wamp wamp, what it do, what it do

You would never guess that I'm a hermit at heart given the kind of day I had -- and so I must go to bed almost immediately to recover all the social energy I burned on today's festivities. I rolled out of bed around eight, dolled myself up, and drove to Berkeley for the December meeting/holiday party of the San Francisco area romance writers group. The meeting was pretty fun, and the program involved hearing from five or six different members about how they stay inspired while writing. I like to hear about other writers' processes, so that was interesting to me even if it wasn't so immediately useful. I also sat with Grace and Tina, the two women with whom I spent a lot of time in Orlando, and it was good to see them -- Tina's definitely going to next year's conference in NYC and Grace is on the fence, so hopefully I can convince Grace to go.

After the meeting ended and we ate lunch, I drove across the evil Bay Bridge to the even more evil city of sin, where I hung out at Samovar for a couple of hours. I was too full from brunch to have my usual quiche/salad/fruit/scone combo (a fact that was remarked upon by two different wait staff -- clearly I go there too much if they remember what I order), but I did have a pot of white tea, a masala chai, and a scone. I also plotted the next few scenes of Madeleine and Ferguson's book for a couple of hours; the scene I was looking forward to the most (sex at a masquerade ball, ooh la la) may not actually be necessary or useful, so I'm faced with the hard problem of cutting an idea that I love so that I'm more likely to get published. Sigh.

The whole reason I was in the city was to get my bangs trimmed before going home on Wednesday, and Susie did a nice job with them. I then progressed back to my car, paid the parking fee -- and mistakenly answered a phone call from Chandlord, who wanted to hang out. Unfortunately, it took nearly twenty minutes to get out of the garage and around a couple of blocks to pick her up, and after we hung out it took over twenty-five minutes to get onto the freeway. I'm not sure that 40 minutes of hanging out with her was worth 45 minutes of driving, but you take what you can get. She did take me to a cool antique store I'd never been to before, so that was nice. Then, I scurried home, hurriedly changed, and went to the other side of Stanford campus for Chris's birthday party / Chris/Connie's holiday party.

Suffice it to say that I had a truly excellent time; in addition to Chris and Connie, John and Jess, Oniel and Kathryn, Javier, Scott and his girlfriend, and Connie's friend Beth all showed up. I cannot recount it all as I'm falling asleep over my keyboard, but it was lovely and nostalgic and entertaining all at once. So now I'm going to go bed, in hopes of getting up at a reasonable hour tomorrow and chipping away at the massive to-do list I need to complete before going back to Iowa. Goodnight!