Found my notes!! (1020 words)

Well, it only took four hours to make my quota this time, and most of the goofing off I've been doing is food and botany neepery in rasfc.

I didn't really stop because I'd met my quota. I stopped because I have finished off a chunk of business and I have to rethink the next bit of business. It's not that I don't know everything that happens, but I have to get the telling right.

I found two of my Afterwar notebooks and they did help some but some of the notes are not in those. Somewhere there's an absolutely ragged Japanese notebook with a sheaf of doodles, maps, charts, and squiggles stapled in it. I'm very glad to have what I do, though. I was right: my original names were much better than the ones I made up to take their place. Though Emma prefers Benavente to Lenker Martín. She says Lenker Martín makes her think of the villainess in "The Fifth Element." I can't see it, and I'm ignoring her objections. The other thing that was confirmed by the discovery of my notes is that I have not forgotten most of the plot details. And I have made some improvements, like Afifah, the child Pablo catches trying to pick up construction workers, and Jun, a little boy who has tossed off a remark I will build on later. And it's much easier, I see, to foreshadow things that have already been written once(as opposed to just dreamed up.


On another note, I just want to remember this: the most interesting music at the Bollywood site is by Arasalum Ayyappan T L Maharaja, in the Tamil section.

Parking.

Okay, so parking is a nightmare. We live in an urban neighborhood in California, and public transportation doesn't cut it, and so people own too many cars, and parking is horrible.

Tonight, for example, I had to leave my car in the street, back the nice fellow's car out of the driveway, drive my car deep into the driveway, and then put the nice fellow's car back in the driveway. I couldn't just park in front of his car. That would mean that he would have to do a similar maneuver at five in the morning, which is not fair, because he has to have the car with the University parking permit. Okay. That's a mere irritation of modern life.

But. We pay $60 a year for the privilege of maybe getting to park in our neighborhood. We have had a parking permit system shoved down our throats by the I've-got-mine yuppie scum who have come to dominate the landscape, and the way it works is you have to buy a permit, but it doesn't entitle you to park. You still have to fight it out with the other poor saps on your street. Parking, by the way, is not regulated between 8 pm and midnight -- which is when the parking problem mostly is, because that's when the neighbors all come home. At the beginning of the program, we were told that our permits were only good within two blocks of our residence, but I can't find that now so I don't know if they dropped it. I was damned well hoping that I'd get a ticket for parking three blocks away when it was too crowded to park any closer, so I'd have something ridiculous to fight.

So the city makes nearly $40,000 a year off it, but parking is no better, not one jot better, and I still have to do the Organ Grinder Monkey Dance to park my car.

Edit: $60, not $605.

In other news: it's raining, the dog is a wimp, and I brought in over $650 net for the band at Bingo tonight.