do you especially think i'm not a genius?

Today was a usual day in small-town Iowa; I woke up late, watched part of 'The Young and the Restless', took a shower, dolled up my hair and makeup--and spent a bit of extra time on it when I realized that I only have to make it three more years to *not* fulfill my senior prophesy. Some bitch on the senior yearbook committee wrote nice or at least normal prophesies for everyone in my class, but my prophesy would be that I would drop out of Stanford, move to Mexico, marry a goat farmer, and live in a barn, barefoot, with our four kids. Needless to say I was pissed, but the whole dropping out of Stanford thing didn't happen, and I don't think the four kids will happen either. Revenge was mine, of course, since she's not married to the guy she prophesied she would end up with, nor is she happily employed in Colorado; instead she's got two kids by two different fathers, and I believe neither of them is known. I shouldn't be happy about that. In fact, I'm rather apathetic about it. But, anyway, I digress.

So after cleaning myself up and donning my Versace sunglasses, thus becoming exactly the snob that my brother has accused me of being (but a snob with a heart of gold!), I went into town with my mother and had a lovely lunch at one of the two restaurants we always go to when I'm home. My father joined us a bit later, and I got to order cheeseballs--I only can get them here, since they haven't exactly taken California by storm. They're not the Cheetos-style cheesepuff variety; they're deep-fried balls of processed cheddar cheese. Mmm. My parents are clearly regulars, since the waitress knew to bring out an iced tea when she heard my father was coming. There were clearly other regulars there as well, as evidenced by the fact that a seventy-year-old man went back to sexually harass (jokingly, or at least non-threateningly) the waitress and she threatened to rip him some extra nose-holes with the oxygen tubes currently hooked up to his face. Ha!

The rest of the day was uneventful; I spent a bit of time on the phone with someone from work, and also spent a lot of time trying to plot out more of my romance novel. I'm backtracking a bit before starting again; I had started it during the National Novel Writing Month (two years ago! damn!) and didn't take a lot of time to plot then, but I wanted to do some character development before picking up the story again, since I feel that I don't know my characters well enough to write really effective or believable dialogue. Also, I like writing with a fountain pen in a lovely journal, but I don't want to write the whole book like that--scribbling down my character thoughts seems like a nice compromise.

My vacation is just flying by--tomorrow I have to spend cleaning up the detritus of my childhood so that my parents will have an easier time moving the contents of my room to the new house, and then I have wedding stuff on Friday in preparation for the actual ceremony on Saturday. Then, I go back to California! Sheesh. Too bad there's no beach here, and also too bad it's flippin' cold--I'm not used to taking vacations in non-warm, non-exotic locations :) Then again, with the amount of wildlife near the roads, this occasionally feels exotic--I'm probably in more danger of getting killed by an animal here than I was on that safari in South Africa, although I think I would rather have the drama of getting eaten by a lion over the mundane alternative of dying in a deer-induced car accident. Goodnight!