greygirlbeast | "...moments before it spat its rain down on me."

Everything Outside the house is white, except the sky, which is the shade of grey just before white.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,692 words on Chapter 4 of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, bringing me to manuscript page 169.

Thanks to everyone who left comments yesterday. They were much appreciated. It helps. It actually fucking does.

After the writing, we had dinner and waited on the coming storm. I read. We played WoW.

Shaharrazad and Suraa are mired in the interminable morass of Vashj'ir. If you'd have told me that Blizzards would release an expansion that includes questing on a sunken continent and that I'd hate it, I'd have called you a liar. After all, how can you fuck up a sunken continent? How can you make anything so cool so uncool, or anything so inherently exciting dull? Well, I'm not sure, myself, but clearly Blizzard found a way. I've done 128 quests of the 150 in Vashj'ir, and its been one long, unimaginative, unrelenting blur of tasks that really don't seem to have much at all to do with Deathwing or the Cataclysm. There was a funny cut scene last night, involving getting an elder-god octopus thing stuck on your head and the chaos that ensues, but that's been about it. I liked the Mount Hygal stuff, but Vashj'ir blows, and, at this point, we're just trying to grind through it as quickly as we can.

I was finally able to try Mexican Coke last night. That is, Coca-Cola bottled in Mexico. Like that bottled in Canada, it's free of high-fructose corn syrup. Here in the US, where the government's corn subsidies help to insure that everything is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, Coke stopped tasting like Coke a long, long time ago. HFCS was first used in Coke in 1980, and became the sole sweetener in 1984. Last night, finally, I tasted Coke as it tasted when I was a kid. And I was not incorrect in my recollection that it used to taste much better. We don't drink it often, but now that we have access the the stuff bottled in Mexico, we'll drink it more often (even though that does enlarge my personal carbon footprint a bit).

Last night, we also watched Dario Piana's Lost Boys: The Thirst (2010). Ignore that other piece of crap, the one released in 2008, purporting to be a Lost Boys sequel. The Thirst succeeds everywhere the first attempt at a sequel fails. It's fun, hilarious, sexy, smart, has a reverence for the spirit of the first film, and doesn't make the mistake of trying to upstage Kiefer Sutherland. Plus, it parodies paranormal romance by inserting the archetypal PR author into the mix. Right down to her tramp-stamp tattoo. Naturally, fittingly, she dies horribly. Corey Feldman is a delight, and Casey B. Dolan is utterly adorable. See this film.

The snow began in earnest about one ayem or so. I went out in it for a bit around 3:30. The night sky was glowing orange-white, the soft filter of streetlights and the blizzard, and there were no sharp edges left anywhere in the world, so far as I could see. Everything was all muted to a gentle, swirling haze. Weather like heroin, both needle sharp and gentle in a single breath. Beautiful. I admit I wanted to lie down and let it cover me, and sleep. There are a few photos behind the cut: