Elaine and I picked up the supplies for her grape arbor today. We got shoots of the standard seedless green variety of grape; Elaine liked some of the wine grapes, but I wasn't sure they were appropriate for a nursery arbor. Besides, they were a lot more expensive. I also sprang for a few optional packages of lady bugs and butterflies. Elaine wants to break into them right away, but the packages say the little critters fare best if kept frozen until their new environment is ready. Trudy's going to help plant the shoots and tie the vines; she says she feels bad about not having her shave ice stand in gear yet and wants to make up for it. We'll see.

The child likes eating grapes at 2am. While I can sympathize with this proclivity, her preference is proving inconvenient from a parental perspective. So, I'm thinking of growing a grapevine along the railing of her crib. I think it would prove a perfect grape arbor.

The last few days have been really exciting for me with regard to my writing. On Thursday, two of my pending publications suddenly became available: an audio version of "Forget Me Not" in Clonepod and A Field Guide to Surreal Botany, the anthology containing my piece about "The Kitty Willow." The authors for the field guide have been following its progress in a bunch of emails from the editors over the last few months, so I've been able to see how gorgeous it is for a while now. It's exciting that other people can finally see it too.

While "The Kitty Willow" isn't a normal story -- (the field guide entries all had to fit a specific structure, but I tried to make as much story-like as possible) -- it is an idea I've been playing with since I was ten. So, it's really nice to see it illustrated by a professional artist and be able to look at what I've been imagining for all those years.

The other exciting progress with my writing is that I finally broke my main character out of the bar she's been stuck in for months in "Otters In Space." The editing process should speed up now since the missing sister I've been editing in doesn't actually appear on stage again until the end of the book.

A friend of mine pointed me toward some links last night: a musical ad for the coming season of Eureka and a new site hosting Dr. Horrible.

I have to hope there's a trend here, because Musical Sci-fi is my favorite genre.

Official first word: nap.

Elaine's been accompanying her attempts to communicate with sounds for a while now, but this is the first time she's pronounced an entire word (not just a first syllable like "dah" while pointing at a dog or duck) in order to communicate an idea. As long as she wants something concrete -- the fruit, bread, or water on the table in front of her, she can verbalize something vague and point. But, I was nowhere near figuring out she wanted to take a nap until she actually exclaimed "nap!"

The fourth Indiana Jones exceeded all of my expectations: it was both better and stupider than I expected. The first few scenes were pretty grim -- overdone Russian villains, dubious Roswell references (I'm always skeptical of Roswell references -- it can be done well, like in DS9, but it's never a good sign), a cheesily smug self-awareness of being an Indiana Jones movie, and an egregious misunderstanding of the nature of magnetism. I was worried. But, pretty much as soon as he opened the refrigerator, everything was uphill. Ridiculous, over the top, and stupid... But, oh so fun. The last few action pictures I've seen had me wondering if I'd outgrown action movies all-together, but now I can see that's not the case. I just don't like action movies that take themselves seriously. Action sequences should be fun. Not serious. And there was very little that was serious about Indiana Jones 4. It was a true movie for the fans -- not the people who complain that Temple of Doom was an abomination, the people who love Indiana Jones movies. All three of them. And, now (only fourteen years after I first heard the rumors at my first Star Trek convention) all four of them. Thank goodness this time the rumors were finally right.

Elaine has a third tooth.