fox

It is not quite 7am, and I am awake and dressed and my hair is about halfway dry, which means I've been up for a while, and yet strangely I am not as distressed by this as you'd think. Thus, a list of Good Things.

• I will relatively soon be retrieved by a sanj. Road trip!
  
• My living room is -- no fooling -- tidier than probably any living room I have ever lived in since leaving my parents' house. (It doesn't hurt that I have more square feet to myself here than I've had since -- ever. Wait, almost. I did have more space in my Ivory Tower apartment, I think, but that was a Giant Studio, so even then it couldn't be the same kind of put-away as this 2BR.) [basks]
  
• I also did the dishes, sequestered the old hand towels in my room with the laundry and put out new ones, and left a check for my half of my parents' Christmas present (we had the home movies transferred from Betamax to DVD, which meant some of Christmas Day was spent looking at the antics of darthfox ca. 1978, no doubt fun for all) on the coffee table, where my brother will be able to see it.
  
• In the past 48 hours I've got more comments on my yuletide fic than in the previous four days put together. This pleases me very much. And it's happened without any recs that I'm aware of, which means people are finding it on their own! ... eventually. :-)
  
• Related to this (really!), I screwed in a couple of screw-eyes on the back of the standup-only picture frame that drove me to tears two Sundays ago, and strung some picture wire between them, and that sucker is now hanging on the wall where it belongs.

You see, it's little things.

sanj will be here soon! Better finish the coffee. Happy new year, y'all!

Hurrah!

... and now for something to eat, I think.

Tonight: 650 words of yuletidey goodness, and thank heavens, because it was the middle bit, which up to now did not exist. Total word count is about 1720, which FURTHER means that the three bits are of approximately equal lengths, and I can't tell you how happy that makes me.

Or, you know, they will be of equal lengths, once the last bit is done. But the first two are DONE!, and tonight that's the important thing.

Er. That, and coming up with a title. I know I'm on my own for that. But beta-filter people, keep your eyes open for a draft-type thing. Most of you are done and submitted, so, you know, I need you now! :-)

Cut a couple hundred words of crap. Wrote 550 more approx. Cut 100-odd of those as they were crap. Wrote 100 or so more. Have now left notes for myself (section 2 is about [THIS]; wrap up [section 3] in some nifty way) and will go to bed. 1100 words, and therefore I shall not be baninated. Huzzah and all that.

yuletide is on 861 words. Some of those words are actually parenthetic dashes, and some of them are crap, but in any case, I am nothing like as panicked about this thing as I was 24 hours ago, which is good, because I totally am going to work on the knitting on the train. :-)

Couch thing is set up in the guest room. Hooray! I actually now have more guest bedding than I am ever likely to have guests (keeping in mind the air mattress, old-school futon mattress, and comfy couch).

Still getting used to the computer clock being in the top corner instead of the bottom one.

Time to make the doughnuts. (I said this one morning at Rice Lake, as some of the curlers were arriving and heading into the building, and they looked at me more blankly than the student on whose paper I once wrote "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Of course these kids are about five years younger than that student, who was at least five years younger than me. Too young to remember "time to make the doughnuts", man. It may be the oldest I've ever felt.)

I started noticing a couple of weeks ago that I was shortly going to run out of contact lenses.

Today, I finally remembered to call Costco and reorder the damn things, which they don't keep in the store (contacts, yes; daily disposables, no), and which they expect to take two days to arrive.  Recall that I am leaving town at You Must Be Kidding Me O'Clock on Thursday morning (well; actually at Harumph, At Least It's Light Out, but I am not remotely a morning person, so tomato, tomahto).  I ask the nice young man at Costco if I've called him early enough that today, Tuesday, will count as a day, and the lenses might be in tomorrow.  Worth calling tomorrow, he says, but he wouldn't count on it.

I call Target to see if they can sell me a quantity of lenses smaller than 30, and if they can do so without a prescription.  I am happy to tell them my prescription, but I don't have anything signed by an OD, and for whatever reason they're not supposed to dispense harmless contact lenses without one ... whatever.  The guy can hook me up with a single pair of two-week disposables in my prescription, which I can't wear for two weeks (for my own gunky build-up reasons), but which I can wear for more than a single day if I have solution and a case, so, good.  I have backup lenses in case the boxes don't come in to Costco on time.

Then I get home.  I count lenses.  I have five days' worth.  If my boxes of new lenses don't come in tomorrow, I won't be able to get them until next Monday.  The days between tomorrow and next Monday inclusive on which it will be necessary that I be able to wear contacts instead of glasses are:  Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.  That's four days.  I won't even run out, and I can keep the emergency backups in reserve.

Plus, I got my Yuletide assignment, and we won our curling game tonight with some good shots and some good teamwork.  Yeah, things are going okay for me right now.  :-D

I'm always a disaster at the requesting part. This year I made the same As You Like It request I always make, and managed to remember to nominate My Fair Lady so I could request it, and then had to struggle to find two more. I went with The American President, because yay Sorkin and I'm in a yay politics place right now; and then I saw "Gilbert and Sullivan" listed, with characters from multiple operas, and I about flipped out. How awesome is that? My request has to do with a state visit between the royal houses of Barataria and Japan, but honestly, there cannot be G&S without wacky hijinks, so I'm sort of hoping my request lands with someone who knows G&S. If they don't know As You Like It. :-D

Offering is generally easier. As a matter of personal policy, I don't offer fandoms where I can't offer "any" for character selection. This year I've eliminated one or two things I've written before, as well, because I don't know if I could come up with something different in them if I had to; and I've decided not to offer anything I've requested. Also, I'm glad I decided to double check who appears under the character list before offering a fandom, because there's one where I'd happily write any characters in the source, but given the very few that are listed, I'm inclined to suspect a request in that fandom this year would make me uncomfortable and I wouldn't enjoy writing it (or, conversely, I would write something the recipient wouldn't love to the max). So I have not offered it, although I know it cold. Am now contemplating whether I think I can offer a couple of other things ... and I suspect not. A lot of the time I don't think I can bring the same kind of funny as the original writer/creator. Alas.