I went home last night and remembered to check the mail... I often let it go for quite a while... it's very rare that I get mail that isn't either a dunning notice or an advertisment.

Anyway, I checked the mail, and found that I'd a postcard from lapis_lazuli, from her recent trip to England. It was kind of a neat picture of the reading room at the British Museam... it had lots of books.

Went in, made a PB&J on wheat, checked my email. Did administrivia for my Play By e-Mail (PBeM) role playing game (RPG).

Plopped in front of the TV (rinoaheartilly is long gone; I have my living room back again. No doubt, this will lead to more TV watching).

lapis_lazuli called, and we talked for a little bit about nothing all that important, and then I watched some more TV.

Life in the fast lane.

I spent yesterday evening with the hamner family. We went out to dinner, and Reily was remarkably unfussy the whole time we were out.

Later, we went and walked around the bookstore, and I was pointing out various children's authors... Rox was teasing me that I know more about children's books than they do, and I don't have any children.

We went back to their house, and Reily slept in my arms for a while while Steve and I talked about characters for the upcoming Hogwarts game.

Reily's a very calm baby, most of the time. I mean, sure, she gets fussy, she cries, but she's also remarkably blase' about being held by people other than mom and dad. brennabe often holds her all through sundaygames, and last night I was holding her for about an hour, and she slept just fine, even though I was teasing her about being turtle-mouth Reily.

Came home, dinked around for a while. Finally got to bed about two.

I'm awake now because rinoaheartilly showed up to hand over the door key and say good-bye.

I'm thinking about going back to sleep. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I really need to get back in the habit of getting up early, and going to bed early.

On the other hand, if I don't sleep a couple more hours, I'm not going to make it through games tonight.

Decisions, decisions....

I took the boys to see Chamber of Secrets today. Mike ended up going with us, because Jai bailed after I'd already bought the tickets, and Mike said he'd use Jai's.

Rose and Mustard Boy didn't come; she said she had things to do, which I found out from Katherine, included a meeting at her bank for financial advice. So, on Tuesday, I'm going to give her a hard time about how going to see her banker was more important than going to the movies with her grandson, and how, when he's a three-piece suit wearing MBA with an ulcer, and she's wondering what she did wrong, she should remember this day.

Anyway, CoS was pretty good. Very tightly edited, though, as Mike pointed out, if you hadn't either seen the first one or read the books, you'd be somewhat lost, as it just jumps right in from the first moment.

Of course, I have a hard time imagining anyone going to see this who hadn't read or seen the first one. I guess there's always someone, though.

The movie was 2:45, which made me wonder (not for the first time) how on Earth they're going to do Goblet of Fire without cutting it to pieces.

Frankly, I think they should've done the whole thing as an HBO miniseries, rather than a movie series, but I suppose there's that whole question of money involved.

We speculated on who would make a good Dumbledore, now that Richard Harris is dead. The same names kept popping up... Christopher Lee, Ian McLellan, Tom Baker... but they're probably all mistaken.

I dropped the boys and Mike off back at their house, and came home, making a stop at hamner's house briefly to drop off some game stuff. At home, I happened to catch rinoaheartilly in the three seconds between her walking in the door and walking back out.

She said something about laundry.

Then Tom sent me email, and I ended up going to dinner at Terry's sister's house. That was a good time.

Then I came home, sat down, and sighed muchly.

Overall, I'm left with a deep feeling of loneliness.

rinoaheartilly just came in, and we talked a little bit. She's been hiding on the couch at a friend's house, because she was afraid to tell me she'd lost her job.

I know that it's not really me she's afraid of. I know that there have been violent, angry men in her past, and that she's mapping them onto me, reacting to them, not to me.

Still...

I wish that she'd believe me when I tell her I'm not going to run her through with a wooden stake.

Or a steel one, for that matter.

She went back out. It'll take a couple of weeks for her paychecks to catch up to her current state of joblessness.

It was a crappy job, anyway... I'm sure she'll find another.

When you said, "Do you want me to just leave," and I responded, "I think that would be a good idea right now," I didn't have anyplace further away than the living room in mind.

---

I came home from work, looking forward to an evening of relaxation. I discovered that I couldn't connect to the internet to check my email, because you'd left your computer hooked up while you were gone.

So I went out to disconnect it, and decided to check the tape for last night's Gilmore Girls and Smallville episodes. I discovered that I had only the epilogue of last night's Smallville, which suggests to me that the timer record was disengaged until right at the end.

Which, in turn, suggests that you were watching Buffy and Angel which were on the tape just fine.

Which annoyed me.

I like to think that I'm a pretty easy person to live with. I like to think that I don't make onerous demands of you.

