Author: Allegra

250 hits and 17 kudos already.  Much more banter and less hardcore fooling around.

So excited! This time tomorrow I’ll be staggering off an airplane and trying to find the way to the hotel.

I’ve written 5K words on the fanfic.  I was very happy when I woke up this morning feeling more like working on HOTM;;;;;;

let’s see if the feeling lasts.

Totally loving where I am with the kids and grandkid this morning. Alex is aware that I’m going to Iceland to look at waterfalls and volcanos.

It’s official!!! I’m freaking out about my overseas trip.

I have made the last purchase – a wall adapter – and I should now have everything I need to travel to Iceland.

The packing starts today.

I am going to be making lists.

Got to snuggle with Alex again last night. Poppa and I took him to Eastburn Park and he wouldn’t climb something and I said you can climb that and I showed him a secret way how and that probably burned two hundred calories offa him right there.

Going shopping with Keith this morning. He’s working but his employment torments are his to relate.

I gave myself a proper manicure and it’s pointless so I’m chopping off my fingernails this morning to be super short again.

Saw Mike with excessive briefness yesterday – he left me a copy of Lost Connections by Johann Hari and he seemed quite excited about it.

I shall do childcare tonight. I don’t imagine it will be as easy as the last time but who knows.

Realized that I wrote some magic and then used it the wrong way. The music I’ve been writing calls my ancestors, and I’m not keen on that, (cause it worked out so well the last time it happened – I was messed for days!) so I’ve stopped singing and playing it and as soon as I made the decision to do that I immediately felt much better. My sleep is better too.

The dishwasher’s running, I’ve had breakfast, and my new fic is up to 4000 words.

Tammy is encouraging me to edit. I’m deleting the next sentence and the sentence after that because I’m fucking pissed off at another friend of mine for the ‘writing advice’ I got but it would be ill-advised to make that opinion public. Or I could take the advice in the worst possible way.

A MIRACLE HAPPENED TO ME YESTERDAY. My parents know about it. ANYWAY I’M IN A GOOD MOOD NOW THANKS.

Phidippus borealis

Clouds in the sky

But where is Alex?

I’ll give you more news about the lad when I have it.

wrote 1420 words yesterday as an experiment regarding volume – not novel related

I cracked a tooth on a pancake (not eating that brand anymore) two weeks ago and Jeff just had root canal plus, so we’re kind of ouchy. I’m wondering if I should see the dentist before I go but it doesn’t seem to be getting worse.

To take your mind off my troubles, have some figures from the top of Renaissance German heraldry.

Finally saw Black Panther. Yup, fave character Shuri.

Alex was amazing. He broke down twice; once I said, too bad, I’m turning the light off. The other time he wanted chocolate cereal for supper and his Poppa and I just looked at each other and laughed quite heartily. Other than that, he was his usual flailing butterfly self, and fell asleep when he was supposed to.

Tonight, I was at Tom and Peggy’s with all of my fam and Tom and Peggy had their son and daughterinlaw and *their* three kids under four and you’d think it would have been a zoo but I found it entertaining in the extreme to have six month old twin boys around, especially when they thought I was the frickin’ pied piper every time I sang and played (took Otto and Rowena). ANYWAY I told Peggy on Thursday I’m showing up with food and the rest of it all kinda happened and Jeff against his best nature et some of the macncheese and now nature done put a plug in him.

I hope the blueberry minitarts buy back some enteric happiness.

We sang and played and Peggy was at the standup bass and her son even played for a while (he backed me up on Clem’s Walk, if you can credit it….)

Anyway it was fun, and everyone cleared out and left me and Peggy to talk and Tom and Paul to talk, and you know how it is when you haven’t spoken to a friend you know well and it all just comes pouring out but really you should be getting going…..

Three kids under four, Christ wept. I know it’s nothing by Victorian standards but even so.

for a couple of hours.

It’s everything else.

I bounce upward for a while but then there is too much down. Pretense is okay, but inadequate. Shit hurts. I think about Iceland and get a little gleeful. I review the list for stuff I have to pack and think about how to travel as light as possible.

and in a few minutes, Alex.

Ate both lunch and dinner with Keith and Paul yesterday. (Lentil soup for lunch, Desi Turka for dins – during which a person came in, shot up in the women’s washroom, puked (in the toilet)  and scraped herself together when the manager told her the police were inbound and then she staggered out in much the same state of distress as when she staggered in. To say that watching the washroom door for the entire meal put a pall on things is not overdoing it, and somehow I ended up subsidizing everyone else’s drinking, but o well.

Keith spent the intervening period interviewing a business owner for the possibility of acquiring it, and I’ll let him tell that story, but we certainly had a lively discussion about it afterward.

Paul and I are hanging with Alex at his place tonight while Katie is off at some appointment.

Due to an event that I’m not supposed to publicly discuss but which is known to the Burnaby fam, Katie’s childcare options are reduced somewhat.

Those two statements are connected. Paul and I are hoping to keep him entertained and then we’re going to haul him off to bed and stick him between us until Paul’s furnace-like corpus roasts him to sleep.

mmmmm the schnitzel house was back on its game last night SO GOOD normally I don’t eat the whole thing but I just devoured mine.

Watching The Alienist. I read the book a couple of years after it came out, and really enjoyed it. Caleb Carr is a historian who lives in New York, and he tried to make as close to being ‘real’ as he could. I particularly remember how incredible the descriptions of 1896 New York were. Also, he wrote a sequel, which if this show is successful will probably form the basis for the next season.

Took Jeff out for brekky this am. Now we’re trying to grind through enough work to feel okay about watching whatever’s on the pvr – which will not include NCIS since it’s a rebroadcast.

I charged up the camera M loaned me without difficulty and now I’m trying to extract pics. We’ll see how that goes. May post some here if I am successful, which I’d better be, since I AM UNDER STRICT ORDERS TO FILL A 16 GIG CARD WITH ICELAND ICELAND ICELAND