1. It’s been busy at work and I haven’t had time to do much else besides work. What a bummer.
2. The read-through on my WIP progresses nicely, but the first ten chapters or so are the easy part of the ms., the part I’d reworked several times before pushing on through the rest of the story. This part holds up pretty well. I shudder to think of the Middle to Come, or the Chaos of Ending.
3. I finally got my DVD player hooked up after an embarrassingly long hiatus.  I don’t watch many DVDs, obviously, but I’d accumulated enough gifts that I thought I really should start looking at them. “I haven’t got the DVD player hooked up yet,” was wearing kind of thin to those who queried. Actually, the cable company had hooked it up when they installed my new DVR box, but it never worked properly and I knew the connections were wonky on the TV end. I’ve got one of those huge, honking old 27-inch TVs that weigh a ton, and I knew it would be a chore to shift it around to check those connections, so I was unmotivated. Lazy swine, am I. Sure enough, I finally hefted that monster around and it was “There’s your problem” all around. In about two seconds I had DVD capacity.
4. I made pork, onion, and green olive empanadas over the weekend. Muy bueno, if I do say so myself.
5. I also watched the first five episodes of True Blood, season one. I’d been leery of it, since I loved the books. I’m actually quite liking it, with a couple of biggish exceptions.
General discussion of series, no real spoilers, but skip to #6 if you don’t want to know.
So far most of the episodes have pretty closely followed the story arc of the first book in the series, Dead Until Dark (which is probably still my favorite of the bunch). All this time I couldn’t understand why everyone said, “Sam? Eww!” when I said I hoped Sookie wound up with him. Now I understand: for some reason, the producers have decided to turn Sookie’s one true friend through all the books, the one who’s always loved her for who she is not what she can do for him, the one who’s always been at her back…into a skeevy guy who sleeps with all the women who work for him. Very unhappy with that. I also think the guy who plays Eric is seriously miscast. He’s this tall, effete male modelish kind of guy, when Eric is a large, physically imposing, ex-Viking warrior. It does not work for me. This actor is, however, blond like Eric. He knows how to put on a nice pout when I thinking brooding is more called for…but Bill does enough of that for twelve vampires, so perhaps the producers wanted…contrast. Yeah, that must be it.
6. When in Ralph’s market Saturday shopping for empanada ingredients, I turned back to my shopping cart to find a woman with her hand in my purse. I’ve been mugged three times. I know better than to leave my purse unattended like that, but I had a brain fade, I guess. When I turned and caught her, she said, “Oh!” and pushed the cart out of the way, like that was her intent all along and her hand just happened to slip into my purse. She reached behind me, not the cart, to grab some crutons off a shelf and walked away. I did a quick reconnoiter of my belongings and determined nothing was missing. I kept close tabs on my purse for the rest of the shopping.
