Keeping Score

So I went to the dentist yesterday for my tooth.

Bad: I'd actually chipped the tooth itself, not a filling. (-10)

Good: It was a relatively clean chip, with no cracks running deeper into the tooth, so it only required a simple filling to fix. (+5)

Bad: They couldn't fix it right away. (-3)

Good: But they could see me later the same day. (+2)

Good: The timing of the second appointment made it mostly pointless for me to go back to the office, but left just enough wiggle room for me to go to the gym. (+7)

Bad: Novocaine = inability to drink or eat without dribbling, plus also the weirdest looking smile ever, and it didn't wear off completely until nearly bedtime. (-5)

Good: The dentist and assistant rocking out to what they could hear leaking out through my iPhone's headphones. (I had it turned up pretty loud so I could hear it over the drill.) (+5)

Bad: When I met the dentist for the first time (my regular dentist was booked, so I'd agreed to see one of the others, a new guy), my first thought was, "Holy crap, what are you, twelve?" Which thought was immediately followed by, "Oh shit, I think that means I'm officially old." (GAME OVER)

Chip Off the Ol'...

I had some popcorn last night. And as usual, I got a bit of shell caught between some teeth. No biggie; it's a known hazard of popcorn.

So I got out the floss to try to clear it out. Only it didn't work. I couldn't even get the floss into the space, much less use it to pry out the popcorn. So I resorted to a toothpick, which eventually pried the popcorn free...

Along with a bit of what I assume is the filling from that tooth. At least, I hope it's the filling, because otherwise it's a bit of tooth. Apparently, I'm getting old.

This morning, while I was fixing Penny's breakfast, another little chip worked free.

And I'm pretty sure this is the tooth that I was told would need a crown when it came time to replace the filling.

Imagine my delight. Dental work: it's not just painful, it's expensive, too!

The dentist can't see me until Monday. The tooth doesn't hurt, at least not yet, so that's something, anyway.

Sleepy

Yep, I'm tired. Penny had a bad dream around 3:30 and wanted me to come tuck her back into bed. She woke me up by tickling my neck, of all things.

Life is chugging right along, though, as usual. We've got something happening every weekend for the rest of the month: a D&D game, a birthday party, a family visit, and then Hallowe'en. Plus I expect this weekend I'll make a run to the storage unit for my fall decorations box and Penny can help me decorate the house, and somewhere in there we need to squeeze in a trip to Pumpkinville (possibly something we can do with the visiting family).

Alex has had two full days at daycare without needing a diaper change! He's less vigilant at home (especially when there is TV to be watched and dinner to be eaten) but I'm okay with taking it slowly. If he can get into the habit at school, during the day, then eventually it will spill over to home as well. In the meantime, he's inordinately cute about it, every time he goes to the potty and pulls down his pants to show me that there's still a picture on his pullup!

I realized last night that I haven't so much as uncapped my camera since the beginning of September. I've taken a few quick snaps on my iPhone, but no real photography. I need to do something about that. Especially with fall in the air and Hallowe'en on its way. That's prime photography, right there. Maybe I'll take a half-day from work or something, sometime, and wander around with my camera.

Of course, I also haven't touched my scrapbook stuff in months, either. I need to get caught up, or else pack it up. Or possibly get caught up and then pack it up. I'm not sure.

I'm too sleepy to be terribly coherent. Sorry about that.

Resume

Yep, made it back into WoW last night. It was surprising how much I'd forgotten. And man-oh-man have a lot of things changed.

But that was actually a sort of good thing. I'd decided back before I quit that I should probably get a mouse and completely retrain my movement. Which would be near-impossible with two-plus years of muscle memory fresh and backing it. It's a little easier now that it's not so fresh. (Though still not easy. I keep reaching for the arrow keys.) And I'm still using the mouse for camera control but not movement.

Not that it matters much, as I'll never have the time to be a raider, even if I were to acquire the gear and skills. I'm very definitely a casual player.

Another blessing-in-disguise: All my add-ons are out of date. Which is actually great, because the WoW interface has incorporated a lot of the things I'd had add-ons for in the first place. And a lot of them were pointless cruft. So getting to start over from scratch on that will be a bit of a hassle, but should definitely be an improvement once it's done.

I wound up logging into my old main just to chat with people -- mostly Matt and Karen, though the raiding folk managed to squeak out a hello before they got sucked into whatever it was they were doing. I didn't actually play her, though. I honestly have no idea what half her buttons even DO anymore -- I'll have to take her back to a low-level zone to remember how to play her. After I fix her talent tree, that is. So to get my actual play fix, I created a new character. That character's on another server, though, so I can check in on Rachel from time to time.

