they must need bears

Good running day today: Made the (uphill) mile out in 16:04 including a pause for street-crossing, and jogged the whole thing except the first two blocks. Walked a half mile around the park in 8:56 (taking my time), stretched for five minutes, and ran the (downhill) mile back in 13:31. I had to drop to a walk for a tenth of a mile breather on the way back, but I made it up at the end, so I still ran 9/10 of the mile, and actually hit a pretty good spot of competence for about a block at the end there. A tenth of a mile of feeling pretty good! That's not to be scoffed at!

It was raining steadily on the way out, broken sun through the overcast on the way back. The dogwoods are in full bloom and the lilacs are starting--didn't those used to be May/June flowers?

Running in the rain is so much easier and nicer than running when it's sunny out. This will improve as the trees along my route leaf out, but for the time being, I need to get out earlier in the morning, dammit.

After Sunday's climbing (sent a 5.4 that was actually more like twenty-five feet of 5.6 and then twenty-five feet of 5.4; flamed out spectacularly fifteen or twenty feet up a 5.7+, flamed out less spectacularly maybe 25 feet up on a 5.6 with a chimney, due to the fact that my toes hurt so much I couldn't put weight on them any more) I came home and slept from 10 pm to 8:30 the next morning, which is unheard of for me.

So I couldn't fall asleep until 1 or 2 last night, and though I did wake up at six this morning, but since I had had a triggery night of hypervigilance and kept waking up every time anybody in the entire apartment building got a drink of water, I decided to pull the cat over my head and go back to sleep for another two hours.

Somebody from Massachusetts recently had a rather spectacular single-car accident where I enter the park. I can tell he was from Massachusetts, because he left his license plate behind. Sadly, he also shattered an old granite curb and took out two or three of the old Victorian neighborhood's beautiful slate paving blocks, which means the broken ones will be replaced with cement eventually. Entropy makes me sad.

Climbing last night was less than spectacular. I managed two 5.6s on the slab (one of them, the last, with a lot of pathetic flail at the top) and a 5.6 on the wall, and quit after that because my tennis elbow (which, in true me fashion, I gave myself while wielding a sledgehammer on my 35th birthday, go me) was acting up. Climbing two days in a row? Still brutal. (You should see the bruises on my knees from wedging my leg into that chimney on Sunday.)

Today's work is varied. I need to finish the final or nearly-final draft of "Overkill," get started on the new Secrit Projekt (tentatively titled, "The Red in the Sky is Our Blood") the opening paragraph of which came to me on my run, do laundry, blurb two things, pay a credit card bill, join the Ragged Mountain Foundation, file some tax paperwork, call my lawyer, email my agent, and make bread. Maybe I will try cvillette's pretzel bread recipe, though I have to buy butter if I am going to do that.

Full day. I guess that means I should get started, huh?

I have called my mother and filed my taxes (ouch!!!!!!) and reviewed and signed two sets of contracts and put them out for my Mail Carrier of Elemental Evil. (SRSLY. I have had good mail carriers and lame mail carriers, but this woman is actively malevolent.) I have been Virtupus. I have exhibited virtupitude. I am mighty.

No matter that I feel like somebody scraped the inside of my head with a spoon.

That was enough work for today.

I'm now trying to talk myself into going climbing tonight, despite having cramps and a bad case of donwanna brought on by groveling through Uncle Sam's yearly requirement of bureaucracy.

Come on, Bear. Kill another hour and go to the gym. You'll feel better if you climb.

So. Incredibly. Lazy.

217.7 miles to Lothlorien. Maybe I should eat some soup.

Isn't this journal much less interesting when I'm not actively writing?

In a move unusual for me, I actually went back to bed this morning and slept for another two hours instead of going out for a run. Climbing last night kicked my ass, and since ashacat and I have plans to go for a walk this afternoon and tonight is archery night I decided I could skip it. I'll run tomorrow.

I was up until 2 am, I am fighting off the carnal interest of the local herbiage with my sinuses, and my neck is killing me. Screw it: sleep was good.

To make up for Monday's good climbing night, last night I stank up the place. Well, I lie. My balance was good, but I had no upper body strength at all, and was back to wiping out on that traverse I sailed through on Monday.

That made me sad and frustrated. I suspect I hadn't recovered from Monday yet. Muscle fibers still repairing themselves from the last round of micro-tears.

