At any rate,
jai_dit, hcolleen, myrrhianna, chailifesong, and I did the usual writers dinner two hours early, and had writing along with the food. Our waiter was pretty much by himself, with a manager and I think someone cooking. The restaurant was fairly deserted, though. I had been telling myself "Look, you can't start editing Circle of Fire until you get some progress on the fic you wound up co-writing somehow." Today I chucked that out the window, and Circle of Fire now has a new introductory scene, and the second scene is getting shuffled around so it introduces our main characters and their assorted issues a lot more efficiently and effectively.
Traffic downtown was dire. Next time, we'll be arriving at least an hour beforehand, in order to evade traffic and road closures.
myrrhianna was brilliant. We got a reasonable parking space and walked a ways until we had a decent viewpoint. I learned that the "cloudy" setting on the cellphone camera is good for fireworks; "night" is not. Live and learn. There has been a heat advisory. We could all do with some bloody rain. It's been moist out, too. 113°F is not fun. At least I'm not out in it much.
At the end of the fireworks, some fellow had a battery problem. I had jumper cables in my Emergency Bag. Alas, that did not work out so well; the kind of help his truck needed was somewhere after the battery.
myrrhianna directed, and eventually had to help me get the car out of the crazy parking spot I'd wedged it in, in the endeavor to get the two batteries close enough to make the cables reach. Two sopranos and an alto singing Phantom of the Opera bits is very amusing. I tried taking the Phantom's part, since I had the deepest voice of those who know the piece. I had to shift octaves without warning at one point, causing the sopranos to giggle at me.
Last night was drunken karaoke from
jai_dit and me. At one point, I wound up getting up to demonstrate that I could in fact walk a straight line, and wound up doing some form of free-form dance, with lots of twirling, arm movement, and semi-fancy stepping. My calves were under the opinion that I am a large woman who is no longer in high school, and wanted to cramp up. I was of the opinion that I was drunk and could still dance. We eventually compromised, but not before unnerving both myrrhianna and jai_dit. Southern Comfort and coke, yo. I had poured two small cups: one for me (with perhaps a tablespoon of it in there) and one for Myrrh (with easily five times that much). The end result of this was that I snagged several slurps from the other cup to save the drinker from having much too much booze at once. Hundred-proof booze is not something to experiment with getting shitfaced on, because the line between happily drunk and far too drunk is so much smaller by volume. And it keeps absorbing after that threshold has passed. I was definitely drunk. "Endless Love" is a bastard of a song to beat if you're not used to singing the male part and isolating it from the female part, especially if you don't know the song that well. July 4th and 5th are now a bit of a significant anniversary for me. One year ago on July 3rd,
hcolleen mentioned in my electronic presence that she really needed to get a new roommate situation, as the current one was not good for anyone involved in it. I did some quick math and volume estimation in my head, and responded that perhaps she could take up my living room floor for some time. On July 4th, she came over, and we took a look at my studio apartment, and tried to figure out where we'd put what and how. We started around 1pm. By 5pm or so, it was apparent that we'd already decided that it was a go. I took her back home, we packed up some of her stuff, and I went off and watched fireworks. By 1pm on July 5th, she was setting up her computer desk here. We're sharing a studio apartment, people. Ordinarily, doing that without killing each other requires a romantic relationship. (For us, it just requires largely-opposite schedules and plenty of internet.) 