Friday night, I went out with my friends Elizabeth and Vicki and some of their other friends to PBR, a cowboy themed bar/club down in Hampton. That turned out to be lots of fun; I haven't gone dancing in way too long. I could've done without all the line dancing (I'm so uncoordinated I can't even do the Electric Slide) but I shrugged and stood on the sidelines (or in our roped-off VIP/party area!) and danced the way I wanted to.
Watching the bullriders was even more fun, though. WHEW. If the waitresses in hot pants and chaps were there for the guys to look at, then the two guys operating the mechanical bull ring were definitely there to appeal to the ladies present. (I'm not ashamed to admit that I was shipping them, a bit, in my head.) I posted one of several videos I took with my iPhone to YouTube on Saturday morning; if you missed me Twittering about it, it's here. (I think I've embedded it below, but as YouTube is blocked at the Day Job, I can't test it to be sure. If it doesn't work, leave a comment and I'll try to fix it when I get home.)
Saturday, once I'd woken up and taken a hot shower to loosen muscles that had forgotten they existed, I went out to run a couple of errands, including a stop at Bed Bath & Beyond to find some curtains for the living room windows. It was a little frustrating -- I'm not too keen on the current color selections (god, I thought we'd left avocado and orange in the seventies!) and I'm not a fan of curtains that look like hanging rugs, and since I haven't quite decided what I'm going to do with that room, decor-wise, I wanted something that would fit a wide variety of styles... and everything I liked turned out to be unlined (for a west-facing window, I really need lined curtains), or only in stock in the wrong length.
Finally, I found something and got a rod to match, and took them home, and after lunch I gathered my tools and started to put the rod up. That ran into a series of errors (including apparently trying to drill through nails or a metal plate, the size drill bit suggested by the instructions being too small for the wall anchor but too big for a naked screw, and my failing to take the hanger length into account when measuring where to put the brackets) so that project took me a solid two and a half hours to complete. And by the time I was done, I'd stepped onto and off of the kitchen chair I was using so much that I spent Sunday barely able to walk. Going up and down stairs was so unbearable that by mid-afternoon, I started scooting up and down on my butt, relying mostly on my (non-existent) arm muscles to do the work. (Today, after another hot shower and some extensive stretching, it's down to merely "very sore".)
But I got the curtains up and the broken blinds down and took all the brackets for the blinds out of the wall, and they look good, and now I can see out again! Hooray! Now I just need to go buy some spackle to take care of all the holes in the wall from the blinds brackets and my curtain-rod goofs. (Next project: curtains for Penny's room so she can get dressed without the boy across the street watching. Luckily, there are curtain rod brackets already in that room, left over from when it was our guest room, so I won't have to install those -- just buy the curtains and a new rod of the correct diameter.)
I spent most of Sunday loafing around, nursing my aching leg (just the one; apparently if I'm not paying attention, I always step up with my right leg first). I did run a couple of errands, and then ducked into Pier 1 to wait out a rain shower. Man, that would be a dangerous store for me if 1) the combination of scents going on in there doesn't immediately bring on a blinding headache, and 2) their prices weren't so ludicrous. I did buy a pair of martini glasses on clearance, though, that I walked past three times trying not to buy, but they were too gorgeously tacky to resist. (I don't even drink martinis, but especially with those colors and designs, they'd make fantastic margarita glasses.)
Sunday night, I gave some thought to an idle half-plot I'd considered for an upcoming Torquere anthology and decided I'd see if I could get some of it out before the deadline hits. I'd tried writing it a couple of months ago, but it got bogged down in its own details, so I backed up and started over... and wow. I blew out nearly 900 words in less than an hour and a half, and then I took a break to watch Leverage, and then I took my iPad upstairs to bed with me and wrote another 400 words before I finally decided I needed to turn out the light and get some sleep at midnight. God, that felt great. I haven't really written anything of substance (barring a couple of exercises for my therapist) since June.
Hope I can keep it up... When I hit Torquere's site to double-check the due date, I noticed that the minimum word limit is 5000 words, not the 3000 I'd originally assumed. Which means I need to write almost 1000 words a night for the rest of this week so I can turn this in by Saturday. Talk about shaving it close!
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