you could be the one for me...and you could be the one that i adore

Today was pretty much a wasted day in the heartland...I awoke with the best of intentions, but instead spent the afternoon engaged in playful arguing with my parents about such subjects as evolution and reincarnation. We then watched Oprah, I took a "break" to check my RSS feeds, and then had dinner with them while watching "Survivor". After dinner, I decided to paint my fingernails (two coats of 'An Affair in Red Square', plus a clear topcoat, which is 2-3x more effort than I usually put into my fingernails, but I'm a lady of leisure right now!) while reading the latest Susan Elizabeth Phillips romance novel.

The book is 'Natural Born Charmer', for those of you who care -- it's another Chicago Stars book, and the hero is the latest quarterback (Dean Robillaird, who replaced Kevin Turner, the quarterback who got with the children's book writer). The heroine is an itinerant portrait painter. The writing was, as usual, excellent, and a lesson in how to write great, snappy dialogue punctuated with visceral scenery descriptions.

However, I'm getting tired of SEP's books, I think. I will continue to read them because it's difficult to find such well-written books, but the Chicago Stars series is basically the same two characters over and over again. The guy is impossibly gorgeous, but more down-to-earth and intelligent than anyone gives him credit for, and is typically working through some major mother issues; the woman acts likes she's tough as nails and doesn't back down for anything, but is hiding a serious sensitive side. There's also the requisite side relationship between two middle-aged characters who are rediscovering what it means to love each other; the adorable but self-conscious preteen; the antagonist elderly lady who is a lot nicer than anyone realizes; and to top it all off, it's set in a small town that is filled with people who are mysteriously able to make the town charming and self-sustaining and possibly revitalized, directly contradicting the facts about how many thousands of small towns are in their brutal death throes.

Anyway, despite that, I would still recommend it, but you'll like it better if you haven't read 'Dream a Little Dream' or 'Nobody's Baby But Mine'. Actually, I'd recommend just reading those two instead.

In other news, I've mentioned that it's a 90-mile drive for me to get to West Des Moines, home of the nearest nice malls, the nearest Starbucks, the nearest Borders, etc. Well, I calculated today, and that's the same as the distance from Palo Alto to Stockton. But, imagine driving ninety miles through virtually nothing, rather than the vast sprawl of unwashed humanity.

On the ninety mile drive to Des Moines, I go through the following towns:

Humeston: population 546
Lucas: 257
Liberty Center: 26
Indianola: 14,227
West Des Moines: 53,945

That's a grand total of 69,064 people.

On the drive from Palo Alto to Stockton, one would go through the following towns:

Palo Alto: 58,598
Mountain View: 70,708
Milpitas: 62,698
Fremont: 210,158
Pleasanton: 67,724
Dublin: 45,000
Livermore: 82,845
Tracy: 75,800
Lathrop: 14,625
Stockton: 289,789

That's a grand total of 977,942 people.

And the other interesting stat - it's 57 miles (from here to Indianola), before I hit my first stoplight. There aren't any stoplights in my entire county. Isn't that awesome?

Okay, that's enough for tonight. Happy Friday!