your words in my memory are like music to me

2009 is currently two-for-two in terms of lovely days. I messed around on the internet for a bit this morning before grabbing my journal and walking down the street to check out the new Peet's Coffee at the corner of Bush and Van Ness. It's about a million times cleaner than the Starbucks across the street -- but I'm guessing that the coffee chain that will lose the most is Tully's, which has a store a block up at Pine and Van Ness, and likely can't compete with both Starbucks and Peet's on the same block. I sat there for about an hour and came up with some goals for 2009 (I refuse to call them new year's resolutions because that increases the likelihood of failure). One is to cut down on my internet usage, which I am already failing at, but I will have to make it happen if I'm going to be able to write another romance novel while working full time.

When I got home, I washed a couple of loads of laundry while starting to sort through my research papers. I now have several piles of stuff on my floor, but I didn't get to the actual filing stage because I decided to finally categorize my receipts from my writing expenses over the course of the year. I need to talk to my tax person about deducting my writing expenses -- because I am seriously pursuing publication, I can deduct expenses, which includes my fabulous and expensive trip to England and Scotland last spring. Yay. But to do that, I need to have my receipts in order, so I spent the afternoon making a spreadsheet and itemizing things.

Luckily, things got way more fun than a day of accounting would indicate -- I drove down to Palo Alto to have dinner with Vidya (aka Chandlord) and Claudia (aka Santy Claude). It worked out quite well for me -- Claudia was nearly an hour late, but the wait for a table was 45 minutes, and so I got to spend some serious quality time with Chandlord at the bar while we waited. Then, we had a fantastic dinner with much catching-up, before losing Vidya to her supposed need to 'work'. Ugh. But then I got to spend an hour catching up with Claude over coffee, so it was nice that I got some one-on-one time with both of them.

I don't know if I'll see Chandlord again before she leaves, although I may be able to grab a drink with her tomorrow night. But, Claude and I are meeting up with John and Jess for dinner tomorrow, so the fun will continue. And then I only have one more day of freedom until I have to go back to work. Taking two and a half weeks off was quite nice, but it may have been a bad move in terms of keeping up my motivation, since now all I want to do is write, drink tea, see my friends, and sleep (not necessarily in that order, friends!)

If I'm going to make the most out of tomorrow, I should really go to bed. And so, goodnight. I'll leave you with this 'Christmas card' that Tammy sent me -- she thought it was an appropriate combination of my interests in Regency/Victorian costumes and Simon Baker, although it sadly isn't sold in stores: