Jane got her Visa! This means that she and Nick (who already has a Green Card) could actually be moving to LA in the near future!

Very good tidings for this Christmas season.

Oh, and Jane increased my love for her even more so by writing this in her most recent e-mail to me:

"I attempted to read Twilight, but lost the will to live a couple of chapters in."

This week, Doug and I actually rented the movie, but not to worry, we watched it with the RiffTrax commentary done by the MST3K boys. (You couldn't pay me enough to watch it straight.)

So. Damned. Funny.

Here's a delightful clip:

I managed to get this picture of our rats...well, two of them, at any rate. Ethel May is somehow very elusive when it comes to the camera.

( Rosemary & Tiger Lily )

I think they're slowly realizing they came to a good place. :)

I guess I haven't posted in awhile...this autumn has really been emotionally draining. But I think things are getting better. I actually woke up happy this morning. I was happier still when my Jeeves alarm clock went off, and Jeeves's speech was slurred as he talked about how the brandy bottle had mysteriously gone from full to empty over the course of the night. Jeeves, of course, had NO idea how this anomaly had occurred. (Tsk, tsk, Jeeves, and SO very unlike you!)

Last night, Doug and I bought three little rats (about 6-7 weeks old and all girls). We'd had pet rats years ago and we adored them - they were great pets. We won't be able to get a dog until next spring at the earliest (we have to get gates for either side of the house and do a ton of yard work first)...but we didn't want to wait that long before having pets in the house again. It makes such a difference.

They have exactly two modes right now: spastic and conked out. Once they really get adjusted (they've already discovered that their new, deluxe cage is infinitely more kickass than that stuffy glass enclosure at Petco), I'll take pictures.

Oh, and yes, I've changed my LJ theme YET AGAIN. This time, though, I expect I'll stick with it for a good long while. It really seems to fit my whole theme better than anything I've had before. And it's morbidly cute. Or cutely morbid. Whichever you like. :)

My page-a-day "Useless Information" calendar informed me today that there are no words in the English language that rhyme with purple.

Stephen Fry respectfully disagrees.

A bit about Halloween first: our house was dressed for the occasion with tombstones, skeletons, bats, ravens, and six jack-o-lanterns. We got at least 25 groups of trick-or-treaters. I missed most of them, alas, as I was out trick-or-treating myself (or at least observing) with little Katie and Kenneth.

Oh, and the art print of the Haunted Mansion that I ordered at Disneyland just happened to be delivered on Halloween. How brilliant is that?

There's something so invigorating about Halloween. It was over much too fast. And may I just shout BLASPHEMY at the stores which tossed out their Halloween decorations a week before the 31st, only to replace them with CHRISTMAS decorations? WHAT. THE. HELL?

Okay. Onto the pseudo NaNoWriMo:

I'm not technically participating in NaNoWriMo, since to do so would mean starting a new novel from scratch (the shiver that just went through me is beyond description). But I decided to get into the spirit of the thing, and my goal is to have my 2nd draft completed by the end of November. This means fully fleshing out all those scenes that are lacking beginnings or endings (or middles). They don't have to be pretty...they just have to be completed.

I just finished two of them...and working on these two scenes in particular kind of made me want to claw my own eyes out. I can only hope that the rest will be slightly better...

Despite the mood icon, I'm going to completely deny that I'm getting sick. Or at least deny that it's anything more than a weird, 24-hour thing that will be completely gone tomorrow morning. Yes. Sounds good. Moving on.

Went to Disneyland on Friday! Lisa was brilliant enough to buy two park-hoppers for Doug and me as an early Christmas present. I seriously can't ever go without a park-hopper anymore, now that I know the awesomeness that is the Tower of Terror. (We rode it twice. XD) Both parks were decked out for Halloween - Jack Skellington has, of course, taken over the Haunted Mansion now that it's October, and a ghostly, ghoulish entity got into Space Mountain (currently called Space Mountain Ghost Galaxy). It was bloody fantastic.

