Okay, on to the rest of the weekend... Spent Friday doing various errands, including picking me up a new Palm keyboard. I was delighted. Until we got back to their apartment, that is.

S&D claim that there are a bunch of little spirits that hang around them, their apartment, their car, etc. that go around generally making mischief. I don't know about that (I am not prone to seeing things of that nature), but they'll be like "Oh, look, there's the butt imprint one of them made from sitting on the Beanie Baby," and "That one was messing with Demma's seat belt," and "Look where that one's blowing the incense smoke" (the smoke was blowing in strange patterns and directions that night...) and my personal favorite, the farting one. Yes, one of them will sometimes produce an overwhelming smell of cabbage in the car for a few minutes at random times. (No, nobody ate any cabbage over the weekend.) Don't ask me how spirits fart. I never did get an explanation out of anyone for that other than that they most certainly do. (insert eye-roll here.)

I'm starting to wonder if one of them felt like messing with me this weekend, as when I got out of the car, my purse somehow ended up emptying all over the street. My beloved Palm dropped to the floor and promptly lost its front cover AND battery cover and one of the batteries popped out. Which promptly wiped out every program I'd put on the thing and made it useless to me for the rest of the weekend. Waaaaaah!

I do have to wonder on the spirits thing though. Demma has a string of bells hanging above the hallway door, and Dave is tall enough to always walk into these things any time he goes in and out. (Rather like belling the cat.) Well, one morning he got up to go to the can, and a few minutes later I heard the bells ringing. By themselves, mind you- they'd already stopped swaying from him going by already, there wasn't any wind in the apartment, they weren't exactly moving much while they rang just now, and nobody had been by to touch the things. Scott's reaction to hearing about this was "I'm not surprised."

The other main fun activity of the weekend was playing Dungeons and Dragons with Jeremy and some of his brothers. Demma and I, much to our surprise, actually liked this a lot better than playing vampire. Not so much worrying about protocol, not so much constant trying to kill or be killed, not so much wandering around bored off of our asses. I'd play it again. Not that we did all that much the first night- got a lot of free gifts and the promise of immortality to go find Oberon on a magical island- but I was fairly entertained nevertheless.

I had an interesting revelation this weekend. Jeremy and I were wrestling on the couch (don't ask, I really don't have an explanation for this, but it wasn't That Kind of wrestling), and I realized that should I have been assaulted by a non-friendly type, I really wouldn't have been able to do a damn thing to him. So much for self-defense- I plain old don't have the strength to even move when grabbed. Seriously, I tried hitting him in the crotch and he was all "Oooh, you almost got me." Dave had been going on previously about how it worried him that I couldn't exactly do any damage to anyone if someone did something to me, and well... yikes.

The other slightly annoying bit of the weekend came from the arrival of one friend of theirs, who Dave calls a drama queen. She really is, I must say. Anyone who deliberately punches a brick wall repeatedly until she breaks her hand (I saw her after she did it) is just, well.... Admittedly, the girl actually had a bunch of things wrong with her now. Got in a car accident, lost her job because of it, is about to lose her apartment if she doesn't get employed again soon, and her live-in boyfriend dumped her for telling him she wanted to have his baby. (Oh yeah, that was brilliant to do just before you hit 30 to a guy you've only been seeing for a few months.) Dave doesn't like or get along with her much, and I can't really blame him. What on earth do you say to a girl who talks like this? "Well, I'm going to eat this sandwich, and I hope I don't throw it up because that'll have wasted all my money." She may be moving in with them if and/or when she loses her apartment, which doesn't exactly sound like a great idea to me. Especially given that the last two people who they let stay at their apartment for a few months, well, the first one stole a lot of their most valuable, heirloom possessions (note: this girl is now living with the Drama Queen), and the other one ate all the food, including an entire freezerful of meat, and racked up $60 worth of long-distance calls. (Which was just the cherry on top compared to the $1000 phone bill they just got claiming they made a ton of calls to a phone sex line in Guyana on a weekend when they weren't even home. Yes, really, I saw the bill.)

I seem to have adopted one of the rats, against my bad-pet-owning better judgement. She's very cute and sweet and actually fairly calm for a pet, which is a good thing considering how nervous I tend to be around animals. (Parents, please raise your kids around animals so they're not edgy around every single dog, cat, fish, etc. they encounter at someone else's house, please?) Her name is Dot, she's got a blue head and a trail of dots/stripe down her back, she fits into my hand and likes to hide behind (what's left of my) hair. Very cute. I can't imagine her getting as big as the adult rats they've got there. I'm not sure when I'll take her home though- I am nervous about being left with an animal or two (I'll probably take Dave's rat Harriet along with Dot so she won't be bored and alone, and she just had babies) in case I get neglectful and forget to feed them again, or clean the cage, or whatever else I always forget because I'm a damn absentminded ditz. Dave says he'll call and remind me, but who knows...

