Teel McClanahan

I’m typing this while my iron warms up.

I slept in this morning until… oh, 9AM. Then went to the bike shop and bought my bike back (ie: paid for the repairs/tuneup I’d asked for) and took it for a little spin around the parking lot (okay, a big spin, it was a WalMart shopping center parking lot) to be sure it felt okay, which it seems to. Came home and ate breakfast and chatted with a friend online for a couple of hours – that was nice, but then she went *poof* and didn’t come back, so I went out to the local Starbucks to write.

It didn’t go mega-ultra fast, though… I suppose I took half an hour off to talk to Heath (thanks for bringing the AC Adapter, or my laptop would presumably have died after only a couple of hours) and at least another half hour between several rounds of trying to decide what to drink and many, many trips to the bathroom to let all those drinks out…. but I was at the Starbucks for a little over 5 hours and wrote … 4191 words or so. Hooray! Almost the 1k/hour of my good NaNoWriMo rates. Then I walked across the street to see that there weren’t any movies I wanted to see starting within 90 minutes, then I walked home.

And while I was walking home I was thinking of what I’d do here. And I got excited when I thought “Ironing! I can make my clothes flat!” As I thought about it, it occurred to me that maybe I could even watch some DVDs while I ironed! Woo! What an excellent follow-up to a hard day of writing, I get to IRON! Yay!

So, I guess I’ll be staying in tonight. But I’m going to have my laptop here, online, and my phone on hand, so … you know, if there was anyone in the world who wanted to actually communicate, it’s not like in a little closed bubble of ironing bliss. Having friends is even better than ironing, in my opinion.

But ironing is pretty good, too.

Today at work, to thank our company for literally millions of dollars of sales each day last week, one of the companies we work with bought pizza for lunch for all our employees. There are four floors in our building (and a couple other buildings I don’t know much about), and here are photos of most of the empty pizza boxes from the first floor alone stacked up to go out with the trash (will pop up in new windows): Lots of pizza boxes.

Sorry about the quality of those photos, those are straight from my phone. But it should give you an idea of the scale on which we operate where I work. Luckily (or unluckily, since I won’t get any of the commissions) I wasn’t involved in trying to make all those sales – my dad is, and he’s having a heck of a time. Would you believe there are TOO MANY calls coming in to close sales properly? This is the first couple of weeks of the busiest season for sales for our industry, but I guess it stays pretty busy for the next three months or so. At which time MY department may begin to feel the volume.

Anyway, I’m off to bed.

Tonight has been good to me. The day was not a loss, not at all. After watching The Shining (what was the point of that, again?) and playing a little bit of Metroid 2-player with Heath (not sure what the point of that was, either, but in a different way), instead of trying to go to my room (where I am now) and trying to write, I got bit by the “leave the house” bug and went to the local Starbucks to write. The bug was either the source of or a symptom of the inspiration that seems to have struck. I got 2435 words written in under two hours. This is very fast for me. Yesterday I got only 1733 words written in … around 4 hours. Usually, when I’m “in the zone” like I was tonight, I average around one thoudsand words per hour worked. So 2435 words in less than two hours was very good. AND it got me out of the sex scene.

Perhaps my favorite sentence written tonight was this: “Suddenly he felt the head of his penis pressing hard and hot against the eager, lusciously lubricated lips of Elle’s vasoactive vagina.”

(Possibly only because when searching for a word, I came up with – and used – vasoactive.)

The sex scene I’m in the transition of working my way out of did not turn out to be as long as I’d aimed for, depending on how one calculates it. It looks like, from the point where their hands are on each other until the time Trevor disappears instantly, magically from the scene is 6583 words. If you count from the time the three of them arrive in the bedroom until the time Trevor leaves, it’s 8849 words “in the bedroom”, and if you count from the time they enter the bedroom until where I am now, it’s 10644 words – and I haven’t resolved the bedroom scene, exactly, and I think Trevor (and probably Sunshine Charming with him) will have to return to the “scene of the crime” where Kay and Elle are paralyzed and possibly dead, respectively. So, my goal (which I set from just before they moved from the dodgeball court to the bedroom) of 10k words was either far short or just fine. Especially if you consider that Kay is still having an orgasm and both young women are still naked.

Anyway. Did good. Feeling good.

Slept in (too bad I can’t do that tomorrow), sent a long email to a friend, then chatted for a long time with her – that was all very nice. Procrastinated writing this way and that and then put in The Shining, since watching a movie is an excellent procrastination tool. Chatted with Heath, played the video game a bit, more procrastinating … oh, and all through the day I was doing laundry – I actually got it all washed and dried. Yay! So part of why I needed to leave the house to write was that if I’d stayed … well, my dad would have come home and I’d have probably put in a movie and ironed all night. But it was only just after 7:30, so I walked over to the Starbucks by 8, got home a little after 10:30, watched my dad play Halo 2 for a while while I folded some laundry, and now I’m posting this. Reasonably good day.

And that’s about that. Tomorrow, work. Then meeting with the writing group, which should be good. Then sleep, then work, then who knows what?

Oh, and yesterday I took my bike in to a bike shop to get a tuneup/overhaul. I should have it back next Friday. And then we shall see how riding it to work and around works out. Time is a funny thing, but I have confidence that everything will work out. And now, I’ve got a bit of laundry to deal with before I can sleep. So. Good night.

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This is a beautiful thing. Click on it, it will pop up and show you the beauty of Postmodern Geek Art. Geeks will understand. What you are looking at is the “new” Microsoft Anti-Spyware software, and some software it has identified as potentially dangerous. Geeks will understand.

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