You birds, always cracking foxy...

Day Trip

I'm in Temecula, CA for 36 hours or so, sleep-deprived and helping my grandmother with some unpleasant legal nonsense. Waah.

Never been to Temecula? Picture the set of "Bonanza" with paved roads. Now make every third building an antique shop. Now picture the sidewalks teeming with white folks in bad wrap-around sunglasses and cheap baseball caps, and the streets swarming with pickup trucks and Harley Davidsons.

Now feel sorry for me.

I thank you.

I have a video camera...

...and I'm only slightly afraid to use it.

For your enjoyment, I present the following blurry, chunkily-compressed snippets from Mynx's karaoke B-day celebration.

Dang portable light crapped out really early on, so most of the clips are pretty grainy.

Arizona is far away

I keep expecting W to walk in the door. But he won't be home 'til Wednesday. The cats and I are listlessly doing our work (me researching and coding, Scooter keeping me warm, Polly vigilantly guarding her precious bookshelf-top against fuzzy interlopers).

News news news

1. Still working on the book proposal. Hopefully I'll know this week.
2. Walter and his dad got to go hear a talk by Malcolm Gladwell, one of my heroes, at Arizona State U. I stayed home to work. Do I even need to say that I'm jealous? Check the photos below for a pic of Walter III ("mine" is IV) with The Man Himself.
3. Jason's friend Doug (who you might know as an author and all-around media maven) had a kid! What a life that girl's gonna have!
4. We might close escrow early on the building. Want!
5. I need to get out and be social soon. I'd forgotten what it's like to be in full-time work-mode without being on tribe several hours a day as a distraction. No wonder I was losing my fool mind before tribe.

Good news, again?

First a home, now a book deal? I talked with an accquisitions editor in NYC just now. I've contributed chapters and done technical editing for books her company has published in the past. Now she's looking for someone to co-author a book for working programmers who are also new Macintosh users. The project hasn't been approved yet, but she seems to think it will be. And I think she wants to hire me: at one point in our conversation she actually said "yay!" in response to my suggestions. Hee.

If this happens, we would travel later than we'd planned. But W is cool with that. He's got plenty to work on here, he says. And that'd give us more time to settle in, work on the place, and find someone to sublet while we're gone.

Random: a big MOOOOO! to Smoooochie, who, today, wrote the sweetest blog entry ever.

Homeowner

In twenty-one days, I will own a two-unit building in San Francisco. It's the smallest building on a calm and pretty street, and someday it'll need a whole bunch of foundation work.

But for now, it'll be home.

Holy shit.

Home.

OMG. OMG-OMG-OMG. OMG

I just got a call from my Realtor. The latest offer on the latest property wasn't summarily rejected. It's a 2-unit in a pretty neighborhood with a protected (essentially un-evictable) older tenant downstairs. A single woman who pays just enough rent to make the mortgage only medium-terrifying. The last place I was interested in was supposed to have gone for $400,000 more than the asking price. No joke. My other Realtor casually mentioned on Saturday that she thinks J's place has gained at least 10% in value since I signed the quit-claim deed in October. The market is brutal.

I might know as early as tomorrow.

If this happens, I'm going to be so broke.

If this happens, I'm going to be responsible for someone else's home.

If this happens, I'll have a home of my own.

Something's in the air

Everybody woke up all eloquent recently. Or visually creative.

Damn, but I know some cool people.

Tuesday

It's raining.

I'm fixing bugs (someone else's, for a change) on a client's website.

W is straightening the bedroom, singing softly along to "Little Green Apples" as it plays over his headphones.

He wrote today and yesterday. I coded some and absorbed as much travel info as I could.

Life's okay.

Obsessive Mode: ON

It's 2005. We had an amazing NYE, and a deliciously lazy Saturday. Today it's time to get serious (which for me means getting at least semi-obsessed) about travel. Do we start in Thailand after all? Which countries need visas? Which countries need vaccinations? How many travel books can I read between now and the time we leave, while still putting in billable hours and hitting the gym?

The Best Shrink In San Francisco™ recommends the UCSF Travel Clinic for shots. We have to go there after we finalize our destination list. We need to make that list of countries (or at least airports) soon. We need the list for shots, and for those Round the World Tickets.

Video camera's been researched and purchased. Panasonic "prosumer" mini; the PV-GS200. About half the cost of its competitors. (If you're shopping: don't believe the absurldly high MSRP, but do research the store's rep before you buy online. Lotta crooks are doing great business lowballing people on Froogle. Then you find out you have to pay for "extras" like a power cord or battery.)

Books: This weekend I read the thoroughly engaging Holy Cow, and the pretty-good No Touch Monkey!. Next up is Video Night in Kathmandu.

We got a small stack of Europe-centric books from my family for Christmas, but I'm very Asia-focused right now. I even started a tacky Amazon.com Wishlist to keep track of wanna-reads.