I have got to quit travelling so much. My dreams are constantly stressful, often involving being lost somewhere off of I-5.

What shall I say? Last week was a bad week. I know I never wrote, but writing is impossible in such states; my brain was wrapped in cotton wool, and it was only with the greatest of effort that I managed to get out two critiques. A pitifully inadequate number; I've got about eight to go.

But it was a bad week. I don't know how to explain it. I got a lot of work done, because getting work done is easy in such situations. I slept too much. I spent time with my friends, which was pleasant and almost normal. I'm sure nobody knew that it was a really bad week for me, except perhaps Earl, who got long ranting email every day about how incredibly annoyed I was by just about everything.

Yes, that's what I remember from last week. A combination of absolute exhaustion and constant anger. It's only in retrospect that it weaves itself into a coherent whole of hideousness, though. Moment to moment it wasn't too bad -- which is why I didn't write, probably, in the end. Writing weaves things together immediately, and I didn't really want to think about how frustrated I was.

So I'm back in Mountain View, after a nice weekend in LA. We didn't do anything the audience might be fascinated by -- cooked, read, talked, watched movies. Slept. Hugged each other. Had very silly conversations with much laughter. We saw a community theatre production of A Little Night Music that was absolutely grand; not always technically perfect, but the energy was infectious.

It was a very good weekend. Even the driving (six hours each way, more or less) wasn't too bad. I listened to Shawn Colvin, Indigo Girls, and Fraggle Rock on the way south; the Fraggle Rock tape made me all nostalgic for the show, and now I'm thinking of hunting down some of the rentable copies and making Trip watch them. Fraggle Rock was a passion of mine when I was fourteen. I was surprised, listening to the tape, to realise I know all of the songs.

The trip north was devoted to the first act of Miss Saigon, which I hadn't listened to in about five years, and then Falsettos, which lasted me a good four hours with the number of times I was rewinding the tape to try to figure out the weird harmonies on some of the songs. Quite satisfying, really.

Much reading to tell you all about: I bought a ton of books from the NESFA table at WorldCon. One got read this weekend; Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Book, which is a painfully funny collection of essays. It's the sort of writing I want to be able to do, the sort of thing that I'd love to achieve with this diary but very rarely manage.

I'm working on style sheets. Honest.

I'll come up with a Worldcon summary soon. Right now I need to be finishing up my critiques, or I'll be forced to slink away from the crit-list with my nonexistant tail between my legs.