For the first time EVER (because this time around I knew to make reservations weeks in advance), we dined at the Blue Bayou...the restaurant that's inside Pirates, right along the "bayou" where the ride begins. I've wanted to eat at that restaurant since I was 4 years old. I seriously don't know what's taken me so long. Nothing quite like having dinner while crickets chirp, fireflies dance, and people drift by in their boats (on their way towards a talking skull and a waterfall).

We left the restaurant just in time for the Halloween fireworks, and even though they were spectacular, I have to say it was seeing Zero fly over the castle that really made my entire night.

:)

Please...please...please let this be as good as it looks...

Kinda wish I were still in Williamsburg right now...ghost and pirate tours and mock witch trials and eating in 18th century taverns are infinitely preferable to processing paperwork. Blah.

It really was an amazing trip - we couldn't have asked for better weather, and we were able to walk wherever we went, save for the one day we took a shuttle to Jamestown.

I'd love to go back.

( Piccies! )

Early this morning (I'm guessing), I dreamt that I heard my Jeeves alarm clock go off. When I opened my eyes (still within the dream), I saw that it was not the alarm clock, but rather Jeeves himself who had come into the bedroom to wake me. This part I didn't question...it was too awesome to question. But oddly, he was wearing a white powdered wig and he had lipstick smeared across his lips. All I could think was, "Wait, just whom was Jeeves kissing this morning? And why wasn't it me?"

By the way, yes, I am back from Virginia. It was a lovely trip. I'll post about it later!

Last night, Doug and I went to see "An Evening Without Monty Python"...a play Eric Idle put together featuring bits of Python sketches strung together and starring 5 non-Pythons (who were all excellent, might I add). Hank Azaria was supposed to be in the cast but apparently he backed out at the last minute due to some annoying film obligation (dammit). But the cast (who included Jane Leeves and James Piddock) really were great. AND, right before the show started, Eric Idle walked through the small and very crowded lobby. I swear I was the only one who noticed...no one else even glanced in his direction. (I have to admit, I was responsible for a very small *squee!* as he walked past us.) :D

Tomorrow I'm flying to Williamsburg with Doug and my mom. I've been there once, back when I was in the 6th grade (our whole class was taken on a week-long trip). I loved it, and I've always wanted to go back. I'll be interested to see if it's as I remembered it, 19 years ago...

Be back in a week!

Why, on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, does the Writer's Block question have nothin' ta do with pirates, hmmmm? Lily-livered lubbers...

Ah well. It's off I be ta do a bit o' plunderin'. Enjoy the day, mateys, for it only comes but once a year!

There's something immensely gratifying and even life-affirming (yes, I'm aware of the irony) about going into Pier 1 to check out their new Halloween stuff, and hearing Dead Man's Party playing on the overhead speakers the moment you walk through the door.

Ahhhhh.

I wonder why little things like this often make me realize how good it feels to be alive.

I'll run through it backwards...

Today is Murray's birthday - he's 6. And yes, he's still with us. We're not sure how he's managed to hold on for this long, but we're happy for it. :)

There was also a birthday party for James today - he turned 7 on Saturday. I spent the latter half of the party sitting on the floor with him and Emmerson, putting together his brand new Lego set of the base on Hoth. (I got to put a tauntaun together.)

Most of Sunday was spent visiting Doug's aunt and uncle down in Huntington Beach. We also got to meet my parents' new puppy yesterday, who is like the sweetest ball of fluff you've ever seen...

( Piccie )

On Saturday we went to the Hollywood Bowl to see John Williams...always awesome. The whole first set was all Harry Potter tunes, and Lynn Redgrave was there to present each one. Williams mixed it up for the second half, playing pieces of his own scores as well as pieces of other scores (the lead violinist played "As Time Goes By" from Casablanca, which was stunningly beautiful)...and he wrapped it up with 4 encores. I swear the audience would cheer for encores all night if Williams didn't finally do what Doug and I call the "sleepy time" pantomime, where he rests his head sideways on his hands. (He does this at the end of each performance, and it makes us laugh every time.)

