Alice scanned in pictures of Nathan and Sean for me, lovely friend that she is. They were waiting in my mailbox this morning. It's funny, comparing the pictures to my memories. Nathan looks exactly like Nathan, except more still than I think of him as being -- my inner image of Nathan is someone in constant motion, always talking and moving and making things happen. Sean ... you know, my first reaction to the picture of him was 'He's not really all that cute after all.' Except then I remember what it was like to see him and the way his grin would appear out of nowhere and then I laugh at myself for trying to compare things which don't compare well.

It's nice to have the pictures, though.

Yesterday was rather crazed -- I spent most of the day fixing a simple but obnoxious bug, a bug that was all over my code, a bug that I would have fixed ages ago if I'd only known that it was actually a problem. Once it was taken care of I was ready to leave, but one of our QA people found an amusing problem running my part of the code using Internet Explorer, so there was about an hour and a half more of fussing with things. Finally we were satisfied that the problem wasn't with my code, so I went home.

Home was nice. Jim was already there, doing laundry. We curled up and cuddled for a while, and then I went about eating dinner (leftover Chinese from my shopping trip with Rachel). I lit a beeswax candle, and made china black rose tea, and the food was simple (orange chicken) but very good. After eating I got out my old coloured pencils, and my new sharpeners & erasers, and went through my Renaissance colouring book, doing little bits here and there until I settled on a picture I liked. For some reason The Witch of the West-Mer-Lands was floating in my head, so I found my Golden Bough CD and listened to their version of it several times. Jim finished laundry, so I did a load, including my sheep pajamas -- now clean and able to come to OryCon with me. It was a very restful evening.

I'm reading James Branch Cabell's Figures of Earth, and it's very snidely funny, with occasional bits of rhythmic writing that I end up reading aloud to myself. I'm toward the ends of the book now, and the endless refrains on the folly of women is beginning to get wearing... but I'm hoping it's specific to this book and not to Cabell's writing in general. I don't think I can read six or seven books in which all the women are turned into wimps by their love for the hero.

Work is filled with bugs, but very few bugs. The nasty one we found last night has been worked around -- it's not clear if it can be really fixed, since it's caused by IE being bizarre and not by anything we're doing. We've figured out how to successfully avoid it, though. I'm down to two open things, one of which is just a bunch of wording changes, the other is an actual bug that may be somewhat crunchy to resolve.

Ed took me to lunch at Sono Sushi. That was really nice; we talked a lot about everything -- games, toys, his movies, my writing, and our solidifying plans to take dance classes together. He's a really great friend, and it's so neat to see someone I've known casually online end up being someone whose presence I really enjoy.

Today is one year of Jim. Today is a happy day. I am going home now to be with him; we'll hug each other a lot and then we'll go eat something for dinner, and then we'll go to Watercourse Way and sit in a hot tub for an hour, and then we'll go home... and all the time I'll be enjoying being with him, intensely, and telling him about my day and listening to his, and being glad, glad, glad that we've managed to shape our lives so that we can be together. Ed said at lunch that it was a real accomplishment, and I laughed because that's what I said to Rachel about it this morning -- that I have a real sense of accomplishment in managing to get through everything so that Jim and I can have now.

Life is really, really good. Good in a deep way that doesn't get shaken even on my worst days. And it's time to go home.