Auld acquaintance.

Spent some time with Julianna today, someone I've been friends with off and on for, oh, a decade or more, now. She's been doing just as badly as anyone else I know, lately -- no job and unsure what to do with herself and badly needing to get out of the house.

We ended up renting a movie, Legally Blonde, a movie we'd both admitted to being guiltily curious about, and it turned out to be a lot of fun and very good-natured.

She also showed me "Buffy: The Musical," and it was fucking excellent.

I begin to see now why people have been talking about it so much. I haven't had a chance to see Buffy in over a year (*waaah sniff*), and this was a fine episode to come back to.

I left "early" (meaning, after midnight), so I could come home and get some writing done. I decided to go ahead and tackle chapter one. This current novel is based on a short story of mine, and I picked up writing where the short story left off; I knew the short story would work as a first chapter if I chopped off the ending and went back and did some revisions. So I finished all that. I can only claim I've written 330 words today, but it was really a lot more hard work than that seems, dammit.

(By the way, if you're curious to see how I'm doing on my novel day by day -- and I'm sure you're just deathly curious, I know, but being public like this keeps me honest while I'm working -- you can check out this page on Bloodletters. It also has an excerpt from the second chapter.)

I don't honestly think I'm going to make my November 30th deadline, but that's all right. What an impressive failure it'll be if I don't, though! I'll have written thousands of words and managed to get in the habit of writing every day, which I'm going to keep doing until I'm done. So there.

Geek heaven.

I can't believe I forgot to write about this:

Friday night, I was at my friend Ron's place. He had me and retcon come over to watch the new director's cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I've been saying for years that there was a good movie somewhere in that mess that got released -- and now I've finally seen it. Wow. And the colors of the transfer were excellent, too -- it's a much more visually interesting film than I'd ever known.

Afterwards, Ron asked me if I had a CD-burner. I've been desparately wanting one for years, but I've never been able to afford it. I admitted that I didn't.

"Here, want one?" he asked.

He was serious. He had a spare CD-burner -- it had come as part of a cheap package deal, and he already had one, and was willing to just give me this new one. Riff pointed out to him that my birthday was in just a few weeks. "Oh, is it? Well, then, happy birthday," Ron said casually.

What I'm trying to get at, here, is the fact that Ron is, quite possibly, the single coolest person on the face of the planet ever.

Saved.

Finally received my check from Design Works Interiors for the website I built for them, so I figured I had the financial wherewithal to go out and buy new tires for the Annabel Lee today. Went to deposit the check and found that the bank was already closed. Well, not a problem -- I should have enough money to buy tires with, and I can deposit the check on Monday.

Went and bought the tires. Expensive things, tires. But I can actually feel the road under the truck, now, and I no longer feel like I'm in imminent danger of sudden flaming death each time I go out, so, yeah, money well spent.

Wasted the entire evening downloading and installing half-a-dozen different MP3-ripping programs, none of which work. Feel tired and frustrated. Decide I need to get out of the house for a while before I can do any writing. End up deciding what the hell, I may as well go to the Mercury.

Drive to Capitol Hill. Spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out how to drive to a bank I can easily get to when on foot. Go to pull out a little cash for admission to the Mercury, maybe an XTZ Tea. Insufficient funds. Wha -- ? Hmm, my account balance is negative. Looks like I didn't have quite as much money in my account as I thought I did when I bought the tires. Briefly entertain the fantasy of standing outside the Mercury until someone who loves me enough to pay to get me in happens to come along. Go home.

On the way home, keep thinking of ways to cheer myself up that would cost money. I could stop and get ice cream -- oh, wait, no, I can't. I could stop and get some cloves -- oh, wait, no, I can't.

Arrive at home in black mood. Caller ID tells me wendolen called minutes before I arrive. I'm frustrated that I missed her.

Listen to voice mail.

She'd calling to remind me that tonight is the Leonid meteor storm, and that despite my pessimistic predictions, the sky is clear.

Tonight, the earth passes through the dust ring of Tempel-Tuttle, a comet that orbits the earth every 33 years. The Leonids are usually no big deal, but tonight we're supposed to be passing through debris left by the comet during close approaches in 1733 and 1866, so there's the chance of seeing hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of meteors per hour.

Around 1:00 is the best time to see them, wendolen tells me. I should look to the east.

I may not see anything. No way of telling. But I'm going to try, and it won't cost me anything. And she was thinking of me.

Tonight might not be so bad after all.