Nothing much at all going on in Greg-land.

My parents are on vacation all this week, and I think we have a vague notion of doing some things. I want all of us go see Spiderman 2, so that should be soon. And it turns out that some crafts place within driving distance has some item from the court of Louis XIV just sitting around, so I think we're gonna try to go there. I'll take pictures, probably.

In books I've been going slowly. I finally finished a book of Lovecraft short stories that I started in my senior year of high school. (I'll be a senior in college come August, for any strangers out there.) The last story, called "The Shadow Out of Time" is the worst Lovecraft story I've ever read. It's everything that he ever did wrong. Most of it is an attempted illustration of his power over psychology. The ending is not only predictable (which can oftentimes be one of the author's strengths) but the item over which the narrator obsesses over is ultimately insignificant compared with everything else in the story. Not the story I would have ended a collection with, I tell you.

I'm also reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces in earnest now. It's fabulous, as I expected. I'm on a break from Quicksilver, but I still love it dearly. I'll get to it soon.

I'm reading less than the rest of break so far because I'm into a lot of video games again. I dabbled in a bit of Morrowind, as an earlier post already mentions. I've also taken up with Sonic Adventure 2: Battle once again. I cleared the two Emerald Hunt levels (Knuckles and Rouge) that had stymied me before, and shot through several levels on both story modes since. This was brought about by my (finally!) purchasing Sonic Mega Collection, which I adore. I played most of these games, and in fact have a bag containing many of the original cartridges in the room where I play (Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic 2, and Sonic & Knuckles). Of course there's still Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga to play as well. So between games, writing, and reading I have a good deal to do.

I've also taken up walking again, as my knee (that troubled me for months on end with hideous pain and frequent blowouts) is doing much better. Today I even saw a skunk and her three to five babies cross fifteen yards in front of me. If I had the presence of mind my dad keeps about him, I would have (as he later suggested) tossed a rock at the mother and thieved one of the babies, as they were young enough to possibly tame. (If you don't know, my dad will chase after any animal. I've watched him run down cats, foxes, raccoons, and snakes - I've heard the stories of when I wasn't there too, featuring two faun deer among other things. He actually had a hold on one deer's hoof and let go to avoid hurting it.) There was also a very dead deer, providing food for many bugs. The remnants of its chest looked like a moving skin, really. Several buzzards were patroling the area as well. I had to cover my nose with my handkerchief the stench was so powerful.

I'm quite taken with how incredibly bright the moon is just now, and am sad that when it was absolutely full we had too much cloud cover here to see it properly. Last night I took a book out and read under the moonlight, just for fun.

I received the short story I mentioned earlier in the mail several days ago; Dr. Blythe (my creative writing teacher from last semester) printed the copy I emailed him, proofread it, and mailed the whole thing to me. That was terribly nice of him, as I offered to mail him a hard copy with a SASE. He had a few comments about the beginning, which sticks out from the story a bit and is rather confusing - I'm still deciding if I should clarify or leave it as is. Of course I know leaving it a bit confusing is risky, but I still think it works. I'll probably do a bit of both. SuperOpie also read it, and hopefully I'll see him in the coming week and we can discuss it. Also, we still have much of The Waste Land to cover (nudge nudge). My working title for the short story, by the by, is "Feet in the Grave." It's a bit too humorous for the thing, I think, but I'm always bad with titles. I still haven't named my satire, after all.

Here's a bit of a writing update before I go: I just got to page 139 of my satire. That's 39,706 words. Woo, and such. I read a week or so ago that theoretically, the average modern novel is somewhere around 60,000 words. So according to that, I'm half done. But I'm not really using that as a scale. But it's still a lot of work I've done. Still a lot to do, though.