Some disturbing rat-related stuff:

1: There's one Big Alpha Male rat, Magellan (I think he's Dot's dad), and one littleler beta male rat, his son Little Man. Little Man has apparently just hit puberty and when he was left alone in a cage with Magellan to give the pregnant females some space, he tried REPEATEDLY to bugger Magellan. Relative and the wrong sex be damned, he was horny! We slept out in the living room, and we'd be interrupted every few hours by furious shrill squeaking as this occurred. Magellan beat the crap out of him, but he kept it up. Finally LM got moved to the isolation cage, then was provided with a woman.

2: While checking on all the rats that had had babies this weekend (within 24 hours, there were about 25 new baby rats from 3 mothers), Scott made a comment that all women should have babies. Truth be told, I think he was referring to the rats because (a) any female rat that stays in his keeping long enough to get mature ends up getting pregnant REAL quick, and (b) he knows very well that Demma's not getting pregnant. Dave, however, um, gave me the "a-HEM" look upon hearing that. Argh.

NaNoWriMo update #1:

As usual, Murphy's Law conspired against me. I somehow knew from the start of my computer troubles that no matter what I did this weekend to try to figure out SOME way I could type my novel while not at home, I'd end up having no recourse but to handwrite it from scratch.

So I started scrawling it down on notepaper off and on throughout the weekend. I did fairly well the first day- though I couldn't exactly do an accurate wordcount without some serious tediosity- churning out about 8 or 9 pages, which is probably about right for the usually done daily word total of 1,666. But on Saturday I just was not. in. the. mood. to write much, and only did a few pages. I succumbed to the temptation to read Star Wars novels I found around the house instead. As for Sunday, I was feeling similarly not motivated to write for most of the day. I did force myself to take the late train home (if I go back late at night, I can take the train all the way to Sac instead of having to take a bus from Stockton to Sac) so I could write without distraction and incredibly bumpy bus action all the way there, and that worked well. I'm currently at about 21 pages, so I'm "almost" caught up to total. It's a shame I didn't get ahead given how much off and on dead time I had to write over the weekend, but oh well.

It's just not too pleasant trying to write fiction by hand. My handwriting is godawful, plus it's too slow for my thought processes and feels way too tedious to do. Though I am fearing that should anything else go wrong with my little computers on a weekend, I should just handwrite the entire weekend anyway just to make sure I don't lose my work when I can't sync it up to my computer any time soon. Ugh. Plus I am really not looking forward to spending the next couple of days typing up my 21 messy handwritten pages instead of doing any actual creation. More of a time waste to have to do that. Though I did get the new keyboard installed and working on the Palm, so that's a good sign.

As for the plot, I am almost out of previously planned thought out ideas for it. Last year I had it thought out to a certain point and then it gets vague- I know the very general main idea of where it's going, but only plotted to about slightly after half the story is done. And I'm almost to the point where I need to think up more detailed plot details before I go on. I don't really know what I'm going to do there at all yet.

Plus the part I wrote this weekend was trickier than I'd thought it would be, which didn't really add to my productivity either. I thought it up last year when I was in a pissy mood, which I really wasn't in this time when I wrote it. I couldn't really get in the right mood for what I was doing. But hey, it doesn't have to be good right now, it just has to be written, right?

Definitely weird this year to have NOT been home when NaNoWriMo started. Definitely weird to not have the support of my journalers mailing list/message boards/chat room pals as I write. Definitely weird to be handwriting instead of merrily typing away while I tell the chat room how many words I've got now and aren't I just the most special for having the most of all already? (I think this year's "most special" award's gonna go to SarahJanet- 4200 words in one day? 8000 words by now? Holy fucking crap, that kicks my ass six ways to Sunday.)

I'm hoping things will feel better once I'm home alone typing again. Though there's going to be another three days of mostly dead time- the new plan for next weekend is that Dave and S&D (who want to avoid Mr $60 Phone Bill coming through town next weekend) will be coming here Saturday through Monday for the birthday celebrations. On the one hand, I'll get a lot done Friday night while they all play D&D, and maybe I'll get to go use my computer for awhile while they're here, and I'll be able to sync whenever I wanna. On the other hand, distractions....

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