Anyway, after I went back to bed I had another dream (two remembered dreams in one week!), this one involving a remarkably inept King in Yellow attempting to force his way through a revolving door to get to me, accompanied by a couple of broad-headed robot Tindalosi, while I hid in a sealed and stained and Goffick corridor on a derelict space station. He wasn't particularly scary, though, because he had tiny little arms and his ragged hump was stuck in the door, so he just kept going around and around, and since the Tindalosi were on leashes, he dragged them through with him. They didn't mind, though: they squish into cracks.

I eventually got out by squeezing through a side door which had a rather long security chain.

My subconscious is quite pleased with itself, as it seems to think it has told me something Vitally! Important! about Chill. What that vitally important thing might be, I am really not sure yet, but it will no doubt come. At least it's nice to know the book is back there cooking. Sometimes you can't tell if there's anything going on in there, even if you lift the lid and peek.

Now I think I will make another travel CD for my Very Long Drive to Penguicon. Something with a lot of Mark Knopfler on it, for signing along purposes. And I will shower. And I will wonder why people are jackhammering my sidewalk this morning. 

Hmm. Looks like the MDC.

Oops.

Transitions are hard.

So I had a long talk with myself on the drive down to Long Island on Friday (amazing how many fruitful conversations you can have with yourself while sitting in accident traffic on the Hutchison River Parkway) wherein I figured out that the portion of my recent bouts of anxiety that isn't divorce- or novel-related is the old adrenal response spinning, spinning, spinning away with nothing to show for it. To wit: for as long as I can remember, at this point, my life has been a scramble to get something accomplished--find a decent job, move west, find another job, stay alive on the inadequate proceeds from that job when it did not deliver what it promised, get married, find something to do with myself when I got laid off, write books (as fast as possible--somehow, when I went through my 2001-2006 bout of hypergraphia, I was left with the idea that I had to write as much as possible as fast as possible, in case I got hit by a bus before I finished. It worked out well, but it was exhausting. Still, I was cruising at half a million words a year there for a while. Which is nice, but probably not sustainable if you ever leave the house.), sell a novel, move back east, find another job, write another novel, adapt to living without a day job, buy a house, don't buy a house, get divorced, write another---

--screech.

Oh, okay. Hey. Look at that. I'm out of immediate, crushing, incredibly complicated things I need to do.

Anyway, that's been my life since 1998. And now, suddenly, at this point in time, there's nothing I really need to do except keep working and trust to the fates that my audience will continue to grow, so I can slow down the frantic pace a little bit.

I think my brain was spinning its wheels, looking for the next big thing it should be working on with total concentration and focus. And it's not there! There's nothing! OMG WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS ADRENAL RESPONSE?

So I kind of took my brain aside and had a long talk with it. Told it that it had done good, and lots of work, and that it was entitled to a little time to decompress and get used to the new world order, with 50% less scrambling. (There may still be scrambling, of course. Life is transitions, as a wise woman once said. And my chosen career is one that involves, yea verily, a certain amount of deadline pressure. But everything is not life or death anymore, and if that adrenal response can check down rather than turning into panic disorder that would be nice, because really, I do not need another pile of wonky brain chemistry.)

My brain seems pretty pleased with the praise, anyway. I think I don't give it a lot of credit for all it does for me. It works very hard for small scraps of affection and recognition. Anyway, I told it we were standing down from crisis mode, and it should take a couple of days to go home and visit its family while we completed the transition to a model oriented towards sustainable work. I'd scritch it behind the ears, but that would be gooey.

Anyway, it's not like I need a brain for page proofs. All I need is pattern recognition skills.

Anyway, I have been feeling better. Now I'm looking at the last ten years and wondering how the hell I survived them.

Huh. I guess I'm tougher than I give myself credit for.

Still, it would be nice to take a break and enjoy some time off. Which also may mean clearing out my social calendar a bit, so if I seem unresponsive to invitations to Do Stuff for a while, please remember that I have five or six more conventions and a weeklong workshop left between now and November, and also a lot of work to get done. And also that I am by nature a solitary and insular beast, and seeing people too often and in too great quantities is something I find exhausting rather than energizing, which I think is sort of the canonical difference between an introvert and an extrovert.

