The Wrath of Kon

It’s one of those days when I don’t have a theme to start with. I’m sitting in my office, eating red bean and rice soup, which is welcome on a Seattle winter day. I’m sure that ten years from now, eating hot soup on a cold day will remind me of moments like right now, just like it currently takes me back to a snow-covered Bloomington, where the streets were rivers of slush and it was just cold enough to keep the snow on the ground. I don’t like the weather we have here, but I don’t miss the snow.

I’m listening to Slayer. More specifically, the soundtrack to River’s Edge. I finally found a copy after years of searching – I think it went out of print about 15 minutes after it was released. I found a copy during my freshman year of college, but stupidly sold or traded it at some point. The disc is an odd combination, with a bunch of old Slayer songs, along with Fates Warning, Agent Orange, and Hallows Eve. I only vaguely remember a Slayer song or two in the movie, but I think I must’ve had the soundtrack on tape back in high school, when the film came out. Either way, it’s great to hear the songs again.

Last night was my first insomnia-free weeknight in a while. I hope I’ve broken myself of the problem. I’m trying to go cold-turkey on caffeine, which should help. I’ve been having weird headaches and some real highs and lows, and I need to even that out.

Today’s not a great journal day, so I think I’ll split.

When I was in high school, I finished all of my requirements except for one English class halfway through my senior year. Since I decided not to go down the Engineering road, this meant that I was in the middle of a bunch of very difficult and essentially useless classes. I somehow managed to con a guidance counselor to let me drop almost all of my classes and exchange them for a lot of fluff. This was a dream come true for me, since I had a serious case of senioritis. I hated my home situation, I hated my home town, and I was under the impression that when I got the hell out of there and went to college, women would be falling from the sky and I’d be recognized as some kind of cult genius for my advanced abilities.

This meant that my schedule consisted of a pre-calc class and a writing class. I had some kind of computer III course, but the teacher gave me all of the assignments in the first week, and I handed them back complete the next day. That hour of the day was spent writing a sport scheduling program, and trying to beat whatever was the hot new chess program for the Apple II back in 1989. My mechanical drawing III class was also humorous, because I was the only student. All of the advanced drafting classes met at the same time, and it was a big rumble of gossip, goofing off, and inside jokes. We did some CAD work, but we did a lot more goading and screwing around. I also got two study halls; I spent one reading every fucking book in the library from A to Z, and the other one working in the school theatre, painting scenery and hanging lights.

But the cool addition to my schedule was piano class. The school just started teaching this, and I was lucky to sneak in, since there were only about a dozen seats. I always wanted to learn to play a musical instrument, and this class started at the beginning. Everyone sat at their own digital keyboard with headphones and learned how to read music, play chords, and poke away at various five-finger melodies in C. It was a small class, so the teacher worked with us a lot and we got to practive every day. I even dumped a hundred dollars on a cheap Casio for home so I could practice more.

I got up to speed pretty fast, and once we got to the point where both of our hands were doing different things, we got to pick music out of a few beginner’s fake books and work on different stuff of our own. One of my big projects was hammering out a watered down rendition of Beethoven’s 9th, rewritten for the beginner who has never left C. I’d never heard the real thing – the closest I got to classical music back then was Cliff Burton’s bass solo on the first Metallica album. But I spent a lot of time at it, and got it to a recognizable state. Ten years later, I think I could at least play the first few notes of it if I was in a piano store and wanted to piss off the salesman.

The anticlimax to this whole story is that I was listening to Ludwig Von and his ninth this morning. It wasn’t anything special, just a German knock-off that came in a super-duper-every-classical-recording-ever boxed set. But it was all-digital, and sounded tight. And within the symphony performance were the same notes I’d hammered out on that Casio all those years before. And it made me think of that final semester, probably my best of those 13 years of school, where I had fun and got ready to leave for the first time. It’s corny, but these are the kind of weird tricks my mind plays.

