To my dinner companion: I was right. Pralines are candies that contain nuts - not the nuts themselves.

(I was completely spoiled by having some heavenly ones in Savannah years ago. Now I'm a praline snob as well as a chocolate snob.)

Books: Well, another chapter was born tonight. It's going to take some research to get it right - I don't have a first draft of this one. I just need to add some space between the two chapters I'm working on now, and realized in a discussion tonight that I hadn't explained a particular concept very well. Here's my chance - now I need to do some research on it so I don't sound foolish. Wish me luck. (But I confess most kinds of research are a lot easier with the Internet around. I guess I can't whine about it too much.)

Ok, I have been remiss. One of these days I'll blog about the war.

But not today. Today I'll tell you that our first flowers bloomed. Crocusses. Two white, one yellow in the front "yard." (The patch between the sidewalk and the street.) The tulips are coming.

Books: I'm not feeling too bad about the progress I've made lately. I'm not exactly screaming through this second draft, but now that I'm past the patch where I lost the digital versions of the first draft - I'm getting back on a roll.

Lovely weather for a war

er, authorized military action

and

happy St. Patrick's Day

it's a surreal, surreal world

Books: progress... is... slow...

I got caller ID at home a few weeks ago. I know, I'm such a gadget geek you would think I would have gotten it a long time ago. Not so. It was an expense I could live without. I only have it now at home because it came free with my latest phone company switch. (You don't have to convince me of its usefullness in business. I took a call today from a salesman who began by asking me if I reported to so-n-so - who actually reports to me. It went downhill from there and included an attempt to mock me for not knowing his obscure company with no introduction.... but I digress.)

I thought I'd like having it at home since it really annoys me when someone calls and then doesn't leave a message. Sarah can attest to that. I've called her several times just to ask if she called me. She'll be happy to hear that won't be happening anymore. Now I have a little box that tells me - if it can - who just pinged my house. This is nice.

What I hadn't anticipated was how depressing it would be to come home and find that no one has even bothered to try to call me in two days. Apparently all my friends have been trained to call my cell phone or send me e-mail. I must be doing something right.

Books: mmmm... changing point of view - again.

Warning: back end work in progress. The site may be a little funky for a few days.

Don't let that stop you from visiting, though!

So the Smart girl is home safe and sound - that's good. Sometimes it's nice to see a happy ending in the real world.

I just really really hope they never make a "made for TV movie" of her story. Please - I beg of you. Don't do it. It will come out all wrong, I promise.

Books: No happy endings in my book right now - just more scheming. I'm worried the chapters I'm working on now are, in fact, slow and boring. That's what I need beta testers for! Comment from one of them, just in today: "It's a tightly knit story. Not all character have a clear cut background, or even appear to, but that's the way it shouldbe. They're evolving nicely."

Right, yeah, it's been a few days. Sorry. Mega busy. Mega tired. Last night I actually fell asleep while attempting to blog. It's one of the dangers of owning a laptop. "I'll just go work for a bit before I go to sleep...."

Annoying billboard of the week: for Match.com - it says "8 million possibilities" and it has a cute picture of a busy freeway drawing arrows between cars - presumably to indicate potential mates. Here's my problem with it.... I think they got the "8 million" number from the population of Chicago and surrounds. That's fine. I'll buy that. Six million here, a few more million in suburbs. Whatever.

But...

Aren't the vast majority of mate-seekers only interested in those of the opposite sex? So even at its greatest - aren't there just about 4 million possibilities for me - driving by on the road. And how many of the people in those cars are married and thus... presumably... not open to any possibility of a relationship.

But wait - maybe they're trying to say that 8 million people have signed up for their service, and the number actually has nothing to do with the picture of people driving down a freeway. Ok, I can buy that. But... wouldn't that imply that they have 8 million men signed up to their service? Let's be generous and say they have an equal number of women. Wouldn't that mean they had 16 million people in their database? Isn't that just about the total number of all AOL subscribers - the single largest ISP in the US?

I think any way you try to rationalize it - the billboard is wrong.

Unless of course it's a picture of all 8 million of their subcribers on a freeway driving to a "Singles Convention" and each of their subscribers brought along a single unsubscriber as a passenger.

Bad advertising. Bad. And here I've gone and given it attention, thus perpetuating it and proving its effectiveness. Oh the irony.

Books: retyping, rewriting, rearranging. I suppose this is why I wrote a first draft - so I could completely change it around in rewrites. I hate people who can publish the first draft of their novels. Hate, loathe and abominate them.

More snow today. Finally it feels like winter!

Books: One of my readers reported in about the last segment I sent out. She said she wants more. Mostly good. Had a few minor issues (I think) that can be fixed along the way or with a sentence here and there. I'm still a little concerned about the length. She's read almost half of it - and she's at page 325 or so. Somebody tell me 800 pages isn't too much for a first novel....

If I'm not ill for one reason or another, I actually enjoy shoveling snow. You can see tangible progress from your work. It makes a huge difference in useablity issues (if you liked that one, check my summer posts about the weeding bug/feature analogies). And it's really satisfying to work hard in the cold then come inside where it's warm to curl up in front of a good fire... or tivo. Whichever is handy.

We're getting our first real snowfall of the winter. It's making me crave skiing. Or even snowboarding. I dreamed about that last night.... snowboarding....

Books: It's kind of hard to believe I'm still stumbling over chapters that have to be retyped because they were burgled over a year ago. What was I thinking, skipping these? And better yet - how did I manage to forget so completely that this still needed to be done? What other things in my life have I procrastinated to the point of oblivion?

I'm tired. Work wears me out. I may not be doing heavy lifting, but I still come home beat.

Books: I gave one of my readers another section of my book today. I keep forgetting to send it to the others. I'm sure that won't last too long. They're all pretty good about hasseling me for more chapters.

Sarah's insisting that I read a book called "Lamb: the gospel according to Christ's childhood pall Biff." It's a clever book on many counts, but he pushes almost everything to extremes, which ruins the realism which is what I like most about the book. He's a pretty good writer mechanics-wise. I'm jealous of that.