---

Right. Things to do today: page proofs, climbing, come home and watch Criminal Minds. The taxes did not get done yesterday, nor did the quails get cooked--there were personal and professional obligations instead. The quails are more pressing than the taxes, anyway. Maybe I'll do those today and the taxes on Friday, because Thursday is pretty much full.

Last night, ashacat and I went to the venerable and redoubtable Eastern Mountain Sports, a local New England outdoor sports equipment Emporium--notable for employing a dedicated and knowledgeable assortment of ski bums, climbing bums, hiking bums, kayaking bums, etc.--to buy her shoes and harness.

Meanwhile, I've been making noises for a while about cancelling my gym membership (BORING) and taking up running again, in the full knowledge that this will be a process full of misery and despair.

See, I used to be a runner. I was never a very competitive runner, because I don't have the build for speed, but I loved trail running, and I was adequate at middle distances. (If I were a football player, I would probably make a pretty good halfback, let's put it that way. Good Eastern European stock: "When ox die, harness wife to plow.")

I suck at jogging, mind you. I'm not good enough at pacing myself to jog. I like to run.

I had a lot of joint problems in high school and college, and while I could still manage endurance sports like racewalking and hiking (at least until the bout with mono), my knees and hips wouldn't take the impact of running. (It turned out not to be lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, or half a dozen other things, and eventually I walked out with a diagnosis of juvenile onset osteoarthritis, a naproxen prescription, and a cane. These days, they'd probably call it fibromyalgia. However, since it went into spontaneous remission in my twenties after a heavy course of antibiotics for a lung infection, I now harbor suspicions that what I had was chronic Lyme disease. Anyway, that's all backstory.)

Well, EMS is in the throes of their winter clearance, and what with one thing and another, while the ashacat was trying on climbing shoes, I walked out with the pair of North Face trail runners that were marked down almost into my price range, and two pairs of Smartwool running socks. (I also got two pairs of hiking socks, because dammit, there will be hiking this summer.)

These are very silly shoes. The innovative lacing system is, well, a winch. And a bunch of very fine cables run through the body of the shoe, all of which tighten when you twist the little wheel on the heel. Silly, yes.

But wow, do they fit. And I think the socks weigh more.

So this morning, I did something I haven't done in twenty years. I got up, put on my workout pants and the sort of scary-ass sports bra a DD-girl needs for running in, put on my socks and shoes, grabbed a t-shirt, put my hair in a ponytail, and went for a two-mile run in the rain.

It wasn't an unbroken two mile run, mind you--I've been hitting the treadmill and the ski machine at the gym, but that's not a thing like actually getting out and running over slate sidewalks in the early morning mist. But I managed six intervals (I didn't time--I just ran until my chest and arches hurt too much, and then I stopped and walked until I could run again. Got to the halfway point, stopped for five minutes of stretching and begging to die, and turned around and came back.

Two miles in twenty-five minutes, not counting the five minutes of stretching. Not a great time, by any means, but a beginning. And I have a 5.2-mile route mapped out for Eventually. (It's my walking route when I am going for a walk to go for a walk, not as an adjunct to errands downtown, so I know it well.)

So I ran this morning in the rain, through the old part of town with the ancient trees and the slate sidewalks. And I'm already looking out the window at the rain, wishing I were back out there.

Tomorrow, I may see if I can do it again.

240.7 miles to Lothlorien

And now I need to go take a shower, start some laundry, and get to work on this book I'm supposedly writing.

I think she was a middle distance runner.
The translation wasn't clear.

Five things twice make two posts... or one long eclectic one.

1) Profound and heartfelt thanks to everybody who offered opinions on my Quest for a New Laptop. I'm still not sure what I'm going to wind up with; I suspect I need to go down to a computer store and bang on keyboards a little. I even contemplate trying out a Mac for longer than fifteen minutes, on the theory that that might be long enough to get over my visceral revulsion for the interface, though how I'd manage that I'm not sure.

2) Thanks for the congratulations on the prematurely released Hugo nomination.The complete list of Hugo and Campbell award nominees is here.  Congratulations to scalzi, autopope, scott_lynch, casacorona (**points! MY EDITOR! MINE!), pnh, ianmcdonald, ellen_datlow, maryrobinette... and whole bunches and bunches of people who are not on livejournal.

The Campbell Tiara (yet another opportunity to look like a demented elf prince!) may be viewed here.