I slept last night. It’s more of an art than a skill to me. I could sleep all day, every day, especially if it’s cold like today. It’s only about 50 outside, but with the gloom and the clouds and the darkness, it’s nice to envelop myself in the covers and stay there, thinking and waiting for sleep. I can tell when I’m about to fall asleep, because my internal monologue becomes irrational and disjointed. I start thinking about multiplication tariffs and drag-and-drop garden plants and secret, transdimensional tunnels and classes I need to study for even though I graduated from college almost four years ago. It’s a nice feeling of confusion, though, and it’s why this insomnia bothers me so much. The self-conversation doesn’t slow – it becomes more of a manic frenzy as I keep looking at the clock. I try to put myself elsewhere and imagine that I’m sleeping somewhere else, like the bridge of the International Space Station, or at Marie’s, with her next to me, Henrey sleeping on my feet, and Mungo sitting on my head or trying to stand on my chest. Eventually I get to sleep, but it’s satisfying when it takes no effort, and the dreams are decent.

I’ve had a lot of weird dreams lately, probably related to the insomnia. The other day, my sister was barbequeing with David Letterman, and instead of his usual schtick, he was talking very solemly and offering her all of this advice and inspiration. They both graduated from Ball State – maybe that was it. I also had a dream that I somehow convinced a bunch of people that I held the patent for fluorescent lights, but when I tried to use it as a physics project, I got busted. Last night I was with my friend Virginia in a national forest that had been turned into a large, refrigerated greenhouse. Elevators and tram cars snaked through miles of tulips and carnations. We were talking about filming some kind of video where various trucks filled with colored chalk would dump the powder on a giant salt flat, weaving and manuvering in some choreographed fashion while a camera truck drove in front of them, and Joe Satriani played guitar. The thing is that these dreams are far more detailed than I can now remember, and I wish I could write all of this stuff down when I woke up.

Lunch is almost over, and I need to find a bunch of art for my January 20 page. I better split.

This is a quick test to see how things have survived the move. Not everything is hooked up yet. It looks like the time is screwed up – I am entering this in PST and the server’s in EST, so it looks like my entries will perpetually be 3 hours off. Bummer. I’ll be back to write something meaningful after I beat the indexing program over the head a few times and make sure everything works.

12/06/98 23:46

That wasn’t fun. My little indexing program written in C was not that portable – it contained a bunch of hard-coded pathnames for speakeasy, and I had to break out gdb to find out why it wasn’t running after I recompiled it (a missing slash.) This system isn’t as convenient as the old one, but I think I’ll eventually get it running okay.

It sure is weird being at bat again. I have many truly paranoid fears about my audience and people running across my writing, especially since I seem to be leading a dual life right now. But, I’m sure about 3 people are reading this, and it doesn’t even look like my site appears on any of the search engines yet, so I guess I don’t have that much to worry about.

All of a sudden, a million projects have fallen out of the sky. I’ve been spending my odd time getting 34.216.9.77/ up and running, and I wish I could work on it full-time. It looks so threadbare right now, simple HTML everywhere and almost no color or pictures. But it has some good content started, and I hope to whip up some stylesheets and more universal design and navigation for the whole thing when I get motivated.

Summer Rain still continues. I’ve been working on it almost every night, trying to finish the final third. There are some real problems with the dynamics of the last 15 chapters, but I’m slowly chiseling it out. I never did finish the middle third – I got about 85% done. I wanted to move on to something fresh, so I’ll have to go back and get to that later. The book is now over 200,000 words, and it’s going to need at least another 50K words before it’s close to done. I don’t think that will happen in 1998, but it might by next spring. I love working on this book, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s unsaleable. It has been fun and I think my friends will enjoy reading it, but it’s probably going on the shelf after its completion. I needed to get all of the autobigraphical bullshit and first-novel gaffs out of my system, and at least I’m learning a lot from it.

Rumored to Exist still sits on blocks, as does the unnamed time travel book. I probably worked on Rumored since I last wrote in here – actually, I’m sure I did; I had a pretty good run with it before I went to NYC in October/November, and got it “halfway done”. I’m anxious to finish it and unleash it on the (il)literate world, but I’m not motivated to work on it right now. It takes a special sort of highly focused, almost manic work ethic to drill away on that thing, and I’ve been too wiped out lately to do anything with it.

