"you'll be pushing up the daisies in the old boneyard"

Argh. So, we managed to nearly double the amount of time it took me to drive from home to Richmond today. My car screwed up in a new, exciting way, and almost halfway I stopped at a rest area, and Dad insisted, over the phone, that I wait for him to show up, so he could check it out, and drive it to Richmond with me following in his car.

Hell, I enjoy driving my parents' car -- it's a newer model of what I have, its brakes function properly, and it accepts gasoline in an expeditious manner. So I slumped on the slightly chill tile of the rest area -- no seats anywhere -- and read most of a short story.

Then the car acted mostly better, after Dad poured some crap in the tank that's supposed to deal with water in the gas. I dunno. It still doesn't accelerate the way it actually should, but it goes, and that is, traditionally, what I look for in a car.

Incidentally, the magazine I was reading? Weird Tales! It's still (after some stops, and management changes) in print. And they're very honest about how Lovecraft is what gives them a market presence. So, that's another market for me to submit to, and also, I liked all the stories I read it in, whereas a lot of the pieces in Fantasy and Science-Fiction Magazine bugged me. So woo.

Oh, and I tried Pernod over the break, with my dad. He enjoyed it more than I did, though I mean to try again, and make sure I use the proper amount of sugar and water. Anyway.

The thing that actually convinced me to open the update program was that I just started Goldfinger, one of the Fleming Bond novels. It's, er, odd. One chapter in, and I have no idea what Bond looks like, though Fleming indulged in the all-too-common APB (all points bulletin) description with the first character Bond encounters in the second chapter. Super. I mean, at least in fantasy novels they're probably not dressed like any preppie asshole on the streets, yeah -- there's a reason heavy-handed writers might be tempted to stop everything to pile on details about how someone looks, with no reference to any other senses. At least Fleming had a nice sensual description in there: his hands were like "mud packs shaped like hands, or an inflated rubber glove." The mud pack thing could have been something special, but I often slide into multiple comparisons myself, so I can't fault Fleming too much for that.

The narrator/Bond (it's in third person, but so far there hasn't been a difference, really) has only referred to women once, so far, and that as "whatever tart he pick[ed] up that night." Yay, misogyny.

Oh, my parents got me a new phone as a sort-of early Christmas present. Really, we were able to get new phones on our contracts, and mine sucked like a dockside ragamuffin in a Navy town. I'm a consumer whore, and my parents like shiny things, so we have two Motorola Razr phones between us. We had to find a new homescreen background for their phone, so we wouldn't mix them up. Of course, I can't get the pictures from it still, as now I need some proprietary software, or some crap like that. Ah well.