Jim woke up at 4:30 this morning, showered, hugged me a lot, murmured sweet nothings, and then headed to the airport and from there Chicago, where he will watch his niece get christened. I went back to sleep, then got up around 8:30 and finished packing, as I'll be going to Oklahoma around 3pm today, to spend some time with my mom. A weekend of travel fun for everyone.

Last night was very low-key -- laundry, monster rancher, conversation -- but got exciting towards the end, when I decided to take a shower, remembered something intensely unpleasant, and had to be talked to for a long time before I calmed down. Well, maybe not had to be talked to, but it helped. I slept very nicely, which I'm sure I wouldn't have without the talking period first.

I am trying to find tools for talking more specifically about things like the above. I am not sure where to find them; most people who talk about unpleasant things in their life do so in a way which irritates me. Perhaps next week I will devote an entry into core-dumping my recovery issues on you all, so everything will be nicely out in the open and I won't have to be sly and cunning when I want to say 'I had a memory flash and freaked out mildly'.

I continue to read Pratchett, and continue to enjoy it. I'm bringing about six of his books with me to Oklahoma, on the theory that they'll make good brain-dead airplane reading. My flight leaves at 3pm today, and it doesn't arrived in OKC until 9pm California time, so that's an awful lot of reading. Or sleeping, if I'm sane, but I don't really expect to be.

Other books being taken to Oklahoma include Startide Rising (still being read), Uplift War (in case I ever finish SR), and A Game of Thrones. I doubt I'll get through all the Pratchett, though. I always mean to read a lot on the plane, and I never mange it; instead I scribble things in notebooks, or sleep, or play with my Pilot, or listen to music. This last will be possible because Jim is loaning me his walkman, just like he did when I went to Oklahoma for Christmas. (Can you sense all the warm & fuzzy I'm feeling?). I'm bringing along a bunch of Rent tapes, which means I can feed two obsessions at once by listening to them & scribbling reviews. The happy life of the multi-tasking.

I have a null pointer exception that I can't figure out, and people are trying to convince me to go eat sushi with them, which seems like a much better idea than sitting here beating my head against this code & hearing the resounding thumps. Perhaps Rachel will appear again soon (being one of the lunch people), and I can have her look at it before we go. Or right after we get back.

Will I ever be happy with my writing again?