Other stuff – some potential writing and HTML jockeying for Rock Out Censorship; The next Dear Death column and assorted reviews for Metal Curse. Something else, but I forget what. I have a lot of ideas for various web projects, but no muscle to put behind them. And I’m journaling more than ever on paper – pages and pages a day. I got behind this year, and I’m trying to catch up before the end of the year. It’s stupid to push it when I have nothing to write about, but I’m trying to fill my notebook by December 31.

Life has been somewhat miserable lately, which is slowing my productivity. It’s the part of the year where it’s always fucking dark outside, and we’re getting the Noah’s Ark treatment with the rain out there. My car is about ready to fall apart, and has a substandard heating system in it. Driving a 200 pound VW in the 100 mile per hour windstorms isn’t leisurely. Since I think every car trip will be my last, it means I don’t get out much these days. The cabin fever and lack of any daylight reference means I become completely nocturnal on the weekends, and then during the week I am plagued by horrendous insomnia. This destroys me – last week I was going to bed and then waking up at 1 or 2, unable to fall back asleep. That makes the days a zombie death march, and destroys any work I need to do after my day job. I’ve been trying to get on some vitamins and supplements and adjust my schedule a bit, but it’s hard. I wish I had 30 or 40 hours a day to write, but I don’t. I’m learning the gentle art of scheduling, although I wish I could just write when I want.

And Marie isn’t here, and I’m not there. She will be here on Xmas, for a few days, and I will be there, maybe sometime in Feb, athough it isn’t cleared yet. I was in New York for the first week of November, and we had a lot of fun. I finally saw Conan O’Brien’s show live, and also caught a Daily Show taping, among other things. I miss her and I miss her cats. I can’t wait until we are on the same side of the country together. Plans are afoot, but until they are solid, they are top secret.

New computer. Well, mostly – I tore out the motherboard and put in a AMD K6-2-266 with 64MB RAM; I also swapped up to a 6.4GB drive. I went up to the latest version of Slackware as my main boot, and broke down and put in a second boot with NT 3.5.1, just so I could run Office in extreme emergencies. After some minor snafus, it’s all running fine.

Lots of other stuff, but I feel like I’ve been at the computer all day (I have!) and I think I’m going to Safeway or something, just to get out of here. I hope I can update more, but no promises…

Thought I was dead? I feel the same way sometimes.

I haven’t been writing for a few reasons, mostly apathy. I’ve also been trying to get the next 15 chapters of Summer Rain done before the end of the month, and I work on them during lunch. It doesn’t look like I’ll make it, but I have a lot done now.

Marie is visiting on Friday, for a week. It’s going to be cool and I can’t wait to see her again. All’s well there except for the fact that she doesn’t live in Seattle yet.

I’m very tired. I bought an Atari 2600. I want to go to Taco Bell, except I know it will make me sick. My throat’s a little sore, but I’m taking a bunch of vitamins and gargling salt water at night to keep from getting sicker. I need to clean my apartment, but maybe I won’t because I don’t think there’s anything I could do to scare Marie. I haven’t drank any soda all day.

That’s it for now. Maybe I’ll write more when I’m feeling creative.

Still alive. On an agressive schedule with the edits to Summer Rain – I am trying to wrap up the 15 chapters that make up book 2 before Marie shows up on 10/2. It’s a mess, but it’s slowly falling in place – I’ve written about 60,000 words – the first fifteen chapters were like 84,000 words. So I might make it, especially if I don’t sleep this weekend.

I’m listening to Shadowfax – their fourth album, The Dreams of Children. I just bought it tonight, and I think that completes my collection. It’s a shame that Chuck Greenberg, the group’s nucleus, passed away a couple years ago. I really like their stuff, and if there’s one band I listen to the most while writing this book, it’s them. (Chick Corea is second; Pat Metheny might be in third.) Their compilation What Goes Around is pretty much the soundtrack to Summer Rain, partially because it’s something I listened to back in 1992, and every song is imprinted heavily with those memories.

