I have plenty of work to do today. It's the 10th, which means Bookkeeping Day. And I'm about as excited about it as I usually am.

My apologies for the Long Silence. I get into moods. (That's usually how I describe finding something more interesting to do in the evenings than sit online for hours.)

Today, we have a grab-bag of thoughts.

First, hooray for geeks! Specifically the kind of game-geek who tries to be the first to finish some new video game, whether Nintendo, GameBoy, or whatever, and to post cheats, helps, and tips online. Thanks to the intervention of one kind GameGeek last night, I've made progress in Tales of Phantasia for the first time in over a week. I will not now have to delete my file and start over, without having faced the Final Boss Monster. (He's still a bit in my future - I was stuck at the point of the third-to-last Boss Monster.)

This game has a dozen side-quests, none of which I chose to investigate on my first time through, so as soon as I do beat it, I'll have to start over. (I understand this is one of those where certain features only unlock on your second round.)

Second, the R.C. is out of town for three days. I'm not sure how I missed knowing she had this trip planned, but when she mentioned it last Friday, it came as quite a surprise to me. The R.C. and I do very well together as roommates (something which still occasionally surprises me), but a bit of alone time now and then is a very nice thing.

She'll be getting her own peace and quite early in November, when I'm in Sacramento. Ugh. One of the drawbacks of having agreed to stay here through the end of the year is that I can't get out of this trip. (Could be worse. I could be Bernie. He has to go to South Dakota later that month. Right now he's trying to choose between a $700+ airline ticket and driving for nine hours.)

The laptop continues to have Connection Issues, making it doubly hard for me to keep up with my personal reading online. I'm about ready to break down and call a ComputerGeek to come in and uninstall the old wireless network and restore the original Comcast box settings, then install and configure a new wireless router for me.

I might be able to do it myself - I set up the last two wireless networks we had at home, but I can only do it if nothing goes pear-shaped. I'm willing to take chances with the laptop and being able to connect with it or not for a few days, but not the PC.

Hmmm...what else?

I spent some time researching my novel this weekend. I love researching instead of writing. Researching is so much more interesting. And so much easier.

I dug out the notebook with all of my information in it, reviewed the World Map (which might need a bit of changing) and realized that I hadn't quite fleshed out the different cultures of the world quite as thoroughly as I could have. So now I'm creating history and back-story. (There's so much less pressure writing the stuff that will never make it into the actual novel.)

I'm missing a fundamental source of conflict. There are minor conflicts between the different societies, based just on their differences, but I need a larger one as well.

I amused myself for hours on end this way, but in the end, I found myself wondering if I shouldn't be doing something more productive with my time. So I sewed buttons and worked on an afghan I'm making to donate to charity. And thought about the novel, instead.

Inside my head, I'm still quite interested in this project, but I haven't quite found the hook...the event or the character that I'm passionate enough about to drive myself from planning to writing. This suggests that my hero isn't ready to step onto the stage yet, I think.

I was quite surprised (stop me, or just skip this bit, if I'm repeating myself) when I discovered that the central conflict of the novel was going to be played out in terms of religious fundamentalism versus, well, not being a bigot and hating anything and anyone different than you. Aside from my comparatively recent dislike of organized religion, inspired by our current "leadership" (I laugh), I haven't my life bothering about religion. People's superstitions are their own and as long as they're not using them as an excuse to toss women into ponds to see if they sink, I don't care that much. I wouldn't have expected to find myself writing a novel around that theme, and most especially I didn't expect it when it happened, being, as it was, a year or two before I really started paying attention to the Bush Administration and their weird supporters.

That's probably about all you really care (and more) about that topic, isn't it?

Apparently it's Circus Season again. I've gotten a dozen calls in the past week from people with heavy Spanish accents, wanting to buy tickets to the circus. I wish the circus would get a new phone number, one that's not one digit off of this company's main number.

And, last but not least, I'm back on the diet. In a manner of speaking. I haven't gone back to buying the supplements, not feeling I can afford $10/day in "special" food, but I'm back on a diet of chicken, eggs, yogurt, seafood, turkey, limited carbs, and eating six times a day, but very small quantities each time. I have three pounds that I put back on that need to be banished and once I get rid of those, I'm thinking maybe I'll lose another five or six. I'd love to be back down at the weight where, back when I was young and vain and depressed because my figure didn't resemble Twiggy's, I used to consider myself grotesquely obese. (For the record, that was pretty much any weight where you couldn't count my ribs.)