"Tideline," my nominated story, may be read here. And I'm guessing Asimov's is likely to put it up on the web too, and I will link it if they do.

3) Latest Criminal Minds fandom kerfuffle over leaked information from an upcoming issue of EW: my personal inclination is that the most entertaining possibility is the one where nobody on the team knows who the Daddy is, and they have to wait for the DNA test to come back...

Oh, wait. That's As the World Turns. ;-)

4) Livejournal boycott:

I'm not participating (obviously), and I won't be packing up for InsaneJournal any time soon--for a number of reasons.

One is because well, LJ hasn't actually done anything in contravention of their terms of service, and the revelation that this company is run by grasping money-hungry capitalists who disrespect their user base makes it exactly like every other company in the world. Corporations have no conscience. They are inherently sociopathic.

Two is because I have a permanent account, which means that not only is LJ not making any more money off me (except indirectly, by way of people coming to LJ to read this journal (God knows why you'ddo that) and thus encountering their ads), I don't have to look at their damned advertising.

Three is because, well, I have looked at InsaneJournal. Which site is exceedingly advertising-cluttered.

5) It's spring!

***

1) I might make 40K on the book today. Please God, let me make 40K on the book today. If I didn't have two conventions between now and then, I might actually be able to finish the dratted thing by April 21. Since I have I-Con and Penguicon to contend with, it's looking likely to be May. And then I have a novelette and a novella I have to write on exceedingly short notice.

Also in here somewhere, page proofs on Hell & Earth and All the Windwracked Stars. And finishing up "Ballistic" with the team, and doing the really real final draft of "Overkill."

So, in other words, Deathmarch continues until further notice. Or, as coffeeem and I have taken to saying to each other lately, "I'll think about that in June."

And then I get to fall down. And take a break until I have recovered enough to work on the edits on By the Mountain Bound and start plotting out Grail. Oh, and revise One-Eyed Jack & the Suicide King, if Roc decides they want to buy Promethean Age #s 5 and 6.

2) Am I signing up for programming at WisCon? I dunno. I have to decide this weekend. And figure out what my schedule for driving to I-Con is.

3) Today I have to go to the grocery store, cancel my old gym membership, call a DMV, and call somebody else I've forgotten I'm supposed to call, but I have it written down.

4) And then write eight pages. Or preferably a little more, as tomorrow is a busy day, and I suspect there will be minimal wordcount. Maybe I should buy some beer while I am at the grocery store. I should definitely buy some more naproxen.

5) But first, I have to shower for my massage therapy appointment. Because nobody likes a smelly patient.

So apparently I have a uniform.

Today was laundry day.

If my count is right, I own and regularly wear:

7 pairs of jeans that fit, or more-or-less fit
4 pairs of gym/lounging pants
8 tank tops
8 t-shirts
18 long-sleeved cotton or microfiber t-shirts
5 sports bras
8 regular bras
30 pairs of underwear
More socks than any woman needs.

And then there's all that dress up stuff bursting my closets that I never wear anymore, but am too superstitious to get rid of, because someday I may need to get a real job again. *g*

Lunch and work date with kayselkiemoon and blackholly was excellent. I have six hundred new word sthat I did not have before lunch. Also, Lunasa with kayselkiemoon, mcurry, and arcaedia was likewise good.

And now I need to go to bed, so I can get up and write more words on the b&%k tomorrow, so I can get tired, so I can go to sleep, so I can get up and write more words on the b^#k on Wednesday.... (also, I need to write a scene outline of "Ballistic" tomorrow, so we can maybe write that in time to go over it before it has to go up.

Other work tomorrow: going over these audiobook contracts and sending them back, and another hundred pages of CEM.

---

Dear Bear:

It's pointless and self-defeating to feel embarrassed by books you have written.

Love, Bear

---

The Presumptuous Cat just totally wiped out trying to jump up onto the bookcase. And now she's pretending she likes me, so I won't tell you about it. Or maybe her feet are just cold.

...and so to bed.

Yes, I have successfully wasted the last two hours.

Okay, not exactly wasted. I showered, and made breakfast, and made tea, and made orange juice. And caught up on whatever internets regenerated overnight.

And now I need to go work on the page proofs, because that tea ain't drinking itself. But I'm stalling.

Page proofs. Do not want.