Not a lot is going on otherwise. I’m counting down the days until Marie shows up again (15) but having this self-imposed deadline to beat is really making the time fly. I also have a lot going down at work, so it’s been busy all around, with nothing interesting to talk about. I guess I have been spending some time on www.ebay.com, trying to track down Atari 2600 crap. I just bought a VCS and a bunch of games and I can’t wait until they get here. It was pretty cheap, and I just want to have an old-school, self-contained unit to play with. Games are cheap – usually about a buck each. The video quality is bad, but they don’t make games like they used to – it’s not just a rehash of mortal kombat or mario, there are some real playable titles out there. Plus, with a fifth of vodka and a friend, it can be a really hilarious evening. So if you have a bunch of Atari shit in your closet, let me know and maybe I can give you a few bucks for some of it.

Like I said, nothing else. I better keep writing before Conan. Later.

I ate breakfast today. It was a pretty weird experience, even though it was just cereal and grapefruit juice. And for lunch, it’s salad and a bunch of fresh fruit. Maybe if I keep this up, I might shed a couple of pounds. I’m trying to give up red meat, fast food, and most processed sugar. (famous last words).

I am writing a Godzilla parody. I’m thinking of writing a bunch of skit ideas and sending them blind to Conan O’Brien. I’m reading a book about “black” planes and browsing another book about military hardware. (Marie left both here for me – I told you she was the perfect woman for me.) I haven’t gotten back into Summer Rain yet, but maybe I will soon. And figuring out what I should and shouldn’t eat is taking up a lot of my time, but I guess that will cool off after I get used to it. Oh, and I’m messing with the C-64 a lot, but mostly just reading about it – it’s still in the closet, but maybe I’ll drag it out soon.

Nothing else. I am obsessed with Coke Slurpees. I have two obsessions in my life, and that’s one of them. It’s probably temporary – the other’s more permanent, and doesn’t contain caffiene (except when she’s drinking coffee, I guess.) I need to finish my lunch now.

What a weekend. It’s hard for me to talk about things, not because they went bad, but because there’s a lot to cover and no matter how much I typed, I wouldn’t do the weekend justice. I also don’t want to seem all sappy and stereotypical about it.

Marie visited. She was even better than I expected. We are in love. I now have an incredible girlfriend. And the only problem is that for now, she lives in New York (but that will soon change). I really think she’s the one, and I’m not worried about the distance. I’ve never met a person who matched me this much, and I love everything about her – waiting a few months for her to relocate won’t be a problem. So that’s the synopsis.

We didn’t do a lot this weekend – at least in terms of the touristy, Labor day weekend stuff you’re “supposed” to do. We spent a lot of time in the apartment, and went to a few places around Seattle, mostly to eat and do some very minor sightseeing. It was still very cool though, spending time with her in person, just watching TV or whatever.

A couple of stupid bad things: I hit someone in the VW. It didn’t do anything to their car, but it bent up my bumper and has me paranoid that my front suspension is going to fall apart or something. The next day, my gas pedal broke while we were in Snoqualmie. I managed to Macgyver it with a piece of shoelace, but it was still a fucked up little adventure. Luckily, these events were minor enough and didn’t offset the otherwise cool time we had together.

I’m trying to get my diet back in order. I just went shopping and bought mostly fresh fruits and vegetables and stuff. I’m trying to quit red meat, fast food, and high-fat items, eat breakfast every day, and stop drinking anything but water and the occasional apple juice at work. The lack of sugar from all of the 7-Up I drink really took a toll on me today – I almost passed out during a meeting I was so tired. But I’m sure it will all balance out eventually.

Speaking of food, I need to finish dinner – I got a late start today. More later.

