Hello again, gentle reader. I present now for your amusement a brief summary of my recent life, in reverse chronological order.

• My sister is visiting! She showed up Friday night and is leaving Thursday morning. With her are Adam (her husband) and Sammy (their son, about 10 1/2 months old). The visit is so far a success, despite San Francisco being ridiculously cold when we went to Golden Gate park on Saturday. Today they took my car and went back into the city, to do Ghiradelli Square & Pier 39, after which Ann is coming back here & is going to pick me up for dinner around 5:30, while Adam is going to Muir Woods and having dinner with some friends. I'm not sure where Ann & I will go to dinner. Somewhere kid-friendly. It sounds like they're going to Big Basin tomorrow, and Wednesday they're coming to the Weekly Thai Feeding so I can show them off to all of my friends & vice-versa. All in all everything is going well and I am glad they're here, but to some extent I'm looking forward to having things settle down into a routine which doesn't involve travelling or guests. There are many things Jim & I want to do to the house and garden once we have more time.

• I started my job at SocialNet last Monday. So far it's been pretty good, despite some confusion last week due to my manager (Simeon) being out sick Wednesday-Friday. I've been wandering curiously around the codebase and fixing bugs -- well, one bug. I'm working on fixing my second bug right now, but am stymied by an inability to find where my debug statements are going. I have asked Chris (senior engineer who looks like a byronic poet but with short hair) to assist me in this, but last I checked he was eating lunch. So, apparently, is the Information Manager (named David, seemingly nicknamed deves -- yet another person who goes by their login name?), leaving me also unable to find out where & how to check in the first bug that I fixed. If all of this sounds sort of annoying -- well, it is. But in comparison to my last job this is a bed of roses. Everyone I've met has been nice, the work is interesting even when I'm frustrated, the kitchen is full of yummy snack food, and there's tons of stuff to do. I just wish things were a bit more structured, so I knew who was supposed to be training me (come to that, I'm not sure if Simeon even thinks someone is supposed to be training me; maybe he thinks I don't need training?) and I wouldn't feel awkward interrupting Chris all the time.

• Prior to starting my job, I visited my parents in charming Enid, Oklahoma for nine days. Despite Enid not having much to recommend it, I had a wonderful time during the visit. There was a lot of extremely good food, and an afternoon of clothes shopping (boy did I end up with an astonishing amount of new clothing), and on Thursday Jim showed up which made a nice vacation even nicer. Jim and Mom and I went to White Water together (a waterpark in Oklahoma City) and rode many slides and had a marvelouslly splooshful time. I was sad to leave, but glad to be getting home to my house and cats and the new job.

• Prior to that there was a week of packing and cleaning the house and pondering my first session of From Light to Darkness, the cool live-action game that Chrisber & Christy lured me into. It was extremely cool but pretty overwhelming, not emotionally but just in the sheer amount of information swirling around. I've started working on a small diary for my character, based off of some of my favourite bits of Sei Shonagon, which is very satisfying.

• But wait, there's more! The weekend between going to Disneyland and FLTD, namely 8/9 July, I went to Las Vegas with Jim and Paul. There were some highly enjoyable moments, but I was so tired of travelling that I didn't have as much fun as I expected. Jim and I (with the help of his hammerhead shark) did manage to break even playing video poker, though.

Do you all feel caught up now? I hope so. I'm rather amazed at how much I've packed into the last month.

For some reason, out of nowhere, I want it to be fall. Proper fall, which they don't really have in this part of California. I want colder weather and changing leaves and perfect blue skies and wonderful way all of this smells. The smell of autumn makes me want to be domestic, to bake and cook and clean and take care of things, but it also makes me long to be artistic, to write or draw. I suppose it's really the same urge, to make beautiful wonderful things, whether those things are cookies or sketches, improvements to my garden or the beginnings of a story. Or, maybe, writing here. Deciding to write here made me want to experience fall, which says something good about being able to start my own creative cycle whenever I want to. So why is it still, always so hard to take that first step and start? I keep asking myself this.

I'm listening to Boiled in Lead. Specifically, I'm listening to track four of this CD, which is "Jamie Across the Water", an instrumental song that manages to hit me right in that place where I want it to be fall and want to write and cook and make things. I'm thinking that, just maybe, I could keep coming in to work this early (I was here at 9am today, which is early for me) and then go home at a reasonable time (such as 6pm) and write (or draw) until Jim comes home. Could that be? Of course. If I just really decide to do it. I wish I knew why I never quite manage to decide.

Enough of all that. I'll talk instead about the garden. It's mostly just going along in a straightforward way, with all the plants that were there when we arrived doing well. The one surprise is a tomato plant which has popped up out of nowhere in one of the borders near the back gate. Despite not being given any special attention it has flourished amazingly, and is now enormous and covered with green tomatoes of various sizes and at least a handful of yellow blossoms which will eventually become tomatoes. They should start ripening soon and I'm really looking forward to that, eating fresh tomatoes from my garden. Jim and I have been talking about transplanting all the lantana that's living in that bed (tiny white flowers on long stems) and getting rid of the bushes altogether so we can use the space for fruits & vegetables. It's very happy to plan these things.

Chris has appeared and shown me the error of my ways that led to my debug output not occuring, and furthermore explained to me that bears like hacking, especially on Macintoshes. This is a good thing to know, and I think I will celebrate knowing it by chasing down the bug he gave me on Friday.