But there are certain things that I like to have happen in certain ways, and it creates a certain annoyance factor for me when they don't happen that way.

I hope that you didn't go anyplace and sit shivering in your car, in the cold. Not that it gets that cold in Tucson, but you know what I mean. I hope that you went to a coffee shop or something.

---

I noticed tonight that the actresses on Birds of Prey are a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. Can you get more cliched?

Tonight's episode was somewhat predictable.

But I still have a huge crush on Diana Meyers, who plays Barbara Gordon. I know that hamner prefers Huntress, but we're looking at it from different places in life... I'm looking for a smart, capable woman for a partner; he's got one.

He just sees that she'd be fun to roll around with for a while. And I'm not going to disagree with that.

Richard Scarey wrote a bunch of kids books set in the Busy, Busy World. I feel like I've been living there for the last couple of days.

Yesterday, I drove up to Phoenix. I stopped in at Paul's gun shop and talked to him for a little bit. He / they had a SIG P220 that caught my eye, but I really couldn't afford the ¼ down.

So I'll scrape the money out of my next paycheck, if they still have the pistol.

I went and had lunch with my mom, then went to visit Gramma. They've got her in a long-term care facility.

It was hard to sit with her. She was once such a sharp person, and now she's... not.

Back out to the folks house, and we went to dinner at the Cheepy Chinese place in Avondale, which seems to have changed little since I was a teenager.

Drove back to Tucson. I decided to take State Route 87, and, as I often do, I thought about Tom Mix dying in his little roadster out there.

At night, you can't see the monument statue, and I imagine that many, many people drive by it without realizing that it's there, or who Tom Mix was.

Today, I was planning to go to work, but I got sidetracked into running errands with rinoaheartilly.

Okay, I guess errands isn't quite the right word.

We started the day by going out to the Celtic festival. We wandered around, and I ended up buying a kilt... not one in a tartan, but in plain navy blue. It doesn't have pockets, unlike a UtiliKilt (How often do you actually end up wearing yours, paka?), so I need to get a belt and sporan.

On the one hand, I probably spent too much on it. On the other hand, the guy gave me a great deal for buying on the spot instead of ordering through the website, as I was talking about.

I guess it all comes down to how often I wear it. If I make it a regular part of my wardrobe, I won't have paid too much for it. If I wear it once a year, to the Celtic fest, I paid way too much for it.

(There was some teasing about my hairy legs sticking out under... I told 'em that's how you can tell a true Scot... it's the interbreeding with the sheep).

I may wear it to sundaygames tomorrow... I haven't fully decided yet.

I do need to get a belt and sporan for it. I'd like to find a fairly restrained sporan... without fur or tassels. They had some nice ones at the same table where I bought my kilt, but, as I mentioned, I'd already spent too much money.

Then I wanted to go to Things for Thinkers, but rinoaheartilly started asking me questions about motorcycles, so I took her to Sparks Cycle Supply. She looked at used bikes, and decided that she really liked a Suzuki Bandit they had there.

The bike was only a year old, and I told her that if she was going to spend that kind of money, she should look at buying a new bike.

So we went down to Things for Thinkers, where I picked up some background material for sundaygames for tomorrow, and then drove to Tucson's Suzuki dealer.

Unfortunately, Tucson only really has one, and it's out in BFE.

We looked at new bikes, and rinoaheartilly decided that yes, she wanted a Bandit. Cool.

I also want a Bandit, but it's fairly low on my "Spend money on" list. First comes a pistol, then perhaps a sword... either a rapier from Arms & Armor or a Culloden broadsword from Armour Class (I particularly like their Sterling hilt sword). Maybe a Viking sword from one of those manufactuerers or Kris. A new computer.

Maybe after my car is paid off I'll think about buying a bike. We'll see.

Anyway, that's a long digression, and I appologize. We were coming back towards home, and I decided to stop off at Jansen's gun shop. They have a pistol range, and they rent guns for use on their range.

So I rented a SIG 220 and ran 50 rounds of .45 ACP through it. I discovered that I liked the SIG; that I was horribly out of practice; and that my thumb was not hardened to magazine releases.

I ended up with a bruise on my thumb, between the slide and magazine releases.

All in all, I spent way too much money today.

Two Scotsmen are standing on a hill, watching their flocks. One turns to the other, and says, "People are sheep." The second casts him a dirty look, and says, "Stop your rationalizing, man!"

I realized today that I haven't actually worked on the starship since rinoaheartilly got here.

And then I played five hours worth of Diablo II.

I tell myself that it's because I have no attention span for working with the code, but I wonder if I've really lost gumption because it's not new and shiny anymore; because I'm through with the parts that can be knocked out in a couple of hours and show a tremendous improvement.