Eating Chinese food, listening to Gary Moore, and taking a break from laundry and other miscellaneous cleaning. It’s a beautiful evening out, but I can’t really feel the cool breeze from inside my apartment. My stereo just freaked out – it makes this weird popping noise about once a week and then there’s no volume until you power-cycle it, then all’s fine. This time it popped and jumped to max volume, which freaked the shit out of me. Looks like it’s about time to pick up a new receiver. I don’t want to retire this one, because I love it – but it’s been 9 years, and I guess that’s a lot to expect out of a piece of electronics these days.

Marie will be here tomorrow. I have to go to work, but I’ll be on this boat trip all day, so it’s pretty much like Friday for me today. I guess this is the last time I will write in here before the big meeting, and I feel like saying something profound, but all I can think of is what I need to get done before tomorrow. I’m not nervous about meeting her, but I’m very anxious. I don’t even think I need to do all of this cleaning, because I’m sure she won’t really care about the state of my kitchen linoleum or whatever. I think I’m pretty safe with this one. But it feels weird, like I’m on the eve of something big, like when I was sitting in my mom’s kitchen in 1995 with a U-Haul of my shit in the driveway, knowing I’d be rambling across the country in a few hours. It’s an odd sensation. But not bad.

This food sucks. I got over my cold, for the most part, but I think the overdose of vitamin C has turned my tongue into mooncraters or something. I guess that’ll heal up fast enough. I’ve got a lot to do, so I better get to it. Don’t expect any updates until after the holiday weekend. Until then…

I’m listening to U2 – Achtung Baby right now, but I’m not entirely sure why. I guess it seemed like good music to have in the player while this beautiful, sunny day poured through the open windows and I stood in front of the stove, only wearing a pair of levis and too lazy to put on a shirt, making grilled cheese sandwiches. U2, and this album specifically, remind me heavily of my ex-girlfriend Tanya. I was very anti-U2 during the relationship, and even more when we split. But two years later, after I moved to Seattle, I gave the album a try and discovered that it was like a time capsule of memories about her. Even though I never listened to the songs with her, the words made me look back and re-examine a lot of our time together and find a lot of missing pieces and hidden messages. Maybe I’m insane, but it reminded me so much of her. It also reminds me of the summer of 1992, the year before we dated. That’s partially because that’s when all of the singles and videos were getting spit from the Island Records marketing machine to saturate the airwaves. But it’s also because my friend Meg kept setting her process name to “Achtung Baby” and because the sounds just seem to work for that period of time. If I ever made a Hollywood movie out of Summer Rain, the song “Acrobat” would be on the soundtrack. And no Puff Daddy remixes.

Last night, I saw this environmental death metal band called R.I.P. on the public access channel. It was pretty cool – they were sort of a thrashier version of something like Rotting Christ, but not as well-honed yet, and they all wore corpsepaint or other King Diamond-like makeup, with costumes and stage props and everything. The show was sort of like an infomercial, where they talked to the band, then showed live footage and these videos. They sang about the destruction of the Earth (I believe their album was called “Save Mother Earth or Die With It”) and mixed live footage with video of polluted factories, clear-cutting, Cheronobyl, polluted waters, etc. It was all very rough and not totally professional, but it was very entertaining and unique. At the end of the stage show, the lead singer took out a prop knife and slit the throats of all of the members, and then himself, and they all fell over and were bleeding all over the place. I’d like to find out more, but searching for R.I.P. on the web would generate a billion hits.

I’ve been sort of sick for the last few days. It’s not horrible, just the start of a cold and I’ve been doing every remedy possible to get it to subside before Thursday. I’m eating vitamin A, ecinacea, zinc, goldenseal and other vitamins by the pound, and drinking gallons of water. I’m not getting worse, but it’s still there. I stayed home on Friday to sleep and take it easy, and that helped. I didn’t do much yesterday, and today looks like it will be more of the same.

My new way to eat up my time and keep my brain busy until Marie arrives this Thursday has been Halberstam’s most excellent book on the 50s. I read this book when I took Murray Sperber’s class on youth culture in the 50s and 60s in the spring of 95 (by far the best class I took in college) and now I’m crawling through it again. It’s 800 pages, and I figure if I mentally race myself into trying to finish it by the time she’s here, I will relieve some of the nervousness and get totally involved in the Korean War, the birth of fast food, Harley Earl’s giant-finned cars, and everything else. But don’t let Newt Gingrich fool you – the fifties were terrible. They were full of labor disputed, inequality, brainwashing, racism, conformity, and governmental atrocity. That’s why the Republicans want them back.

