evening funny

KISS band members open coffee house - just the headline alone was enough to make me choke on my tea.

why it's good to live on the fifth floor

The East Coast has (hopefully temporarily) become Seattle and London all in one. It's been raining every day since the end of last week, and we're not talking about a light downpour. We're talking about periods of rain coming down so hard and thick that you can't see through it ("it threw itself down...," as Neil Gaiman would say). The waterfall at the lake across the street looks almost violent, especially compared to the mere trickle that it was early last week. The irony is that we have a water ban in the county due to low water levels. I wonder if that will be lifted once these storms pass through.

And it worries me that the National Archives has flooded. As "America's recordkeepers," shouldn't they have plans in place to prevent that from happening?

The lobby of my condo building has flooded several times in the last few days. This is not unusual. What is unusual is that the condo association is actually doing something about it other than just leaving the front door and the back door open and spraying Febreze everywhere (Lysol would be better, probably). This time, they're actually using those special vacuum thingys to get all the water and dampness out.

And for those of you asking how the frantic condo cleaning went, it's still going on. You wouldn't think a one-bedroom condo would require all that much time and effort, but you would be mistaken. I attribute this lengthy process to the accumulated tasks that were put off over the last few months due to work and travel and exhaustion from work and travel. Nothing like family coming to stay with you to get things in order once and for all.

things to do...

clean house from top to bottom before grandmother comes for a visit for dad's wedding
finish watercolor painting (do I even remember the lesson from the workshop?)
listen to new Keane CD
listen to new Chris Botti CD
listen to Lorraine a Malena CD (won by Heather)
watch season 1 of Lost (borrowed from Heather)
watch season 4 of Good Neighbors
get living room TV fixed
get dishwasher fixed
vacuum inside of car (where does all that dust come from?)
finish all the half-read books lying about
try out cucumber raita recipe
teach SK to knit (her idea - yes, really)
go see Shakespeare play in EC (Lear or Shrew or both?)
finish draft of novel
edit and revise draft of other novel
get on treadmill for an hour to make up for dismal lack of exercise this week
check in on Miami crew
laundry
find key to storage room
buy plane tickets for Australia trip
re-make forgotten cup of tea that has now gone cold sitting on kitchen counter

amusing reading

You know it's going to be an odd day when this many eye-catching stories appear all at once:

Party in Hell

Daggy Manilow

Navel gazing

Duck X-ray

this is what a martini sounds like

I highly recommend this band - Pink Martini. They've got a Breakfast at Tiffany's-lounge lizard-film noir-Havana bar sound. It's a twelve-piece band complete with piano, brass, string section, drums, xylophones, and harp, among others things. If you are at all depressed or tired, this music will cheer you up and make you want to take salsa lessons.

P.S. If someone can tell me what kind of camera the bandleader is using, I'd be most grateful. It looks like an old bellows-type camera, but it takes polaroids.

it's a funny thing

At first I thought that having two story ideas at the same time was a great thing, because that's never happened to me before. Then I realized that trying to divide your writing time between two stories means that you'll only get half as much done on each one (bloody obvious, right?). So while I did get 50, 000 words written in May, in actual fact it was 25,000 words per story, which means I'll spend June adding 25,000 words to each one so that I'll have a decent-length (though still crappy) rough draft of each one. I have, however, decided to take my company up on it's yearly offer of summer hours, so that leaves Friday afternoons free for writing.

I have a number of business trips coming up this summer - the first one next weekend to San Francisco. It's also soccer World Cup time, and I hope I'll be able to keep up with it given all the distractions I'm facing. Ukraine and the Czech Republic have qualified for the first time, and there's the usual bunch - The Netherlands, Portugal, France, Italy, and England; also I think Serbia, Montenegro, Switzerland, Spain, and Croatia, and that's as many as I remember of the 32 teams that qualified.

I've also finally joined the i-pod nation. I can justify this because there's no point lugging around a CD player on business trips when I already have to lug around a laptop. And besides, I plan to stuff it with audiobooks thanks to audible.com