she wanted everything and nothing now...she wanted everything and more

If I sell my book, the gift I'm going to buy myself is a new chair. I really want one just like the chair I have in my office, but that chair retails for ~$700. However, it's perfect for me -- unlike my current desk chair, which I inherited from Walter, who inherited it from Derek five years ago. This one's fine, but if I'm going to keep spending weekends glued to my desk chair and weekdays sitting in my car trying not to commit an act of road rage, it would be nice for the desk chair to be a bit more ergonomically friendly.

I got a lot done today, but most of it wasn't for the romance novel. I lost an hour this morning because I thought that I had woken up early and so laid around in bed -- but when I finally got up, I found out that my blackberry thought that today was the end of daylight savings time and so set itself back an hour. Despite that, I still got a lot done; I had a nice, long conversation with my parents while cleaning my apartment, and I continued cleaning after getting off the phone with them. After several hours of scrubbing, dusting, vacuuming, and washing, my apartment is sparkling and tidy -- just what the doctor ordered, since a) I'm allergic to dust and the place was getting pretty dusty, and b) I'll have to spend the next few weeks holed up here while I finish the book and start submitting to agents, so having a clean place as a hermitage is essential.

The other big task I accomplished today was filling out my absentee ballot. Between the office elections, the state propositions, and the City of San Francisco propositions, there were three separate ballots. Reading the pros and cons on 34 propositions took awhile, but I fulfilled my civic duty, filled out my ballot, and dropped it in the mailbox. Now I can close my eyes and pretend that the election is over, even though there's still more nine days (or weeks, depending on what ends up being contested). My favorite part of the propositions is how many propositions there were for $1-5 billion bond initiatives, and how every single one of them claimed that the proposition did not raise your taxes. True, maybe the language in the proposition wasn't written to raise taxes -- but how do you think we'll end up having to pay them back? I did vote for the high-speed train from SF to LA since I'm in favor of infrastructure improvements, but in general I laugh when people claim that billions of dollars in bonds won't cost you anything.

I did do a bit of work on the book, but it wasn't writing -- I'm trying to come up with a name for Ferguson's father's dukedom. The problem is that all the v. ducal-sounding names sound ducal because they're actually real dukes -- or, they belong to incredibly small towns, while dukes are usually named after large towns or entire counties (York, Norfolk, Sussex, etc.) I'll clearly just have to get over it and give the guy a dukedom based in a middling-sized town. I've narrowed it down to a few towns on the eastern coast of England -- while I'm not sure exactly where I want that story to go, placing the duchy on a coast leaves room for a possible smuggling element, since there was rampant smuggling during the Napoleonic Wars due to the embargo on French goods. And who doesn't love a good smuggling story?

I suppose I should go to bed; I have to go to work tomorrow, which I'm not completely excited about. But, I'm about a million times more excited about work than I was at this time last year. And tomorrow's my official five-year anniversary at work! Before I dwell on any issues surrounding my life's progress or lack thereof, I think it's time to go to bed.