I'm still going to need to work out some kind of schedule. Matt was telling me that he reserves Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays to do at least one thing that is not WoW -- that is, he can play, but only after he does something else first, which is a reasonable idea, except that both Tuesdays and Thursdays are TV nights for us right now. Which means if I copy his schedule, I'm still not finding time to do anything productive. So I think for me, TV nights are definitely WoW nights, and I need to reserve a night or two to definitely not be WoW nights, or I'll never make my editing deadlines.

Don't know if I'd mentioned this: a few months back, my publisher put out a call for editors, and I threw my name in the hat. They sent me a few pages as a test sample, and I marked it up like crazy and sent it back. I didn't hear anything for quite a while, so I sort of assumed that my lack of editing experience showed somewhere: I missed something important, or I was too picky, or something, and they'd settled on someone else. But last week, they contacted me to let me know they wanted to bring me aboard as an editor/proofreader, and was I still interested?

Well, heck yes! Not sure how much will fit in with everything else going in my life, so I asked them to start me off slow, with a novel or two and a couple of short stories a month, and if I have time for more, I'll let them know. It's not going to pay enough to let me quit my day job, but it'll help feed my gadget habit, and it's also a little something for the resumé.

I'm weirdly excited about it. I like editing fiction. I have a sneaking suspicion it's one reason I have so much trouble finishing my stories, in fact: I just keep re-editing them. There's always something I can do to make it better.

Anyway, between that and the WoW, I guess I won't be able to complain for a good while about being bored, eh?

Crafty

So. Even though I quit playing World of Warcraft a while back, I still follow a couple of sites (mostly because they make me laugh). So I knew the Cataclysm expansion was in beta. And I'd been planning on playing it. What I hadn't gotten around to deciding was whether to start back up before the expansion, to re-learn the game and re-train my muscle memory and such, or just wait for the expansion to come out first.

Well, Blizzard made their official announcement recently: Cataclysm will be released in two months, on December 7.

And I started to ponder the decision. Before, or after? Before, or after?

I think what decided me, really, was the world events. Burning Crusade (the 1st expansion) had a few world events that led into it (though I didn't participate much, being a brand-new player at the time). The 2nd expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, had a lot of stuff that happened in-game before it was released, and it was a lot of fun, even just to watch.

And here's a dumb thing that's going to sound like an exceptionally lame rationalization, but it's kind of true anyway: I wrote better when I was playing the game. I was near to tearing my hair out about the amount of my time it sucked up and the general lack of writing time it left me, but when I did write, I wrote. I don't know how that works. Maybe just that the game was enough of a stress-reliever from real life that I stopped blocking myself? I don't know.

But I guess I'll be finding out if it still works, because last night I fired up the Downloader and had it start retrieving patches. And this morning, I created a Battle.Net account and merged my old WoW account into it, and downloaded the authenticator app for my iPhone. And Matt sent me a Scroll of Resurrection.

So tonight or tomorrow, I guess, I'll be back in the game. I'll have to figure out how to avoid dumping all my spare time down the rabbit hole, and I'm still waffling between dusting off my old characters or starting a brand new one. Those of you who play, tell me what server you're on these days and who your current main is, so I can say hi when I get there.

Rainy Date

Nice weekend. Saturday we met up with Braz and Adin at the park for Ripley's birthday party. The kids had grand fun running all over, despite a few minor spills. Then we went over to Ruby Tuesday's for an early dinner (thank goodness, because 4 adults and 6 kids is a bit hectic).

And then I went over to Adin's to babysit their four so Braz and Adin could go to a party. That provided some moments of hysterical silliness.

Funny thing #1: Ripley and Sarah announced that they were going to put on a puppet show "for the grownups."

"Grownups?" I said. "Is there more than one?"

"Well," Emma said casually, "I am almost to double digits."

Funny thing #2: After I got the girls put to bed, I started to set up a little station at the dining table so I could do some writing. Just as I was getting set up, Ripley came out. "I need some water," she said. "I want a cup of water with five ice cubes."

I remembered this as one of Ripley's Things, so I wasn't going to question it. But she continued anyway. "If you do," she said, as enticingly as possible, "I'll give you this pumpkin sticker!"

Funny thing #3: After telling me they expected to be back around 11, and after my assuring them that I'd be fine and they could stay out as late as they wanted if they'd just send a text message so I wouldn't worry... Braz and Adin were home barely past 10. There might have been some gentle mocking on my part, there.

Sunday was turn about babysitting: Matt and I dropped Penny and Alex off at Braz's to play and we went down to the Newport News Park Fall Festival. The weather was not as nice as we had been hoping -- it was, in fact, alternately drizzly and rainy all day. But I got to look at cute crafts (and nearly bought a bunch) and I did buy a dried-bean soup mix that sounded tasty, and we picked up a handful of freebie DIY crafts for Penny. Then we watched a short magic show (the magician had a monkey!) and ate a lot of unhealthy fair food. Mmm, fair food.

