What I've been up to lately:

(a) Winning the Halloween costume contest at work.

(b) Plugging away on my NaKniSweMo sweater, which is going well. I couldn't get gauge on it for shit, but since it was off enough that I could just make it in a bigger size and still follow the instructions, I am doing that. I've tried it on so far and it's fitting, so yay to that.

(c) National Play Writing Month is going well, for the most part. I am actually just kind of writing out the whole driving thing as it happened rather than trying to fit it into playwriting format yet--I figure I can just go through it later and prune down or something. I don't know if I'll get a 50k word count on that or not, but I might as well give it a shot since I am over 10k now.

I am seriously starting to wonder if I just start hating everything I work on once it becomes big-sized, though. All was fine and lovely before 10k, and then I started hitting the "this is less fun" burnout point yesterday. That...seems like a problem to me.

(d) I have heard that most of the East Coast relatives are fine, though some were in NYC at the time--the non-flooded, still-has-power end. I never heard about one cousin, but I assume she's fine and I am just way low on the "people telling me this shit" list.

(e) I went to see Steve Wozniak last Monday, as he came to town for a Q&A session with the engineering dean for the engineering department's anniversary or something. He was quite cute and geek Santa Claus-ish--I don't know why I thought that. Here are some thoughts from the notes I took (on my iPod):

* He loves Segway polo and is on a team called the Silicon Valley Aftershocks (hah). He loooooooves Segway and wonders why it didn't take off with everyone. My guess is: the expense.
* He was into the idea of "pay it forward" before the movie because he never wanted anyone he gave money to to feel like they had to pay it back. He wants everyone in the world to be his friend. Awwww.
* When asked what his favorite award was, he said his degree from UC Berkeley. (This got applause from the college crowd.) He said he went back to school under a fake name--Rocky Raccoon Clark--and got the degree in that name. His second choice for this question was getting into the Inventor's Hall of Fame-- he made a crack that Steve Jobs couldn't get in that one.
* He loved working for Hewitt Packard and said he'd never planned on leaving-- he just wanted to hide in the back of the lab inventing things.
* He was a Tetris champ and had his scores printed every month in Nintendo Power magazine. One month he decided to submit his score in a fake name--his own name backwards--then forgot about it and got annoyed that some foreigner beat him.
* When asked about what smartphone he preferred, he said he likes them all, even the Windows ones. Then came out with this remark: "I think Steve Jobs came back reincarnated at Microsoft." I'm surprised I didn't hear more startled choking noises from the audience on that one.
* He collects oddball watches to show off to his "little friends." (His words, not mine.) He was wearing a big one this evening with vacuum tubes. "It's waterproof. Once."
* He said that with regards to elementary school education, you know when a kid is going to drop out when s/he is 8 years old. Ouch.
* At a Stanford graduation, he said they were saying things along the lines of the engineers will design the future, the scientists will cure diseases, or whatever, and then got to the ol' "the liberal arts people will work at McDonald's..." God knows Steve is NOT A LIBERAL ARTS PERSON, but even he was all, "geez, I can't believe they said that out loud."

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