I guess I haven’t written in here for a bit, and I forgot to mention my flying trip on Thursday. This guy at work is a private pilot and is trying to get his hours up, so he invited me and another guy for a short day-trip in a small Cessna. I’ve been up with him once before, in a big loop around Seattle where I got to look around and see everything. This time, we went to Friday Harbor, which is in the San Juan Islands.

The trip started at Boeing Field, which is a huge airport, but it’s mostly for big cargo jets (UPS, Fedex, etc), corporate learjets, Boeing test planes, and private planes. You can’t catch a United flight to Chicago from here, just like you can’t land your Piper Cub at SeaTac (well, I guess you could, but it would cost a lot.) Me and Chris stood on the tarmac while Jon checked out the plane. I saw a Virgin airways jet take off about 100 yards away from me, which was an awesome sight – I thought it was going to rip all of the bones right of my body as it left. It’s cool to see all of the planes there – some rental businesses have rows and rows of identaical Cessnas tied down like soldiers in formation, and the next lot over, you’d see all of a TV station’s news choppers. On the other side, a big DC-10 getting loaded up would sit there, and a Boeing test 747 would be across the way, maybe getting worked on to try out some new electrical fix or something. It’s a very odd and disparate situation.

The plane checked out, and we had to pull it to the taxiway, which is sort of funny. The plane weighs about the same as my Rabbit, and even with 40 gallons of fuel and 3 adults, it probably weighs less than the average bone-dry and empty sedan. The interior of the plane is about the same size as the Rabbit, but it has much better seats which make it a bit roomier. For the flight up, I took the back seat and gave Chris shotgun, and we agreed to switch on the way home. I had my camcorder with me, and wanted to get some good shots of the Seattle approach.

We all piled in, and Jon went through the last of the checklists before firing up the engine. I learned on my last trip that I’d never be able to fly a plane – there’s so much to remember and do. There’s the checklists, and the gauges, and the air traffic control stuff – I’d forget something and crash into a schoolyard full of kids or something. But Jon seems to be pretty good at it, and talked to the tower and got us all ready to go. While we waited, I saw a biplane land – it was red and looked exactly like the Red Baron’s plane, with open cockpits and everything.

Then it was our turn. We hurtled down the runway into the air very fast – it’s nothing like being in a 737 where they have to shuttle down thousands of feet of runway before they slowly rise. The Cessna bobbed right into the air, and reminded you of the tradeoff of such a small plane – it really shimmeys all over the place on takeoff. Maybe it was because I was in the back and had more of a fishtail effect, though. I had the camcorder out (you can use electronic devices during takeoff in this plane) and got the whole thing on tape, the skidmarked concrete falling away from us, and the surrounding Seattle turning into a model train diorama. I only wished I could’ve captured the headset audio onto tape – we all wore headsets with microphones so we could hear each other talk over the prop noise, and this also piped in the air traffic controllers and other planes. I haven’t watched my tape yet, but I imagine it’s just got prop noise in the background.

It’s weird and cool to see Seattle at 3000 feet. Our northbound course took is right through downtown and over Elliott bay, and I got a good view of my apartment on the way up. It’s the kind of height that’s damn high, but low enough that you can really see everything below you. I followed the landmarks on the way up – the UW, I-5, Northgate Mall, Fred Meyer in Lynnwood. Pretty soon, I ran out of familiar sights, and we were on our way to Everett. The plane cruised at about 100mph, so it only took a few minutes to get up there. We heard a lot of air traffic chatter, telling people to move to different headings and altitudes, because a group of 4 Navy jets were doing a ceremonial flyby somewhere in the area. I didn’t see them, though.

