Friday, June 11, 1999

So KT wrote last night that she was finally and completely over the situation from three years ago when Matt broke up with her to start dating me. If you've been wondering what happened, her rendition is a bit one-sided, but more or less accurate. The comments in red are mine - she let me see her rough draft before she posted it.

We stopped by the house yesterday, and they've begun putting up the struts that form the ceiling of the first floor and floor of the second. My dad called last night and we talked about it for a bit. I think he's almost more excited than I am. He thinks that if they can get the roof up by the 15th, then we're probably safe to not renew our lease.

Dad also told me that he and Mom are thinking of getting themselves a computer for Christmas this year. This coming school year is my Mom's last year before she gets to retire - she's been looking forward to it for several years. But once she retires, she won't have e-mail anymore. So they're going to get a computer. Mom uses a Mac at work, so that's what she wants at home. I get the impression Dad doesn't care, so that's what they'll get. I wonder how irritated Dad will be when he discovers that the Mac interface isn't exactly what he's used to. It took me a good while to learn the Mac interface to my satisfaction. (Because of course I'm not happy with just being able to open files and run programs. I've got to be able to much with the settings and stuff.) They want Matt and I to sit down with them and help them decide what they need and where they should buy it.

We're going to have a busy evening. Matt needs to go to the bank and get some cash for his trip to New Orleans next week, and we have to go to the card store to pick up cards for Father's Day and both of his siblings' birthdays. We also made plans with Chuck and Anita to drop by their place to see their new daughter, and of course we want to go see today's progress on the house. And, of course, since Matt is leaving town tomorrow morning, we'll want to spend some time alone together.

I think I'll be starting my AD&D campaign around the first weekend of July, so I've started gathering ideas for plots. I've actually found several very good, entertaining ideas. Isn't the web marvelous?

I think I'll finally finish Exiles today. I don't think I'll be buying any of the sequels, though. For pete's sake, the book is 850 pages long! If you can't get your plot done in that many pages, you're being way too wordy! Okay, that's not always true. But I've identified at least three chapters that are entirely unnecessary, and at least half of each chapter contains perfectly useless information. I bet I could condense this book to 500 pages without losing any of the salient plot points. And the extra text doesn't even make me care more about the characters - several of them have died, and I wasn't especially moved. I'm more intrigued by the villians than the heroes, too, which is a bad sign.

No comments: