October 21, 2002

OMG!

1:23pm : There has been a shooting at Monash University. I never thought this would happen in Melbourne. I have called the 4 friends that go there, and only got in contact with one of them. The reports are 2 dead, 8 injured. i am worried sick

1:27pm 2nd friend has checked in. only two to go now. Apparently there are 2 dead and 8 wounded.

3:10 Last of my friends have checked in. I am still terribly concerned for others i know that go there, but it was in the ecconomics section - and i don't know anyone who studies that.

Thank u to all who msg's me.

---

done much earlier ......

It's good to be back at my desk this morning..
AAAhhhhhhhhhh.. A peaceful break from my hectic weekend. It's good to be able to sit here and node quietly, without interruption.

My weekend started Friday night, after work. I went to check on beehive I had moved from the compost bin. Swollen handed (that only went down this morning) and ankle (still a little inflamed this morning) I put my gear on and checked them out. They seemed to have moved house into the hivebox, which is good, although a lot of bees were still outside the box, which leads me to think there isn't enough room inside the box. I plan on going round to the guy's house tonight to check on them.

The rest of Friday night was then spent food shopping with GF and flatmate. We then watched Mad Max - Beyond Thunderdome. Pretty kewl, but very dated.

Saturday morning I spent struggling with the front lawn and a lawnmower. Teach me to leave it till the grass is knee high before I decide to cut it .. I had to do the old, cut it three time, on consecutively lower settings on the lawnmower, before it got close to looking 'normal' again. The afternoon was at a friends bbq, where I happily took control of charcolising all the meat, for a few hours.

Saturday night. ERG. DVD movie - IRIS - interesting movie. Girls: you'll like this. Guys: RUN screaming, go walk the dog, visit your mother, clean your room, shave, SOMETHING.. you will not enjoy this.. but come back to the female u set down to watch this, as you can certainly win 'points' with the amount of "there there *pat pat*" attention you can lavish upon here after the movie... YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

SUNDAY - OH the joys! This was to be the crown day. The Australian motto GP was down at Philip island. I had managed to wrangle some work down there - doing surveys for some tourism mob - and so had free entry and a cark parking pass (always a bonus). I knew that I would have to work fairly hard in the morning, but I figured it was all worth it.

Getting up at 5:43am (43 minutes AFTER the alarm was meant to have gone off... bloody thing) having a 3 second shower, waking the other person in my house coming along, and hustling out the door, I headed to Frankston to pic up the 3rd person I was taking. I set a new land speed record, from Noble Park to Frankston, only 11 minutes, I think more from the total lack of anyone else being alive and awake at 6am Sunday morning, than from speeding (I sat about 10 km/hr above the speed limit). Having bundled friend No. 2 into the car, we then lit off to Philip Island. We had to be there by 7:15 am, and thankfully got there by 7.11am. Briefed and prepared we hit the racetrack and started surveying people at 7:37am.

This went on for hours.

At 2pm I had barely completed 80 surveys (the things was 6 pages long, and 40 questions! it was a monster...) and I began to worry that I wasn't going to get time to see the main race, which was, after all, what I had come down to see. I went back to the temporary office that was our base, handed in what surveys I had left, and was shocked to discover the guy saying, 'Thanks! you've done really well! ' and pissing us off. We had done enough - HURRAH!

It was now that I discovered that I had to take a few other people back to their cars - this was ok, but I wanted to watch the race beofre dropping them back. They implied this was ok, so I wandered off to watch. They bitched at me. They moaned. "We're ganna get caught in traffic", "everyone will try to leave at the same time", " you know we could leave now..." ARRRGGGGGGG!

Stupidly with only 4 laps to go, I gave in and headed back to the car park, happy 'friends' in tow. We left the carpark ahead of everyone, and I took them back to their cars at the house they had stayed overnight at. THEN I had to wait, to let ALL the traffic past. YUP. *I* ended up getting caught in it anyway. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

I managed to find out who won though - ROSSI! - well done!

Well, it's been a year since I joined the e2 community. And I've got to say that this place has become one of the true joys in my life. No matter what's going on in The Real World ^TM I can always come here and feel that I'm a part of something very, very cool.

I can come here and get that sweet rush of instant feedback, knowing within minutes and sometimes seconds of posting a writeup that someone's read my words and appreciated them. Such a wonderful far cry from The Real World ^TM of publishing, in which you write something, print it out, send it off to an editor ... and wait. And wait. And wait some more. And when months (and sometimes years) have passed, you get a form letter: Sorry, this does not meet our needs.

Well, that doesn't meet a writer's needs, now does it? The need to be appreciated? The need to know you've been read? Even the downvotes are better than the cold outer-space silence you so often get as you send your work around.

How did I get here?

A year ago, some other Columbus writers and I were trying to warm our writerly souls a little bit and perhaps drum up some anthology sales. We held a reading at a little bookshop in Yellow Springs, OH. My housemate /jen brought zot-fot-piq with her to the reading. He heard me read my story "Through Thy Bounty" and was apparently quite impressed with it.

"I'm an editor with this website, only it's not really a ezine," he told me. "People post stories there, and I think they would really enjoy it. It's at www.everything2.com."

"A website that runs stories but isn't a ezine?" I wondered to myself. "What the heck kind of place is that?"

