Our ongoing effort to cook at home is still going well. Tonight I made a crab-tomato-basil bisque, served with some nice crusty bread, and Heather made tasty pear-currant tarts. We got ingredients for some other dishes, too (lime-crab-avocado salad! chicken with ham and orange zest! Some crazy chicken-asparagus dealie Heather's going to make!). So it should be a nice week for dining, with plenty of leftovers for a couple of nights if the thought of cooking fills us with cataclysmic dread.

We've both been good about writing, too. I did a couple of pages of the Bridge novel yesterday (though mostly I cleaned the house, organized my finances, and engaged in various other forms of writing-avoidance behavior). Today was much more productive -- I did an outline for the first four chapters and wrote about 1500 words. I'm pleased so far. And Heather's making great progress on a fabulous new story for a project she's been invited to. We went to a café over on Grand Ave. this morning, sat at the window, and worked diligently side-by-side. Nice.

And, hey, Heather updated her journal, for the first time in nearly a month. Whoo!

Another good thing: I got a check from Asimov's for my upcoming story "Bottom Feeding," so look for that sometime soon.

Last night we went to see Kinsey at the Parkway. It was a pretty good movie, made better by the fact that we were at the Parkway, my favorite theater, where we kicked back in comfy chairs and drank pints of pear cider while we watched.

Of course, there are bad things in life as well. Our front door just started sticking, so now we have to shove it to get it closed. Our car has a mysterious leak, which caused the back footwell to fill with water during the recent torrential rains. We've now duct-taped every conceivable entry-point for water, but we won't know whether that worked until it rains again. Since this is the rainy season, that should be, oh, any hour now. On the way to the grocery store today we picked up a nail in one of our tires, and found ourselves in the Safeway parking lot with a flat. There was, entirely coincidentally, a Triple-A guy in his towtruck at the service station a block away, and he was super-nice, came over and jacked up our car and put the spare on, didn't even want to see our Triple-A card -- he just told us to be nice the next time we encountered someone who needed our help. (I'm normally capable of changing a tire myself, but we have a fixture for spider spikes on the tire, which covers the lugnuts, and I didn't have a socket wrench to remove the spider spikes; fortunately Mr. Triple-A was there). Alas, getting to our spare tire required opening our trunk, and once open, our trunk is loathe to close again -- several months ago it mysteriously stopped latching; we think the latch fixture is broken. Much to our surprise and delight, after we'd opened it to get the spare tire, the trunk closed and latched properly, to which Heather said "It's an ill wind that blows no good." But our good wind was only a passing breeze, for the next time we tried to close the trunk, it wouldn't work. I have no idea what's wrong with it. It's maddening. Anyway, we drove the block to the service station, and ten minutes and $20 later had our flat tire patched and put back on. As far as catastrophes go, it could've been worse.

So that's the weekend. Much the more good than bad.