Have Wheels, Will Travel

Yeah, yeah… I skipped a week. I was returning from Wisconsin to Virginia last Sunday, and had neither the inclination nor the enthusiasm to blog about being separated again. Then, Monday night, I got my consumer buzz on: I spent *hours* at the local Toyota dealership making arrangements to add to our collection of Priuses. Prii? I spent the rest of the week driving myself to and from work, and getting semi-intentionally lost to reacquaint myself with the roads of my High School years. A lot has changed in this neck of the woods since then. As Vonnegut says, “bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.”

I love the Prius. Especially with the upgrades they made in the six model years since we bought the previous one. So I had to give family and colleagues test rides, too, right?

I also had to figure out how to think like an accountant. This class is almost as bad as the business law class for twisting my brain into knots. And I can’t just write my way out of a box into a good grade with this upside-down use of words. I keep fighting with my textbook in an Inigo Montoya-voice: “I don’t think that word means what you think it means…”

This class may be the one that finally breaks my straight-A streak. On the other hand… my sister-in-law IS an accountant, and she was helping me sort some of my confusion tonight, so… I’m fighting for something that really doesn’t mean that much in the end anyway.

😀

The other good thing about regular flights across half the country: I found an enforced time away from everyone that allows me to write. Not that I wrote much, but at least those 250 words got me to 15K, and broke the wordless streak.

I also discovered the Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre Fiction Generator 2000. The plot-bunnies… they MULTIPLY! This one actually sounds enticing to me… and not unrelated to what I’m already doing with the Red Slaves series… (Spin-off, anyone?):

In a coal-powered Soviet Russia, a young collector of oddities stumbles across a dream-inducing drug which spurs him into conflict with a charismatic politician on the rise with the help of a bookish female scholar with mousy brown hair and her closet full of assault rifles, culminating in a fistfight atop a tower.

Your title is: “The Neurotrons.”

So it’s been a busy, productive week for me–even if it wasn’t as productive as I was hoping. And I capped it with a sore throat and fever starting yesterday morning. I’m feeling better now, but have the cough of a strange cold to contend with as we whipsaw through another drastic set of temperature swings. If things continue this way… next month I may have to threaten Virginia with my full-length, down-filled blueberry to make the temperatures stay consistently above freezing.

😉

In the meantime, check out how the other ROW80ers are doing with their goals.