Random Thoughts Make a Less Insane Post

Lots of rest and quasi-relaxation (more on this below) on top of surviving the DDJ and RWA insanity of last week went a long way toward making things feel more normal this week. Of course, I still haven't written any fiction yet, but that will change tonight. (Actually it could have changed last night, but I decided to take one night just for me as the quasi-relaxation didn't count.) So, on with the randomness.

Potty training is a strange road. Right now Drew thinks it's all a game and hasn't quite figured out that he can do his business in the potty in addition to sitting on it and playing with toilet paper.

After years of working with Celeron processors and above, Pentium 4 feels like moving through molasses, especially when trying to use Office 2007. I miss my old laptop.

I read 9 books in 10 days as a judge in a romance contest. I didn't have to read them so quick, but I found that reading for a contest feels more like a responsibility than fun and didn't like having all those books hanging over my head. Plus, romances tend to read very fast for me, so it was just easier this way. That being said, it was fun to get 9 free books and breeze through them all in the name of service to a writing organization. I signed up to do this again next year.

Related to the above, it is apparently a Bad Thing to have a heroine utter "Shit!" The preferred expletive is "Crap!" I find this word wholly unsatisfying as a single utterrance to express any emotion beyond a desire not to seem coarse. In fact, the only context in which I use the word crap is in full sentence, usually along the lines of "this is a piece of crap" and even then I tend to opt for the much more satisfying substitute of shit. But I have noticed that I am in the minority of women in this word usage preference (at least based on the books we choose to read). This is not the only word choice difference I seem to have with the female majority, but that is another post and one that requires a certain amount of bravery on my part as the words are rather loaded and my grandmothers read this blog.