to get up at some unholy hour this morning because he had to drive down to McChord and catch a plane. He's flying today and tomorrow and he has to get up really early tomorrow too. So he slept in the guest room last night since he went to bed early, and Reece got confused. She went to bed in our bedroom shortly after he did. I was in the living room watching The Triplets of Belleville, which I borrowed from Kathy. It was very bizarre and very French at the same time. I think I liked the music better than the film.

After that I was over, I finished up Letters to a Young Poet and then went to bed. I had bizarre dreams last night, probably somewhat influenced by the film I just watched.

Today I have a short article to write about the weather/climate in Maastricht, Netherlands. It was a subject up for grabs on one of the sites I do writing for, so I took it, since I lived so close to Maastricht and it's an easy topic. That only needs to be a maximum of 200 words, so it shouldn't take long to do.

Kathy and I have plans this afternoon to do crafts. She has a project in mind to do for her son, so I'm anxious to see what that's all about. We've been making plans to put out a line of our own candles and soaps for sale on etsy, but I'm not sure when we're going to do that. I'm kind of anxious to get started on that. And we would need to find a way to make our product unique from all the similar products that are flooding the market. That's the hard part. And she wants to do decoupage as well, which would also be something worth pursuing as a way to make extra money. And it's a good way to recycle the ridiculous number of magazines that I own.

Yowza

So I am now maintaining 3 blogs. I started a new one today. Not ready to release the URL for it just yet until I have a few more things posted on it.

This is madness, I swear. And each of these blogs serve completely different purposes. I hope the new one gets a lot of visitors, because it's not really writing-focused. It'll mostly be links - just trying to compile information in one place that is otherwise scattered throughout the internet.

I'll probably wake up tomorrow thinking I'm insane, and then I'll end up deleting it. But it's something I've been contemplating for weeks. And I've mentioned the idea to a few people and they thought it was very useful. So we'll see.

Anyway, I spent part of the afternoon at Kathy's. It seems her son has acquired a big box (a plastic backyard playset came in it) and she wanted to do something crafty with it, since he wants to play with the box. We contemplated turning it into a castle or a boat...and I even thought it would be fun to turn it upright and make a refrigerator/freezer out of it. We both really loved that idea, but Beck wanted to have the box horizontal instead of vertical. So we just cut random shapes into it...made random little doors and windows (I even cut a big B-shaped door into it). We wrapped it in white paper. Beck took his colored pencils and scribbled all over it and we had a bunch of stick-on stuff to decorate it.

So that was our crafty thing for today, although we're both anxious to do a girls' only craft afternoon with decoupage. She has a bunch of small wooden boxes.

Also, the birthday present she got me arrived today while I was there - the t-shirt she bought from Mental Floss. *points to icon*

She wants to get together soon - all of us - and have a picnic or go somewhere new and interesting. I'm kind of digging Wright Park in Tacoma. Although it doesn't look to have picnic facilities. But it has a conservatory and a sculpture park. Fantastic photo opportunities.

I came home at 5, about half an hour after Lance called me from McChord to tell me that he was on his way home. And I found a package of books from my editor on the doorstep:

The Wandering Heart - Mary Malloy
The House Always Wins - Marni Jameson (a home improvement book)
Writing Places - William Zinsser
The Devlin Diary - Christi Phillips (this is the one I'm reading first)

The Wandering Heart was compared by one reviewer to A.S. Byatt's Possession, so I hope it's really that good. Possession is an amazing book.