So here, have a link to the pre-order page for Fast Ships, Black Sails, a pirate-themed SFF anthology edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, in which truepenny and I have a story called "Boojum," and which also includes stories by folks like Kage Baker, Michael Moorcock, Howard Waldrop, Garth Nix, and Naomi Novik.

Today is declared a day of napping. I'm in charge of resting up and not getting sick again before I go to New York tomorrow, where I will be one of four authors reading from Ellen Datlow's anthology Inferno at the KGB bar. The other three readers will be Jeffrey Ford, Nathan Ballingrud, and John Grant.

10 more days of vacation, before the Great Novel Deathmarch of 2008 commences. I'm getting quite restless and frustrated, which is a good sign, and I am envious of my friends who are actually producing words. I really, really want to be writing.

I think in part I've diagnosed what's wrong with me, on the production front. There's a bit of post-workshop-disease here. I attended an intensive one-week critique workshop last summer, and while it was incredibly beneficial to me, it's also left me hyper-critical of my own flaws as a writer. Normally, the cure for this is time, but unfortunately, I don't have time currently. So I am trying to use The Power Of My Brain to get some traction here. It's what it's there for, after all, and it's a trick I'm pretty good at.

Oh, and via ellen_datlow, the first review of The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, from Publishers Weekly:

The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Sixteen Original Works by Speculative Fiction's Finest Voices. Edited by Ellen Datlow. Del Rey, $16 paper (416p) ISBN 978-0-345-49632-4

Declaring that short stories are the “heart and soul of fantastical fiction,” prolific and venerable editor Datlow collects 16 impressive original stories in this unthemed anthology. Standout selections include Margo Lanagan's deeply disturbing “The Goosle,” which eloquently corrupts the Hansel and Gretel fable with bubonic plague, sexual slavery and mass murder; Jason Stoddard's “The Elephant Ironclads,” which describes an emergent 20th-century Navajo nation struggling to become a world power while staying true to its culture; Elizabeth Bear's “Sonny Liston Takes the Fall,” a poignant tale about the life, death and sad legacy of the troubled heavyweight fighter; and Pat Cadigan's “Jimmy,” a strange and supernatural coming-of-age story set in the moments just after John F. Kennedy's assassination. The thematic diversity and consistently high quality of narrative throughout make for a solid and enjoyable anthology. (Apr.)


via kelliem, giant Australian sea spiders!

I have been such a productive Bear this morning. I answered a huge pile of lurking email, found, organized, and printed out the chapter head ornaments for All the Windwracked Stars to send to the production manager, paid bills (I love that my bank deducts the credit card payment from my checking account immediately, but waits between 24 and 72 hours to apply it to the credit card balance. Gotta make a few pennies on the float. (Somehow, I am reminded of Richard Pryor in Superman N and his half-pennies.) Although they are kind enough to retroactively credit me for the missing days. So it's just like they're borrowing the days. And the interest.

I feel like I should get a kickback for the short-term loan.

I still need to shower and eat something and read some slush, and then I am curling up with the start of S2 of The Wire and seeing what happens.

And I have a plan re: Chill. The plan is, I get the rest of February off, except for administrative work and research and all that stuff. And yes, I do have to sit down and make myself read Dust again, as much as it hurts my heart to do it. And in March, I am walling myself up in my tower and writing the book. I will come out for exercise and food and occasional internets, and other than that, there will be noveling. And we will see how much of the damned thing I can get done in 31 days. I have four hours of driving to do on Sunday, and four hours of driving to do on Monday, and driving is good thinking/plotting time for me. (We're going out ot Logee's Monday, a field trip I'm really looking forward to.)

I am restless, and would really like to be working again, which is a good sign. (I kind of feel like I am wasting my life when I'm not actually producing fiction. Because really, it's what I'm good for.)

There's an inch of snow on the ground, and it's supposed to be intermittently spitty through the beginning of next week, but nothing serious.

Mort Castle has an excellent post up at Storytellers Unplugged today. One that made me nod, and reassess what I think I'm doing with my art.

In other news, I've been made aware of what looks like a really excellent site on trekking Kilimanjaro, which I note here for your interest, and so I can find it later.

Noted without comment: And according to Michael Eisner, a deal is in the works to end the WGA strike.

It seems somehow appropriate that I am mailing Hell & Earth back to Jessica-my-editor today, when (according to tradition) we celebrate the 444th anniversary of Christopher Marlowe's birth.

