As I write this I'm almost done with my first screen, which has taken me something like two weeks (a fact I'm trying desperately not to think about -- hopefully the next one will only take a week, and then the one after that only a few days -- but I digress). I just have to add one more piece of functionality (delimiters!), and then I'm done. Being done will be pleasant.

So I went to Grass Valley, along with a horde of other people. Nobody exploded. There was no psychodrama whatsoever, although there were a few tense moments. I did indeed spend long periods of time holding Katie, who seemed to enjoy it inasmuch as a 3.5-month-old can be said to enjoy anything which isn't food. I ate frozen grapes. Al ran Mage. Jim and I got lost on the way up, but only minorly. We played Arabian Nights twice, mostly due to my wanting to, but we never did run into Evil Magian Fire-Worshippers, despite the fact that I was assured they existed. After the end of the second game Chrisber read through the storybook until he found the paragraphs with Magians and read them to my triumphantly.

We want to Ames, and I acquired far too many books. Most notable (or at least expensive) was the 188- edition of Dante and His Circle, collected by Dante Gabriel Rosetti. I haven't yet read through it extensively, but it seems to be the poetry of not only Dante (the long-ago Italian one) but also his friends, which means there's lots of arguments in sonnet form bouncing between people. This is just the sort of thing I find amusing, although I sort of wish I hadn't found such an old copy. But then again, old books are nifty, so I guess I don't mind it too much.

I also picked up:

• Tarzan of the Apes (Edgar Rice Burroughs) due to Jeremy's insistence that I will never understand the pulp roots of sf without it -- plus he claims it's a really good book. I remain dubious.
• Lord Valentine's Castle (Robert Silverburg) also due to Jeremy, although he was merely reccomending rather than insisting.
• Quentin Bell's 1972 biography of Virginia Woolf, which is supposedly the seminal work.
• Another biography of Virginia Woolf, titled something like The Moth and the Flame, which was written around 1952 by a woman with more romantic sensibility than scholarship. It reads much more like a bad novel than like a biography, but I continue plowing on out of amusement. The primitive litcrit of Woolf's novels is interesting, even if the rhapsodic treatment of her mental problems (ie: Woolf never recovered from her mother's death and thus retreated into insanity, as insanity loved her -- except the actual quote from the book is much worse than anything I can paraphrase) makes me ill.
• Several children's books, titles unremembered; one was a Meg mystery (which series I read avidly as a child), another was told from the viewpoint of a young boy in Turkey.

I'm certainly I acquired others, but I honestly can't think of what they are. Tomorrow I'll provide an actual quote from the awful biography, and also report on any books I may have forgotten.

Earl has shown up early due to catching the 5:30 train instead of the 6pm train. I am cruelly making him sit in Rachel's chair (she's gone to karate) and read while I finish coding. I desperately want to finish my screen tonight, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen -- my utterly last thing (loading the delimiters from the db) isn't quite working, and I'm too tired to figure out why. At least I've determined that the delimiters are getting saved to the db, so I know it's a problem with my load-this-information code and not anything else.

Dinner is planned for Shogun, which is a yummy but slightly expensive Japanese place a few blocks away. Afterwards I'll drop Earl off at Temple Square (a weird thought) and then go home and collapse, or maybe work on my loft bed.

Yah, I definitely give up on finishing this tonight. Dinner.