Pretty soon, we were over the islands and heading west. I had a map and followed along, but didn’t know any of the features on the ground, since I’d never been up there. It was beautiful though – some mist, but it only added to the incredible views of the Cascades and Mt. Baker – it made them more mysterious. I looked below – Chris said he thought he saw a whale, but all I could see were the ferries and the occasional boat. I didn’t film much of this, because I knew it would just look small and unmajestic on tape. But I did enjoy the show.

Before I knew it, we were making our approach in to Friday Harbor. Jon had to circle the plane around in some weird manuvers, and I got the whole thing on tape. There were many boats and ferries below, and we circled in to the airport. The touchdown happened fast, and we taxiied into the transient parking area. This airport was not much more than a single strip and some parking – there was no tower and no other dramatics. We pushed the plane into a spot, and hiked toward town.

The town was one of those very laid-back, touristy places – it reminded me a lot of Seaside, in Oregon, but much smaller and with less traffic. There wasn’t a lot there, but everything had to do with tourists – gift shops, restaurants, bed and breakfast places. And everything was CLEAN, like a Disney attraction. But it was cool, and I hope at some point Marie and I can catch a boat there and spend a weekend in a nice hotel or something. It looks like a good way to forget what’s going on, and it’s only like 100 miles away. We ate at the slowest fish and chips place in the world, but the food was okay and it was nice to just sit by the window and watch the beople go by. After eating, we took the grand tour of the city (i.e. walked around the block) and then headed back to the plane.

I had shotgun for the way back, and got the whole takeoff on film, which was cool. I also got to see some weird islands on the way back, with lots of very eclectic houses sitting on giant plots of land. This one house was built on maybe 25 acres of nothing, and sat on a giant artificial bluff that overlooked a huge manmade kidney-shaped lake. There were lots of light-aqua swimming pools shimmering in the sunlight, too. It made me wish I could’ve bought 50 acres there back in the seventies, so I could now sell half of it and use the money to build a mansion.

The ride back was also pretty quick, and I got more shots of Seattle on the way in. Landing was a little hairier, or at least there was a lot more chatter on the radio. The airport gets busy in the afternoon, and there are wake advisories after those big FedEx 757’s start hurtling in for the afternoon pickup. But we got back, touched down, and I made it back in time to go to work for a little bit. Overall, a very cool trip.

I guess I’ve been babbling for a while – it’s time to either get some cleaning done or leave the house for a bit…

It’s one of those weird, depresso days. I’m worried about my car. Paranoid might be a better word – it has a small coolant leak that’s probably just a hose or a hose clamp, but even that’s a pain in the ass to fix. I know if I bought 3 replacement hoses and 6 replacement clamps and drained all of the antifreeze and swapped the hoses, it would probably still leak, 6 hours and $30 later. I want to bring it to a shop, but then you’re talking lots of cash. I hope this thing can hold together until January, and then maybe I will buy a semi-new Toyota or Honda or something.

I’m still counting the days (8) until Marie shows up. That means more cleaning, preparing, and waiting. The apartment is pretty clean right now, but there are a bunch of things I need to do right before she gets here, like buy some food, do some laundry, etc. I’m trying to keep busy with the book, but it’s hard to keep focused. I’m still picking away at some stuff, like dialogue, but it’s been a real pain in the ass. On my last read through the material, I marked about 250 things in 15 chapters that needed to be changed. And some of those changes are giant – I have a lot of holes to plug. But I hope to get some of this done in the next couple of months.

Tomorrow, I’m going flying with a guy that I work with. I guess he needs to log hours with passengers or something. I went with him a couple of years ago and it was great – he rented one of those small Cessna planes, basically a VW with wings, and we circled around Seattle at 4,000 feet. It was an incredible view – high enough to get an incredible view but low enough that you could make out the buildings and streets. This time we are going to Friday Harbor in the San Juans and back, and I’ll have a camcorder with me.

It’ll be nice to have many distractions between now and a week from tomorrow. I have the flying, and the boat trip the day Marie arrives. Plus with all of the shopping and dusting and cleaning and mopping, I have some stuff to keep me busy.