it's getting harder and harder to breathe

If you missed out on voting in the European Photo Contest semifinals, voting has been extended until 10pm CDT Sunday!

Today I drove up to Des Moines again, hoping to find inspiration to get back into the groove with my novel. I only wrote 1500 words (~6 pages), but I think I'm back into it. My favorite trick when I've lost my 'voice' is to write out the last couple of paragraphs in my notebook, and start scribbling away with pen and paper until I get to the point where the ideas are coming too fast and I feel the need to start typing again. It worked again today, although the scene was still slower to write than usual -- but it was a 'love' scene, and those are hard anyway because there are only so many ways you can write them and they all sound rather silly if you think about them at all. But I persevered and triumphed, and it should be relatively smooth sailing from here to the end (fingers crossed).

The day itself was absolutely gorgeous - 84 degrees, somewhat humid, but just the right temperature to encourage me to drive all the way up and back with my windows down and my sunroof open. This wreaks havoc with both my allergies and the dustiness of my car's interior, but I love the feel of the wind while I'm driving, so much so that I would probably get a motorcycle if I could conquer my fear of having a grisly accident and embedding a lot of asphalt in my face. You can tell you're extremely pale when three hours *in a car*, plus three or four hours sitting by a window in a cafe is enough to give you a touch of sunburn -- I'm going to have to work on my tan so that I don't look completely washed out at the SoCal wedding I have coming up in a month.

I came home to another delicious homecooked meal -- Mom made tenderloins for supper (appropriate given the type of scene I was writing today, although my characters' loins are merely tender, not breaded and fried). Tenderloins have to be one of the most amazing foods around, and yet I never see them in California -- maybe cooks out there don't like pounding out slices of pork until they are double or triple their original surface area. Or maybe cooks out there just don't know what they're missing.

After supper, we turned on CBS (of course) to discover that CBS was showing a mixed martial arts prizefight. And my parents are such ardent CBS supporters that, even though my mom doesn't like fights, and even though my dad didn't like the rules, we watched a whole fight between a couple of women. Then my dad switched the channel -- to PBS, the only other station they will watch. We watched the last part of some documentary about Cambodia, then turned back to CBS for the 10 o'clock news -- only to find that the fights continued until ~10:45. But they will not watch other news stations, so we settled in to watch the heavyweight match between Kimbo Slice and James Thompson.

Kimbo Slice had already won my heart with his ridiculous pre-match banter; James Thompson had already lost it when he entered the cage and revealed his hideously malformed cauliflower ear. I knew guys in high school with cauliflower ear, but this was something else entirely -- one commentator called it 'the alien lifeform that used to be Thompson's ear'. But I never expected what ended up happening -- Kimbo Slice won on a technical knockout because he *popped* Thompson's cauliflower ear, sending blood spurting everywhere and messing up Thompson's balance, resulting in an early end to the match. If you want to see something gross, look for a clip of that moment -- popping a cauliflower ear is apparently a really, really bad, messy idea.

So that was another day in the heartland. All y'all city kids are missing out.