Not Lazy

April 6

Noonish

It occurs to me that in my last entry I wholly neglected to mention house envy. Not sure why -- I suppose the early-ness of the morning and the lack of coffee contributed.

But, Thursday, after work I went into the city and had dinner with Heather at this tapas place in the Mission with pastiche-surrealist art and rather amazingly uncomfortable chairs. Then we took BART toward South San Francisco, to see the recently-purchased home of one of Heather's friends (that friend's S.O. is mentioned in the acknowledgements of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, which I mention only because I find the SFnal connection interesting). We were given the tour, and given some yummy chocolate with ginger in, and some beer, and listened to anecdotes about livestock auctions. But, anyway, the house: wow. Two floors for living in, and a garage/basement below that. Narrow little staircases that I loved. A real courtyard in the back. A rooftop/patio thing. A tiny kitchen whose size shortcomings were wholly redeemed by the big cool antique stove and the breakfast-nook with built-in seating. Huge rooms. Lots of windows.

I'd love to live in a place like that.

I can't remember the last time I had house envy -- apart from my usual envy for Scott & Lynne's place, with the murals and the balcony.

It's got me thinking a lot about living-spaces, how they reflect the personalities and lives of the inhabitants, and I think there's a rich vein in that line of thinking that I can mine for fiction...

Hmm. This was meant to be the layabout weekend, but it hasn't worked out that way. Yesterday (Saturday) we went into Berkeley so that Heather could do yoga, and I wandered around aimlessly and read while she did that. Then she went dress-shopping, and we went (more interestingly, for me) printer shopping.

See, I have this old laser printer I got a few years ago. It prints a mere 6 pages per minute. It gets confused if I try to print more than 30 or 40 pages at a time, and will randomly skip pages (this is most annoying when I'm trying to print, say, a novel). It doesn't pull paper very reliably, so when I'm trying to print double-sided, it often screws up. I have to special-order the toner cartridges, since they're for a model that has subsequently been discontinued, and I always lived in fear that one day there just wouldn't be toner anymore, and I'd have to manually refill old cartridges, probably thus poisoning myself somehow. I kinda hated the printer, to be honest. So then the image drum died, and I went online to see how much it'd be to get a new one -- $115, including shipping. Out of idle curiosity, I went online to price new printers, and discovered that I could get much better printers for just slightly more money than a new image drum. My course was clear!

So we went to a couple of computer places in Berkeley, and decided to get a combination flatbed scanner/copy machine/inkjet printer (I generally prefer laser printers, but it'd be kind of nice to have the color-printing option for the occasional small-print-run chapbook, and also to be able to do photo printing at home); it cost about $200. I doubt we'll ever really use the copy-machine option, though -- it's not exactly cost-effective. We were planning to buy a cheaper version of the same printer, since the only real difference was that the cheaper version didn't scan things at quite as high a resolution, but then we noticed that the ink cartridges for both versions were the same price, even though the cheaper one claimed it could do about 600 pages of black-and-white text, while the other claims it can do over 1200 pages. If that's true, buying the slightly-more-expensive printer is a way better deal in the long run (hell, in the short run -- the cost difference between the printers is about the same as the cost of one ink cartridge).

So, whoo! We came home with our shiny new (and it is, verily, most shiny) printer... and didn't play with it. Because we had to do yardwork.

I detest yardwork, but our lease says we have to take care of our yard, and our landlady was grumbling about the knee-high weeds, so we decided to chop them down. Even though it was kind of pretty and green and lush and small-flowered before, and now you can see the bare patches of black earth, since we don't actually have grass, just clumps of weeds. Ah, well. That took a couple of hours (and it's not even that neat a job -- we should clean up the edges at some point). Then we played with the printer!

It's lovely and shiny and prints 22 ppm in black and white. We printed a nice crisp beautiful version of Holly's belly-dance flyer, which she can now get copied. La! I can tell it to print a copy of a novel, and then just go away until it's done -- with the old printer, I had to sit there, clear paper jams, tell it to re-print pages it skipped... it was hellish. I'm glad we got it, even though we're still pretty much broke -- I had to spend at least half as much money getting a new image drum anyway, so I'm glad I decided to go a little extra and improve my quality of life. Whee!

But I don't actually have any stories I need to send out, so I have nothing that needs printing. Shiny new printer, and nothing to print. Sigh.

Last night Holly took us out to sushi to thank us for helping her design her flyer, which was fun, and we consumed great lots of fish, mmm. Most lovely. We came home and watched a couple of episodes of Angel season 1 on DVD (they finally had the first discs at the video store -- they're still "very long wait" on Netflix). I've never seen any of the first season, and I was stunned to find that they're actually good! Even the first one! Very Buffy like, with the mixture of funny and fighting and poignant, but even from the beginning there's a strain of deeper darkness than you see on Buffy. I'm impressed. I wish Season 4 of Buffy was out on DVD, so we could alternate episodes, since there are lots of cross-overs... ah, well. Someday.

Now, today, should be a lazy-Sunday, right? But no. We have to go shopping for clothes. Heather needs a dress for the Nebulas, and I need to buy some pants (I have a good shirt-and-jacket combo, but no decent slacks). Bah. And to make matters worse, we got up at 10:30 -- but it was actually 11:30! Curse you, daylight savings time!

Midnightish

Shopping was very nearly painless. We went to International Blvd., and Heather bought a lovely dress from a shop where almost no one spoke English; I stood beneath a television which was blaring the news in Spanish, reading an M. John Harrison story, while Heather tried on dresses. Surreal, but not unpleasant, exactly. And the story I was reading made me realize what the next novel, after the Frog novel, is quite likely to be...

Then we went to a men's clothing store. The pants were all at least $80. We left promptly. I got a nice pair of slacks at another store for about $20, also a nice tie and a belt, since I didn't actually own a belt. I already have a coat, and shirt, so, ta da, we've got our clothes for the Nebulas. Since we were nearby, we went into the crazy-busy Trader Joe's and filled a couple of baskets with food. Got home after only a few hours out-and-about, which was nice. We worked on Flytrap stuff for a while, then had dinner and watched some Angel, then did more Flytrap. The upshot is, we've pretty much finalized the table of contents. We can't post it yet, though -- Heather hasn't sent out all her acceptances yet, and there are a couple of pieces still teetering between yes and no. Should be final in a few days, though -- whee! We're very happy with the 'zine. It should truly rock, and I'm having a blast working on the layout.

So, it wasn't a lazy weekend, like we'd wanted, and it wasn't a writing-filled weekend, but it was fairly productive, at least. Wish I had another couple of days off just to relax, though...

Words written since February 1, 2003: 28,300

Words written since last entry:
Zip.

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