Big love and thanks to everyone who consoled me after yesterday's tragic tale of doggie woe.

Today has been much, much better so far. So far I've been utterly selfish, making it a total me day. I slept in til 11, then sat around for an hour drinking a pot of green tea and reading a magazine I picked up yesterday. Then I did yoga for an hour before taking a nice, long shower and making myself presentable so I could then make myself scarce for a couple of hours while my mom hosted that church baby shower. I went to Panera (formerly St. Louis Bread Company) for a couple of hours where I hung out sipping Hazelnut coffee and nibbling on an orange scone and working on DL 3.11.

For those of you suffering from writer's block or just trying to get back on the horse and jumpstart your writing groove, let me tell you that nothing works for me as well as getting the hell away from my computer and out of the house and sitting in a cafe with nothing but a nice pen and an empty legal pad to keep me company. The nice pen is important. Fancy pens make you want to write.

Actually, I also had Fizzgigg to keep me company. The weather today was fabulous, at least 70 degrees, so I took him with me and we sat out on the patio. He got bits of scone and his own cup of water and plenty of attention from passersby, not to mention that he got to go bye-bye in the car, so he was in teeny doggie heaven.

I got a pretty good start on the next scene in my episode. I think that's something else that's important re: this particular method of getting unblocked -- not doing too much by hand (unless, of course, that's how you usually write anyway). I just get it started, then I make myself quit while I know what happens next. Then I come home and type up what I wrote and go from there. It's interesting, I find that writing by hand makes it easier to sink into the story and filter out everything else, but then as I don't write longhand very often my hand gets tired and I tend to rush the story. So all in all I'm better off writing via computer. Writing longhand is a great way to get myself going, though. And that's it for the unsolicited writing advice portion of today's entry.

What else? Oh! Things are looking up on the car front. There's really a snowman's chance in Texas of my brother getting a car running tomorrow, but my mom has really been wanting to get herself a new vehicle anyway, and she's looked over her finances and decided that she can afford to do so. So she's going to buy herself a new car and give me her minivan, since it's newer and more reliable than my car anyway. I don't know when this will happen, but it will be soon. So, yay! On the other hand, the trunk of my car has been doubling as extra storage space ever since I moved here, so now I have to figure out where I'm going to put all that crap. Hopefully there's room in the non-habitable portions of the attic, because there's not any more room in the part that I live in. That's really a minor problem, though, and one I'm happy to have to solve.