A little better now, yep. Thanks, Heather, for dropping me an email. It was nice to get a human's input on all of this.

I've got thirty minutes to go, and then I can go home. I haven't quite decided what I'm going to do this evening. I doubt it will be computer-related. I got all the needed repotting done yesterday (yay for catnip and creeping thyme!) and did some pretty heavy trimming of the airplane plant. It should—hopefully—start recovering soon.

I've been pondering what I could do around the house to start keeping it a bit neater. I was really bothered by how the house looked on Friday. I know that nobody else noticed, but I noticed. It always seems like such a hassle to "clean the house"—I'm wondering if perhaps I'm tackling it the wrong way.I figured that I'd try to pick one very small area of the house each night, and clean that. Last night it was the area to the left of my computer desk. I was thinking of doing the reading room tonight. Just…something. My frustration with the level of clutter in the house has been rising lately; it seems like every room I go into, there's more of it.

It's a minor thing, though. Really, I have to keep it in perspective. I'm just a bit of a control freak at times; I get disgruntled when things don't quite go like I want them to.

Random mental note from this weekend: discussion between Jeff and I that Pieter Van den Hoogenband, while wearing his swim cap and goggles, looks similar to Andy Wilkinson. Hee. Swimmers. Yummy. Now, granted, the moment he takes his swim cap off the resemblance vanishes, but you get the idea…

I've been blasting Vertical Horizon into my ears for most of the day. I think I'm gonna have to buy this album.

I have a serious case of the hungries. I'm hoping that we have the correct chicken parts so that I can make pasta al'arrabiatta. Of course, I probably butchered the spelling of that; I don't have the recipe in front of me. That's a really simple dish I should introduce the wondergeeks to, come to think of it…

I'm still delving into Iain Banks' Feersum Endjinn. It's the first non-Culture novel of his that I've read; it's quite different, but it never ceases to amaze me that a writer's style can shine through even such vastly different prose.

Which reminds me….my last topic of the day. One of my friends wrote to me last week and said that he was glad to see me writing again, though he hoped that I'd turn my focus back to more literary things. Funny how little things like that can be so intriguing, tantalizing, and terrifying at the same time! I've been formulating ideas for a bit of more literary writing for a while now, but just haven't been able to make myself sit down and write.

I find myself wishing that I had an old, cheap laptop that I could take into the guest bedroom. I'm not sure if I'm making excuses for myself, or if this desire to shut myself up in a room to write is a legitimate wish. I know that Jeff doesn't look over my shoulder while I'm doing stuff at the computer, but writing for me is such an incredibly private thing that I almost become paranoid if someone's even in the room with me while I'm trying to put things together.

All I know is that the character of Meg Benson's been sitting in my head for nearly a year now, and she refuses to go away. I know how it starts; I know how it ends; I know that everything that happens in between would come to me…if I could just get the courage to start.

So much in life comes down to that: the courage to start.

My workday is over. Now I'm going to drive home with thoughts of Meg on my mind. Thanks. :P