chill, wet, patchy days
as fall comes to Seattle
like July, or June

today’s sounders match
sun, cheering, aggressive play
zero zero draw

Slept in, decided to finally look into DSL service since my provider’s long, long descent into horribleness has led to me being having slow, vastly overcharged. This ended up taking hours, as trying to figure out which provider is least horrible is like trying to decide if you’re better off drilling a hole in your skull using a power drill and one or another sized bit, or if you want to go with a hand-cranked version. It’s all painful and horrible.

Then I went to go buy wine. Garagiste is awesome. Wine Outlet is awesome. Bringing home four cases of crazy, great, cheap wine almost redeems the day. Seattle rocks.

And now I’m going to make (not quite from scratch) ravioli and a nice tomato sauce. After which, I’ll sit down for my scheduled ~7pm appointment with the keyboard to write.

My pledge: I’m going to stop doing moon research and write the book, and not draft-1 of the book, I’m going through the last outline and writing all the chapter placeholders, all the gaps in draft-1. And I’m going to start pushing out snippets to prove it. And if not that, than the YA book, and if not that, then something. Word counts word counts word counts.

So:

“What do you think the chances are it blows out?” Megumi asked.
Shhhhh.
Megumi sighed. “I don’t know,” James said. “It’s why we’re running the test.”
Megumi made a face. “I know….” She said. “Okay. I think it’s a hundred percent.”
The two vendors looked over, and James’ eyebrows shot up.
“What?” Megumi asked. “No? You think it holds? Care to make it interesting?”

In the days after riding huge distances, my body has three reactions:
1. Holy crap I’m sore, what just happened?
2. To prevent you from doing anything that ambitious again, I’m going to go into sleep mode every couple of hours and render the brain powerless to motivate action
3. In case you figure out a way around that, I’m going to require massive calorie intake every time you wake and every few hours, so if you decide to run a marathon or something I’ll be prepped

I feel pretty good considering I biked over 200m Saturday and was criminally undertrained.

Item 1: I don’t usually eat pork, or beef, but on the fourth of July, say, I’ll make an exception and have a hot dog, or a brat (in the same way I don’t go to eat at someone’s house and make a stink if there’s sausage on the pizza).

Item 2: From Science Daily:

A new study by researchers at Rhode Island Hospital have found a substantial link between increased levels of nitrates in our environment and food with increased deaths from diseases, including Alzheimer’s, diabetes mellitus and Parkinson’s. The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

I’ve got a new short story, about black holes, astronomy, and redemption and prepared food, in the latest (August) issue, on newstands and in mailboxes now. Well, probably before now, I just got back from vacation. It looks like so:

Check it out.