If I want to go on from here, I now have to get into the nitty and the gritty, the tiny little details that most people don't conciously see.

And I'm not sure if I'm really ready to tackle that, just at the moment.

On the other hand, if I let the project grow too cold, it'll never get done.

I think I'm going to go play some more Diablo, now.

Sometimes, rinoaheartilly amuses me.

I came home from doing laundry to find her walking out the door, all duded up in High Goth... black hair, black clothes, pale makeup with red, red lips, the whole enchilada.

"You look nice," I said. "Where'y'headed?"

"The Desert," she said, trying to sound mysterious.

I looked around, threw out my arms. "Here it is!"

I took a walk down by the river today.

You know you're a real Arizonan when you don't associate rivers with water.

The moon was up, still mostly full. It's officially Autumn now, the equinox is behind us. Now, the nights will be longer than the days.

You'll be hard pressed to tell for a while yet, in Tucson. Temperatures will still get into the mid-nineties for a while.

The house is nearly silent. If not for the whisper of music coming from Girl's computer, I might imagine that I was alone here.

Karen didn't respond to my email. I thought it would be likely that she wouldn't but I'm still somewhat disappointed.

It's almost ten, and I'm not sleepy. I wish I could make a human connexion right now, instead of playing with my weasels. I wish that I had a friend I could call up, and say, "Hey, I'm bummed, let's go sit in Denny's and talk about books or something."

I wonder what Melissa I. is doing tonight.

I took my textbook for the trig class I'd dropped, back to the store where I'd bought it. Unfortunatly, the deadline for a full refund was Monday. So I sold the book back, effectively paying $35 for the priviledge of renting it for a couple of weeks.

I've got the balance of the cost in my pocket. Later today, I'll probably spend at least part of it to buy milk and hot dogs.

I can't drink milk. I'm lactose intollerant, and depending on how strongly intolerant my body is feeling on any given day, it can be mildly unpleasant, or downright nasty.

Boy Kid, however, doesn't like soy milk. Plus, he's at the stage in his life where he needs lots of calcium.

Girl's out of money.

So I'll buy milk, and hot dogs, and maybe a couple of other things, so we can get through the next week or so, until I get paid again.

I'm giving her six weeks to be employed. That's less time than it took me to find a job, when I first came back to Tucson, but I also don't have the means to support both of them for the time it took me. I'm expecting her to be a lot less picky than I was.

I'm sitting here, watching an old project render on the Suns, playing with render time and large images. I'm thinking about life, the universe, and everything.

Not too teribly long ago, I admitted that there was a woman who had evinced interest in me. I also admitted that she broke two of my dating rules. To whit, 1) Never fall for anyone who lives further away than a city bus ride, and 2) Never fall for anyone who is already seriously involved with someone else.

Some of my readers may point out that I break the first of those rules (which is not my rule one... Rule One is: Never Get Involved With Anyone Crazier Than You) on a regular basis.

What's the problem, you may ask. Why do I fall for far-away women? Is it a lack of attractive, intellegent women in Tucson?

Well, no... Tucson is a university town. There is, I assure you, no shortage of attractive, intellegent, and, no doubt, even slightly kinky women here.

I just don't meet any of them.

My major social outlet is the computer. I sit in front of a computer all day, at work; I go home, and sit in front of a computer. Yes, I know, this is sad and even pathetic, but it's a fact of my life, so get over it.

And yes, I know, before anyone feels obliged to point it out, that by and large, women aren't attracted by my l33t typing skills.

Anyway, as I was saying, essentially the only women I meet are the ones who share this with me. And, if you meet a woman through the phosphor screen, the chances are better than not that she lives Someplace Else_TM.

It makes for a lonely existance, yes, but not unbearably so... usually.

Anyway, the point of all this was that there's this woman, who says she's interested in me, but who lives on the other side of the country, and is involved with another guy.

It's arguable how serious the involvement is. He lives a couple of hours away from her, by car, and only comes to see her sporadically. But he says he loves her; she's said in the past that she loves him.

So, you know, I'm not holding out much hope of anything really coming of this thing, of this interest she has in me; that I have in her.

Recently, I sent her a greeting card. Nothing much, really, just a little card with a vintage photo on it of two kids playing dress-up. Kind of cute. When she got it, she let me know, thanked me.

The other day, she wrote this long entry in her journal about how no one ever sends her anything in the mail except bill collectors.

Oh.

Well.

Okay, then.

Mixed messages really burn my soup, y'know? I mean... if you say one thing, but act in another way, which am I supposed to listen to?