Then again, I'm due to run five miles today, so that probably wouldn't be the best idea.

Had a decent birthday... hung out with my friend Jodi and ate barely adequate Italian food (she recommended the place and then kept apologizing over and over and over about how bad the place had become since the last time she'd eaten there). It was entertaining, though (the restaurant, and well, just the evening itself), and I was glad to just have been dragged out of the house. Plus, she bought me ice cream afterwards, so that made it all good.

Soaked for about an hour afterwards, read for a while, and had an argument with my cat. I think he got seriously worried that I was in that much water... he leaned up to look at me a couple of times, and then he sat just outside the bathroom door and meowed at me every few minutes. If I didn't say anything back to him, he meowed again, louder. I'm not sure what he would have done if I didn't answer... drag me out with his claws? (Actually, as big as the little bastard is, he could probably do that.)

If you haven't already, go look up Epitaph of a Small Winner. Phenomenal. The guy's life isn't even that dramatic, or at least no more dramatic than the average person's is, but the things he says about it are stunning. Now, I'm just finishing up The Regulators (still want to see how it ends, but I should have known... it was definitely written in his crappy nineties period (anything he wrote between Dolores Claiborne and Wizard and Glass I thought really really blew.)

Oh, and I rediscovered the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard. I read all (or at least most) of the pastiche novels when I was a skinny geeky kid (rather than a filled out geeky adult) but I used the excuse of the new definitive edition of the stories, republished as they originally were in the '30s, to reread them again. Looking at them as someone who's read a ton of literature since then... well, there are a few writing flaws, but they're actually pretty good, tight stories, with more going on than sword-slashing and bodice-ripping. Plus, I've working out some new ideas for my next writing project and I think these stories will help get the nuggets out of my head.

And I've been putting it off long enough... I've got to finish my fourth-draft revision of "Ward B." Still need to try to publish this damn thing. Anyway, wish me luck.