I think, though, that what happened on Friday afternoon won for the most interesting experience of the weekend. I went back to the beach, and the tide was out very far, so the water barely came up to my waist even after I'd walked out quite a ways. I noticed a shadow at one point, and I looked down to see a very small shark (probably only about 2 feet long) curving right around my legs before swimming out to sea. I don't know what kind it was, but it looked very much like this, except it had a sort of speckled blue and grey hue.

It was really cool. I'd love to say I was totally calm about it, but I've gotta admit I gasped like an idiot and jumped about a foot to the side. Still glad I got to see it though. :)

And here's a picture of a seagull who stood next to me for quite awhile on top of an abandoned sand castle...

( Another piccie )

Oh oh, one more thing. I completed #32 on the list of 101...creating a new Top 10 for my site. Okay, this is possibly the cheatiest (yes, I did just say "cheatiest") way I've ever completed a goal, because first of all, it's a Top 7, and second of all, it's just 7 Great QI Moments. So all I did was copy and paste YouTube code. But it's there, and it's new, so YAY!

...and one that all writers (published or not) will appreciate:

"I began writing seriously when I was about thirteen. Out streamed poetry, stories and novels, the latter of which were always aborted early, usually half way through the second chapter. It took my friend Douglas Adams to encourage me to go further and he did this by pointing out that the reason I had never managed to finish a novel was that I had never properly understood how difficult, how ragingly and absurdly difficult, it is to do. “It is almost impossibly hard,” he told me. It is supposed to be. But once you truly understand how difficult it is,” he added, with signature paradoxicality, “it all becomes a lot easier.” It was many years later that Clive James quoted to me Thomas Mann’s superb crystallisation of this “A writer,” said Mann, “is a person for whom writing is more difficult than for other people.” How liberating that definition is. If any of you out there have ever been put off writing it might well be because you found it so insanely hard and therefore, like me, gave up and abandoned your masterworks early, regretfully assuming that you weren’t cut from the right cloth, that it must come more easily to true, natural-born writers. Perhaps you can start again now, in the knowledge that since the whole experience was so grindingly horrible you might be the real thing after all."

Oh, how I wish sylvera were around right now...I think she's the only one who might appreciate this like I do. It's a flash movie (done by a budding German animator) that pretty much sums up the entire plot of the first Monkey Island.

I think I've watched it 20 times, and it never stops being funny. The guy did a brilliant job, especially considering that he doesn't speak English fluently.

And it amuses me no end to hear Guybrush talk in a campy German accent...

I went swimming in the ocean yesterday...it was the first time in a long time that I'd gone in far enough to really ride the waves. It's such a unique, amazing feeling...it's like this sense that you've arrived home. I can't explain it. Even now, all I want to do is go back.

And then last night, I found this quote by Stephen Fry (actually, this is only a part of it - I listened to the whole thing on YouTube)...

"...we are captains of our soul and masters of our destiny, and we contain any divine fire that there is, divine fire that is fine and great. I mean it's perfectly obvious that if there were ever a God, he has lost all possible taste. You've only got to look - forget the aggression and unpleasantness of the radical right or the Islamic hordes to the East - the sheer lack of intelligence and insight and ability to express themselves and to enthuse others of the priesthood and the clerisy here, in this country, and indeed in Europe. God once had Bach and Michelangelo on his side, he had Mozart, and now who does he have? People with ginger whiskers and tinted spectacles who reduce the glories of theology to a kind of sharing, you know? That's what religion has become, a feeble and anemic nonsense, because we understood that the fire was within us, it was not in some idol on an altar, whether it was a gold cross or whether it was a Buddha or anything else - that we have it."

First of all, it's devastating that there aren't more people like him in the world.

Second, listening to this was really the perfect way to end my day...it just seemed to fuse everything together.

"I could care less."

Really? You "could" care less? How much less could you care?

...and maybe someone else needs a laugh too...