Tuesday

I've been watching Card Captor Sakura since Friday, when I pulled out the first six or seven dvds to lend to Kristin. I watched the first six episodes before lending those dvds to her at writer's night, and then afterwards I just started watching from the next dvd that I had in the series.

It's a very long series and to my mind is one of the most creative and interesting magical girl series I've ever seen. I'm now past the point where the first movie takes place, and past the point where Sakura has collected all of the cards, and in many ways the series only gets better beyond that point. New characters appear, with unknown motives and mysterious pasts, and the series begins to deal more seriously with some of the interpersonal relationships and to confront some of the tougher questions involved. For a series that is mostly happiness and light-hearted friendly kid's stories, it really holds up very well over a pretty long series -- 70 episodes and 2 movies.

My goal this week is to write on one of two stories every day. I feel as if I've already failed, but in fact I wrote quite a bit on my new story yesterday morning, so while it's been 24 hours since then, I still have time to get some writing done on it today. I'm still trying to figure out exactly when the story should start -- I pretty much know what the central theme is, but trying to figure out where it starts and where it ends is more difficult.

Sanctuary

It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere, I'm all alone, more or less...

Well anyway it's cold and I'm alone in my warm apartment. My apartment isn't actually all that warm -- I keep the thermostat at between 60 and 70 in the livingroom and the bedroom, and I keep the one in the study turned off. But it feels very very warm when I first walk in from the cold.

Daniel Amos has a song called Sanctuary, and I was thinking of it tonight, because of the cold, and the warmth of my apartment. My sanctuary is probably pretty messy to some -- one of the people that came to take my boxes last Saturday said something about how I had a lot of unpacking/putting away work left to do -- but to me it's already pretty tidy. It's much tidier than my old apartment was, and much tidier than it was just after I'd moved in. I keep doing the dishes and doing laundry and trying to straighten up and organize better, so I think I'm doing okay so far. ^_^

My sanctuary has a nice television that I rarely watch, but has a dvd player that I use a lot. It has a nice couch with two comforters and a pillow so I can lay down and watch anime or movies. It has a cookie jar with cookies in it in case I want one. It has a cake that I made last night, because I'm trying to cook a lot more, partly because I don't have a microwave oven yet, and partly because I want to save money and not eat out as much. Only the cake I made last night called for three eggs, and I only had two, so I added extra vegetable oil, and... well, it's okay, but I'm sure it would have been better if I'd made it the riht way.

My sanctuary has a warm bed and a radio alarm clock to wake me up. It has computers and a working network and internet service, for which I just found out I owe $154.00, $99.00 of which was for installation. This despite the last statement that I got in the mail from them saying that I had a -45.00 credit. Hrmm.

My sancutary has two bathrooms, both of which I use because sometimes one is closer than the other. It has two showers, which have matching shower curtains, but of course I only use one of them.

My sanctuary has bookshelves with books and cd shelves with cds, and dvd shelves with dvds, and I still have more books to put somewhere. I have a closet full of comics and lp records and cassette tapes that I probably need to get rid of.

I have a warm jacket but after arriving to work or arriving home, my fingers are always cold. Generally I don't wear gloves, even though I have a pair. They're in the glove compartment in my car -- where else would they be? This way I always know where they are, and they're always really cold so that I don't want to actually wear them.