Monday mopes.

I'm glad we all can still be excited by a Mars landing. It seemed incredibly intricate, and the more pieces you have the more that can go wrong. But it looks like they did it.

My brain tells me we probably don't need to send real people to Mars, but my heart says, yes.
We should do it.

**********

And so it begins. Was writing notes on the Epic fantasy, and they turned into a scene.

It really is a cool feeling when a scene takes shape, and it feels right. I really missed it, this creative buzz, without knowing it, and I'm glad I'm back to doing it, no matter what happens.

I've done a lot of what I'd now call Preliminary writing over the last 30 years, especially over the last 5 years or so. I can now see those efforts as practice, as experimentation. I tried different genres and formats and styles and tenses and points of view, but it all circled back to what I think I'm most inclined to write -- fantasy.

Writing fantasy is like coming home.

**********

Every year, the car show downtown is my store's worst day of the summer. I don't understand the need to move the cars away from the park. That seems like a good place for them.

Sorry, cars do nothing for me. (Neither do bike races -- of which there seems to be one every weekend.)

**********

Linda and I turned off the T.V. and watched and listened to the thunder storms last night. There is nothing like being cozy in your own home while nature rages outside. Well, at a distance, while a gentle rain falls on the decks.

**********

I've lost 14 pounds, so I have another 5 or 6 to go.

I'm pretty rigorous about calorie counts, and the math works out exactly the way it is supposed to -- in spite of having a plateau where I didn't lose a pound for 8 days; and then a spurt where I lost 3 pounds in 3 days. The results, calorie and exercise wise, are exactly what the math says they should be.

(Need cut 3500 calories to lose one pound, eat less than 1500 calories, with an average expenditure as a relatively inactive middle aged man of 2700 calories -- one pound lost every 3 days.)

As I say, I don't know why this is relatively easy for me, once I set my mind to it. I always thought I was weak-willed and lazy.

"Won't do any good if you just go back to what you were doing before," warns Linda.

Well, I don't intend to. No sweets, no cheats. No salty snacks. No fast food.

I'm going to try to keep up the steps, and otherwise just be moderate in my eating. If needs be, I'll start counting calories again.

That should do it.

Going to reward myself with some t-shirts at the store, in the L size, instead of the XL size.

**********

Went to see Total Recall. Liked it O.K. Lots of action. Lots of Blade Runner set design.

But why the remake? Why the Spider-man remake? Come on. There are hundreds or thousands of worthy S.F. ideas out there.

Make a movie of Tunnel in the Sky, by Robert Heinlein!!!

************

Not to be flip.

But people are always telling me I should put up more signs in my store.

But people don't read them. Hell, they don't read them when they are rafting on an unfamiliar river and there are WARNINGS!!!

We seem to lose one or two people every year to clearly marked rapids.

People tailgate and talk and text on their phones, and they do drugs that ain't good for them.

People are willful sons of guns, combined with inattention, and that's a lethal combination.


LATER: I'm going to add this comment about Common Table to the end of today's entries, because I don't feel like writing a whole post on it.

I was somewhat dubious of Common Table's business model. (I still believe non-profit should be non-profit and profit should be profit and never the twain shall meet.) But then it turned out I knew some of the people involved, and I felt they had only good intentions, so I guess I hoped for the best.

Still, I'm not terribly surprised. I think Bend probably just isn't big enough for this -- when I did some research, almost all the restaurants who were doing this were located in much bigger metro areas.

Still, it would have been nice