And now the purple dust of twilight time.

A slow day on the raybear Ranch, but I like that "slow" doesn't mean stagnant. I don't think I've mentioned here, but I'm currently in the middle of a NoWriMo, or NOvel WRIting MOnth, and no, it's not the official National NoWriMo, but a break-off version involving me, a few folks at school, and a couple local writers trying to do 50,000 words between July 15th and August 15th. I've been playing the writing coach, sending off e-mails and text messages to encourage writing, following up on word counts. We post every day in a conference how many words we've written. Today was 849. This falls pretty far short from the NoWriMo pacing of 1667 words per day, but exceeds my personal goal as a writer to do at least 500 words a day. The new joke is that it's HaNoWriMo -- how about half a novel, 25,000 words, by mid-August? Especially if they're good words?

I got off track about my slow day. I went to the grocery store in the morning. I had some ridiculous IM conversations, googled lots of random isht, watched the movie Big Bad Love and posted my discussion contribution to the board, I washed some dishes, now I'm working on the laundry that's been sitting strewn on our living room floor for 5, 6 days. I watched a gorgeous thunderstorm out the bedroom window. I found all the Air America programs on podcasts. I wrote a long e-mail to a friend. I tracked down the whereabouts of my financial aid check. I'm wearing my plaid summer pants.

If all my slow days are this good and semi-productive, I'm doing ok.