This is going to be one of those long, wandering blog entries where I tell you about my day, even if none of the things that happened have anything to do with each other. I am inflicting this on you to attempt to break out of a kind of "writers block" which is really getting me down.

You have been warned.

This morning the parrot did not want to get up, because she'd been up with me until 12:30 at night watching "The Dog Whisperer" and photographing stuff for e-Bay. So I let her sleep in....

went out and ate a bagel for breakfast. I carefully packed my lunch, then, when I was halfway to work, realized I'd left it sitting on the kitchen counter. I do this all the time. This time it was because I was trying really hard to remember to bring my inhaler with me, which I did. However, you cannot eat an inhaler.

I pulled onto the parking lot of the Red Run Deli and called The Hub to ask him to stick my lunch back in the refigerator. He said that he had been vacuuming the floor, which I knew already, because all of the birds were shrieking out alarm calls in the background.

The deli, which had been open last Saturday, was not open today, so I dragged the "open house" signs out of the back of the jeep and struggled up the incline with them under my arm. They're not heavy, they're bulky and they flop over. Also I have to carry my keys and the big mallett that I use to drive the stakes into the ground.

When Friend Will saw it last week, he asked if I had it on hand in the case of a sudden onset of road rage. I replied that you never know, to which his wife, Jenne said that she would pay real money to see me whack somebody up aside the head with a mallett.

By the time I got the stupid signs into the ground I was irritated enough that I COULD have hit somebody up aside the head with the mallett. I was also very, very thirsty, so I decided to go the the Giant in New Town to get an iced tea.

The Giant in New Town really IS a Giant. It's huge. Since I'd never been in there before it took me walking around the perimeter of the store twice before I located the iced tea, and then I didn't feel that I could, in good conscience, spend time picking out something to eat for lunch.

As I was putting my money back in my purse, the cashier held up a sweet potato and asked the two Asian men whose order it was a part of what it was. One of them shrugged. The other one said he didn't know, but that he thought it was some kind of radish. The cashier flicked her light on and yelled to her manager that she needed a price check and to know what the item was. The manager blinked at her and went off to the produce department.

I considered trying to explain to all parties that it was a sweet potato but decided that none of this was my problem and that, if I got involved I might never get to work.

Then I made a the wrong turn coming out of the shopping center and promptly got lost in New Town for ten minutes. Eventually, I located the road to the sales office and, when I got to work, stopped at the gate to put up the multi-colored flags the boss is so fond of. This is something else you have to drive into the ground, so by the time I got into the building all my makeup had sweated off (it was already over 80 degrees outside) and I still hadn't started the balloons. Also, the boss had bagged up the trash but left it in the laundry room, which I'm sure was just an oversight, but it didn't smell too good.

Luckily at 11:00 The Hub showed up with my lunch on his way to a job he was finishing up for a client. He swiped a man sized handful of hard candy out of the refreshments as a "delivery fee" and went to go fix somebody's toilet.

I read my office e-mail. I read that the mayor of Atlantic City, New Jersey is missing. I updated some phone numbers. I did some filing. The boss called to ask me what her schedule looked like. I told her that she was screwed before I fully thought through who I was talking to, but she found this hilarious, though she really WAS screwed in terms of having back to back meeting over at the other property.

No one came in. I refilled the paper clip dispensers. I made sure we had toilet paper. I read all the blogs I read and left one person a comment. I checked on my e-Bays. Nothing was going on.

I hauled out the draft of the novel I'm trying to work on. It's going terribly. I used to write very quickly. I could think of what I wanted to say and say it. But now, when I write down what I am thinking it comes out as something much different in ways that do not seem improvable. In order to not waste paper by throwing out pages and pages of work I am spending more and more time trying to line up, in my head, what I am aiming at on paper. But I find that I am very easily distracted.

At this rate, I'll be going at the pace of my old high school friend, whom we used to call "Mongoo". Mongoo was obviously not her name, and she was, and is, a terribly bright person, but if she was writing fiction it went at something like a few paragraphs a week. She was working on a very good and well thought out historical romance (heavy on the historical, light on the romance) from our freshman year into our softmore year.