Lis Riba, an even bigger Kit fangirl than I am, has a suggestion:

Finally, since today's anniversary is pure speculation, I'd like to start spreading the notion that May 29th, the date of Marlowe's death, should be commemorated by treating an author to a meal -- with absolutely no haggling over the bill!

In other news, several of my books and stories (and many of my friends' books and stories) made the Locus recommended reading list for 2007. You can see the whole list here.

I'm going to be AFK for most of the day today. Play nicely among yourselves, please, and you may consider this an open thread. I have to go shave my legs, which (proof that I am old) I do not because I have a hot date, but because I have an appointment with a health-care provider this morning.

See you on the flip side.

Okay, this morning, I finished a hopefully better draft of "King Pole, Gallows Pole, Bottle Tree," and sent it to readers. We'll see what still doesn't work. I also made myself spaghetti squash and lamb chops for lunch (mmm) and washed dishes and cleaned the kitchen and swept the floor, which was getting a little desperate.

Now I'm going to go practice guitar until The Jeff and ashacat get here, so we can drive up to Northampton for Chris Smither at the Iron Horse, since the Nor'easter is forecast to hold off long enough that we don't have to cancel the trip.

In the meantime, here's something to read: a nice note on the official Amazon blog concerning Dust, which is not something I've ever gotten before.

Ooo. It says this blog is controversial. Better run right out and start a fight.

The previous blog entry over there provides a link to this lovely article: The Jonathan Lethem New York Diet, which made me laugh and laugh.

I'm not sure what I'm doing tomorrow, other than getting snowed in. I don't think I'm ready to start work on revising "Overkill" yet. Maybe if I am good, I can get some work done on "Your Collar" or "Smile," or something on Bone & Jewel Creatures. Also, I might try to finish reading Carmen Dog and start Wicked Lovely or Playing in the Dark.

Oh, and Chaz wants me to make bread pudding. And I want to make steam buns. Mung bean paste, I think.

That sounds like a pretty good Sunday at home, doesn't it?

And then they sat down to dinner, and were still there four days of writing later.


2,789 words tonight, to finish the current scene in "Overkill." Longest scene ever.

Also, got my arm twisted to write an anothology story by next August, today. In my copious spare time. Still if I can get "Overkill" finished, that's my secrit projekt commitment handled until s2, except the incidental stuff.

Today's adventure in sentence-level writing:

He would not let the rest of the team know his palms were greased with sweat.

His palms were greased with sweat.

Sweat greased his palms.

Yep. That's pretty much how every sentence I write gets written these days. Is it any wonder that the process is a little exhausting?

I'm glad I laid down good words today, because there were none yesterday and I suspect there will be none tomorrow, given how the schedule is shaping up.

---

The Precious! It is mine! Yesssssss!

Alas, the reason that the schedule will not be shaping up is not because the mailman brought me the Man From U.N.C.L.E. DVD box set today, though he did.

My preccciioooussssss.

I can only imagine how the fans who have been waiting since 1964 to see some of these episodes again, uncut, must feel.

---

In the house of dust, roll yourself in ashes.

A pretty good review of Dust is up here. I'm still not writing the books Paul Di Filippo wishes I was writing (no Nazis in this one either) but at least my ranging shots are getting closer.

Speaking of Dust, it's a real book now. I know it is because the UPS guy brought me a case of copies today, which means that they are lso probably at A Fine Bookstore Near You. Amazon won't ship until the official release date, though, so if you honestly can't wait, hit a brick-and-mortar, or call up your local independent SFF bookstore and see if they have them.

---

I come to praise Caesar, not to bury him.


And because cristalia did this, and I love it:

I come to praise gregvaneekhout, because he posts videos of jerboa.

I come to praise panjianlien, for she is richly deserving and is not praised enough.

I come to praise buymeaclue, because she reminds me of the need for persistence. And that learning things is hard.

I come to praise coffeeem, because she makes me snarf tea with snarky comments about Gordon Sumner. And also because she costs me money with her excellent taste in music.

I come to praise yendi, who finds giant cookware sales so I don't have to.

I come to praise truepenny, who sends me emails that make me laugh while I am pecking away at the longest scene ever. And who doesn't let me do things the easy way.

I come to praise jmeadows, who is a good enough Christian to make me wish I had the faith gene.

I come to praise <