wait...what's the sense in life?

I really wanted to write my romance novel tonight, but I just couldn't get into it. I should have gone to Starbucks--in fact, I had walked in the door before deciding that it was too cold and that I would rather write from home while wrapped in one of my oversized Irish sweaters. Mistake--I instead spent a couple of hours looking up peerages and British nobility successions on Wikipedia. Useless, I know, since everyone knows that a good romance novelist just makes up titles with reckless abandon, and I know enough about the nobility to be able to fake 95% of the book without doing any research at all. However, I did learn that there are lots and lots (relatively) of unmarried dukes, earls, or heirs to dukedoms and earldoms floating around, which was interesting. I may have to move to England and lie in wait for one of them, since I think I would be in a better frame of mind for romance novel writing if I was a duchess (or even a countess or marchioness--although I prefer 'marquesa' or 'marquise', but beggars can't be choosers).

So, tonight was frustrating, but rather than take my usual cure for frustration, I'm going to go to bed instead of staying up until four a.m. reading a book. I have a meeting at eight a.m. tomorrow, followed by a full day of activities, so I don't want to be tired and cranky. I still don't have my replacement contacts, so I look tired and cranky anyway, since I only wear my glasses when I'm tired and cranky, and I've now been wearing them for almost five days straight. Ugh.

All this talk about being tired and cranky is actually making me tired and cranky, so I should stop. In other news, I ordered bottled ink today from pendemonium.com; they're located in Fort Madison, Iowa, and so I could theoretically go to their real live store when I'm home, but Fort Madison is several hours away from my house, so ordering the ink online seems easiest. It's also riskier, since it's hard to trust ink reviews and online color swatches, so I'll just have to hope that colors like 'saguaro wine' and 'cyclamen rose' are as lovely as the purveyors claim that they are. I'm excited, though; bottled ink is clearly the next step down the path to complete and utter eccentricity, and this is one step that I am happy to embrace. By the end of the year, when I'm sitting in a cafe in a ridiculously large sweater, with vibrant ink stains on my hands and a generally disheveled appearance, I will have achieved my goal of appearing to be a crazy seventy-year-old. Yay.

Okay, that's all you get from me tonight; I'm going to bed. Not that my bed is particularly subdued either, since the current bedspread is a warm orange color, and the fabric is covered in tiny mirrors. It's luscious. As you can tell, I can't wait to be an eccentric old woman; then, all of my strange tendencies will be seen as lovably acceptable, rather than dangerous character flaws that render me unattractive to the vast majority of my male counterparts.

Actually, Tammy and Shedletsky were trying to convince me last night that it's a good idea to post a personals ad on Craigslist looking for someone who is willing to dress up as a Scottish earl--the personal could include language as 'ownership of a velvet cloak and command of Scottish brogue a plus'. I don't think that this will get me exactly the type of guy that I want, but you never know. Tonight is not the night for me to write that particular ad, though; it will require several years of complete and utter boredom before I reach that point. Goodnight!