Then, one day, on our way to catch our busses, she dropped her books and the loose leaf pages of her work went everywhere! She was so horriifed she just stood there. The wind was blowing: by now it was March. We began to run around madly after the pages while I yelled at people passing by "Hey! Hey! Help us! That's her novel, her story, she's been working on it for over a year!" (Mongoo herself was profoundly quiet in general, and too horrified and embarrassed to say anything now. And besides, I think she was crying) The jocks and the preppies just laughed, but the "heads" all sprang to life and began to chase the pages with us.

The "heads" were the druggies and the girls who were pregnant. Again. They were the boys with long hair who hung out in the student smoking lounge. They wore denim jackets with the confederate flag sewn on the back. The girls were skinny from cocaine and untreated eating disorders, and kept razors in their shoes to use in fights or cut the insides of their arms in the bathroom. The girls wore too much black eyeliner. They used long feathered roach clips as hair ornaments.Their boyfriends were men, the female teachers never looked at them and some of the male teachers looked at them too long. People thought the boys were criminals and the girls were ruined. But these were the people who helped Mongoo get her novel back.

And since she, ever careful, numbered all the pages, one boy put all that he could find back in order, smoothing them out against the front of his spiral notebook with the pot leaf drawn on the front. He had on a denim jacket with the words "Lynard Skynard" done in fancy script in magic marker on the back.

He handed the pages to me since he sort of knew me. We were on the same bus. "What's it about?" he asked, shyly.

"It's, um, a love story." I said. "Who's Lynard Skynard?"

"Huh? Oh. A band. A really good band. You know, classic."

We parted ways. Mongoo got back all but two pages, and she even caught her bus, which was a miracle, since her bus driver was some kind of maniac who always flew off the parking lot like he was being chased by banshees.

The next time I got my allowance I went to the record store. There was an album my Lynard Skynard: the one with the song "Simple Kind of Man" on it. I looked at the album cover. The band members all looked like heads. I bought the record, and hid it from my parents. I played it when they weren't home. The kid was right. It was a good band.

But The Hub still does not believe I ever owned a Lynard Skynard album.

The boss came in and asked me to go to Kinkos to have some copies of some plans made. I did this gladly to get out of the office. The copies had to be made on one of those plotting type of machines. The paper ran out half way through. I went over the self printing photo processor and dug my camera out of my purse. I printed out the baby flamingo and the snuggling hippos, and the picture of The Hub at Hodads in Ocean Beach. I tried very hard not to remember that there used to be a copier like that at the engineering office where I used to work in Massachusetts. I try very hard to never remember that place. ("I guess you are just enchanting to men." he said. Who talks like this? Nevermind to a married woman - I mean what kind of person talks like this at all?) I printed out the picture of the camel. The garden at the polynesian restaurant. I wouldn't even look up until the man with the island accent said, "All set, Ma'm" I smiled and paid and left, cool and calm.

When I got back to the office the afternoon appointment hadn't shown up. Somebody's contract was all screwed up because we didn't have updated numbers from the home office for options. We speculated about the construction project down the street. A lady came in and the boss gave her a tour.

After work I decided to go to Trader Joes to buy some groceries. I stopped at the book store first. I walked around until my feet began to hurt. This is what's going on in the bookstore: Both sides of the political extreme have new, vitriolic books out about how the other is evil. Oprah has a book out about how to live your life. Dogs remain popular.

In science fiction the world is being taken over by computers, while elsewhere people with unpronouncable, vaugely Celtic names are practicing arcane and long winded magic over volumes and sequels to volumes. Somebody's wearing a hood. Somebody's wearing a helmet. Somebody's wearing a robe with runic symbols on it. Somebody's riding a dragon. In paperback, first time in print, some woman in an iron bra is fighting off a sabre tooth tiger. Meanwhile, some other woman "learns that she is a true submissive" (actual quote) but still winds up having to save the world. SF is starting to get on my nerves. Men who create female characters think they think about sex all the time and women who create male characters think they think about honor / rules all the time. If it weren't for Terry Prachett I'd be afraid the whole section would sink under it's own self important weight.

Meanwhile, over in romance, vampires, werewolves, and sometimes space ailiens have become romantic heros. I'd like to introduce the vampire to the true submissive and see what would happen. Lunch, I guess. No wonder I can't get anything on paper. Good Lord.