I really liked the whole trading babysitting thing. It's not often that Matt and I get time together without the kids, and hardly ever on the weekends. We definitely must do more of this.

If the weather had been nicer, we could've stayed a lot longer, but as it was, I think we got back to Braz's just in time, because Alex was starting to crumple from lack of nap. We got them home, put Alex down to rest and sent Penny next door to play with Ray, and then Matt started the laundry while I ran to the grocery store.

Braz and Adin and Adin's kids came over for dinner, and that worked pretty well, too. We had grilled cheese and tomato soup, which was supposed to be a concession to the picky eater. But apparently she doesn't eat grilled cheese, either, so next time I'll just go with my first impulse, which was chili. If she's going to turn her nose up at it anyway, it might as well be something everyone else can really get into.

So now it's back to work for the week. I'm already off on the wrong foot, having sloshed grounds into the coffee bucket, realized it's status report week (which is full of annoying administrivia for me to do), and also realized that I'm going to be taking meeting minutes for the managers' meeting this morning, which I also hate to do. But at least I remembered to bring a book for the gym!

Anecdotes and Shameless Plugging

The tip of my nose is red.

And painful. It feels like I am either about to sprout the world's most humongous zit, or I somehow bruised a tiny spot just at the tip of my nose. I have no idea which it is -- it's been like this for several days, so if it was a zit, I'd think it would have popped up by now, and if it was a bruise, I'd think it would be getting better.

But in the meantime, I look like the caricature of a drunkard, with my red-tipped nose.

***

As Matt said, we appear to be raising something of a brutal realist of a child. He got to look through Penny's writing journal at Back-to-School night, in which the kids answer questions and draw pictures. One question posed was, "What will you be like when you are 100 years old?" Penny's response: "When I am 100 years old, I will be dead and rotten."

Well then.

***

Alex has latched onto Penny's favorite game of pretending to be a family of ___, filling in the blank with whatever she's currently thinking about. Family of dragons, cats, horses, dinosaurs, lions, ghosts, whatever. Then we all have to say what kind of ___ we are. "I'm a white kitten." "I'm a blue dragon that breathes ice." "I'm a triceratops." Like that. Just lately, it's been vampires on Penny's mind.

The other day, riding in the car, Alex said, apropos of nothing: "We be a family of vampires?"

"Sure, kiddo, we can be a family of vampires."

"I'm a T-rex vampire!"

...Well. I guess he wins, then.

***

Last night, Penny was reading a book from the library. "Mom? Is this guy a prince?" She held up the book to show me the classic actor-with-skull Hamlet pose.

"Um, kind of," I said. "It's a play about a prince."

"Why is he holding a skull?"

"It's a very famous scene from a very famous play."

"Do you know it?"

"Yep. I've read it four times, and seen it performed a lot."

"What's it about?"

...How would you try to summarize Hamlet for a 7-year-old? Like much great literature, it's got a shocking amount of sex and violence. I did, in fact, do my best to lay out the basic plot (using our own family to illustrate the ick factor of suddenly discovering that your uncle has become your stepfather), and not leaving out that Hamlet pretends to go mad, then actually (possibly, depending on your interpretation) goes mad, definitely drives Ophelia mad and to suicide, and that by the end of the play, pretty much everyone is dead.

(...tying into her new mild morbid streak and the previous anecdote about her, I suppose.)

Then we looked at what was actually in her book. The picture was of one of the characters' grandfathers, who had been an actor. So I tried to explain to her about how, because it's such a complicated and difficult part to play, a lot of actors want to play Hamlet, because if they do a good job, it's a big achievement for them. So by having a picture in her book of this guy's grandfather as Hamlet, they were showing us that he was actually a really good actor.

Penny constantly surprises me with how smart she is. I was really impressed at how much she seemed to understand of what I was telling her, though of course, I doubt she got it all. When she'd finished reading her book, she looked up at me and said, "Mom? When can I see Hamlet?"

Ah, sex and violence sings its siren song, even to the 7-year-old set. I told her we'd talk about it again when she was in high school.

***

I discovered last night, quite by accident, that my ebook Of One Mind has been released to online distributors and is now available at Amazon.Com, AllRomance ebooks, Coffee Time Romance, and probably other distributors that I don't know about. (It's even on sale at Coffee Time -- if you haven't yet, you can pick it up there for only $2.99!)

I know several friends have picked it up (even one or two who have no intention of actually reading it, just to be supportive, which is definitely above and beyond the call of duty!) but I have one smallish request for those of you who did read it... Pretty please take ten seconds to click through and rate the book? Or even take two minutes and write a quick customer review? By all means be anonymous and honest if you didn't like it, but people are more likely to pick up a book on a whim if they see that other people have also done so. I'd really appreciate it!

And if I haven't said it before: to everyone who bought my book, thank you so much for your support. It really means a lot to me!