Speaking of sucked in, I was going to run errands this afternoon, but then VH1 Best of the 90s was on, and there's so much internet out there, and.... not so much.

I made a decision about the book, and after days and days of not eating well, not sleeping well, and my stomach turning over every five monutes, I finally feel peaceful and hopeful.

I took advice from the infamous Tim Minear and said, "I don't give a fuck about the money."

And you know what? It's so amazingly freeing.

So there's a game plan, and a plan B, and it's all on my terms, and I feel like awesomecake with awesomesauce.

I've spent the last several months converting my boss's precious "interesting cases" teaching tapes to DVD. Some of the earliest ones, from the mid-80s, were in giant plastic cases easily twice as big as the actual tapes, with complicated slide-and-lift locking mechanisms, because the media inside were so precious! and delicate!

And on a couple of the earliest tapes, from back when VHS was a whole big new thing and nobody was certain whether it would catch on so the department wasn't yet ready to invest a bunch of money in supplies, the last echocardiogram ends and suddenly we're in the middle of a big hair and padded shoulders soap opera or the '88 Winter Olympics (all downhill events, no skating, drat them).

And, huzzuh. Weirdly timely.

[link]

This is really weird, but I really feel like I knew his daughter at some point in my life, but her wikipedia page gives no clue to where our paths would have crossed. If I was going to have an imaginary friend, why on earth would it be Jamila Wideman??

Please let the traffic not be fucked again tonight. I just want to get to the pool early. It's not too much to ask, right?

So Allyson, does that mean you're going with Lulu for Sam?

I feel like awesomecake with awesomesauce.

I'm glad. I always figure a decision that makes your stomach unclench is probably a good one.

There were two more leads and one publisher being monumentally slow in getting back to me with a maybe.

So I set a shit-or-get-off-the-pot deadline. I keep hearing about how "this is how the business works."

Yep, leave writers hanging on broken promises for days, weeks, maybe a month or six.

So I just said, "look, I don't care about money, so here's the date I need you to get back to me so I can go POD in time for summer."

I just really needed to have some control over the sitch.

I am washing my gigantic shower curtain (it goes all the way around the tub, because it's a pedestal tub with a shower curtain ring) in the washing machine for the first time ever. I hope I don't destroy the curtain or the washing machine.

Though given the choice, I'd take a destroyed curtain over a destroyed machine.

Also, we are out of bleach.

And I'm going to make an apple crisp. (That isn't related to the shower curtain, just part of my brain infodump.)