So I came. I gazed in wonder. I read the FAQ. And I proceeded to post writeups like a maniac, like a lab rat hitting a lever to get a hit of pure liquid love.

I'd put in 15, 25 writeups a day those first few weeks. In two weeks, I was at Level 4, and 24 days after that, Level 5. I slowed down after I hit Level 6; I convinced Braunbeck to join, and had some of his stories I'd posted reassigned to him. Later, I moved about 60 writeups over to the BioTech account.

Recently, I've been made an editor, and I think I've come to understand this place in ways I never could as a regular user.

The next year

I want to keep going like I have been.

But I can't.

I mustn't.

As much as I love this place, it doesn't pay my rent. And this place, this wonderful place, doesn't "count" as real publication.

My mother calls me every week. "How's the writing going?" she asks.

Me: "Pretty well."

Her: "Have you sold anything?"

Me: "Well, no ..."

Her, sounding worried: "Well, then, what have you been writing?"

Me: "Stuff." I feel like the hapless convenience store clerk Raymond, with Tyler Durden holding a gun to his head. "All kinds of things. Mostly for this site I work on."

Her: "Do they pay you?"

Me, feeling more like Raymond every second. "Uh, no, ma. We're all volunteers."

Her, sounding disappointed: "Oh."

I've had this conversation in a thousand different incarnations with other writing friends. I grow weary of trying to explain E2 to them, to explain my lack of real-world progress. I should be trying to write things I can sell. I know this. But I come here, and day melts into night, or night into day and I've written and learned a lot ... but somehow none of it counts.

Braunbeck is frustrated with me for all that I'm not getting written. He knows why I love to come here (which is why he wisely stays away for the most part). E2 is horribly addicting to those of us who live to write and who crave immediate gratification. It's the neverending chocolate cake, the everful bottle of sweet wine.

And I've got to push myself away from the table and get back to the writing that might matter in The Real World ^TM. I can't ever make a career as a writer if I don't ever sell a book. And my books aren't getting written because I spend all my writing time here.

Bad Lucy. No biscuit.

So, I'm limiting myself. Wednesdays and Sundays, that's when I'll be on from here on out until I feel I've made sufficient progress. Wednesdays and Sundays only. I still intend to hold up my editorial duties as best I can within those limitations.

so out of place, out of space, out of time....going where? who the fuck knows anymore. i have motions to go through so i can have my piece of pie....

i miss arms in the night wrapped gently round me....2 days and it already feels like years.

Well, I was right on the money. I got exactly what I was expecting, for the most part. If some of you will recall (though, if you do, I tend to wonder just how much time you're spending reading about my life when you have your own to live), I sent my first story submission out to a magazine some weeks ago. When I sent it out, I was totally expecting it to get rejected. I understand (and still do) that first-time authors rarely get their first submissions published, that getting rejected a few times is kinda like a proving ground.

Well, it did get rejected.

But, man, it was worth it.

Dear Mr. Seals,

Many thanks for giving me a look at 'Jumper,' but I'm going to pass on this one. I enjoyed the story- it moves along nicely and Wolf's character comes through the interview well, but in the end, I just didn't feel this one was right for us, alas. Thanks anyway for sending it along, and best luck to you with it.

Yours,
Gordon Van Gelder
Editor/Publisher
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

So, yes, it got rejected, but it wasn't at all bad. As a matter of fact, I'm kinda inspired by it- he didn't even have any criticisms or red-marks. The manuscript came back to me as pristine as it was when I sent it out, which is rather remarkable, IMHO. That's a subtle hint to me, I think, that there is nothing inherently wrong with the story itself, or even the writing. This supposition is encouragement for me to just send the story out to another magazine in the hopes that it'll get picked up elsewhere. In the meantime, I think I'm going to send a different story to FSF-Mag. If "Jumper" wasn't right for them, perhaps I might have another one which would be. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." And, in the final analysis, I did succeed. I'd set out upon this endeavour with the intention of "earning myself some rejection notices." Well, I won the booby prize, I guess.

Next on the list of magazines I want to submit to... Analog: Science Fiction and Fact. I'll keep you posted.

In other news, I finally learned how to render crisp and clear pictures with 3D Studio Max. I'd been having problems with that, you see. Every time I rendered a picture, it looked great in the MAX render-shade window, but whenever I exported it to JPG, it came out blurry. So I sprouted a brainstem (with some guidance from Scifi-Meshes.Com) and exported to BMP instead. The BMP is photo-quality, perfectly clear and so crisp I could practically see the volume of space. So I dragged the BMP into Photoshop, exported to JPG and it came out perfectly, no loss whatsoever. This, my friends, makes me a very happy camper indeed.

Here's the URL to the pic I did today, if you're interested:
http://www.nightshade-ink.com/homebnd2.jpg

Note to editors: that link is to my personally owned domain, which will be around for a long, long time to come- it's safe as kittens.

Well this is fun. My folks finally got broadband. Cable modem to be precise... It used to be coming up here meant that I pretty much got cut off from the world, but now... well it's nice. You know how broadband is;)

I should write more. I feel it slipping away. Time was that I majored in lit (ok English, then lit, then journalism) and I could write my freaking tail off. Do you need 500 words on a given subject? Done and done and within 50 words w/out even trying. Of course at that point I was writing for publication everyday as a sports reporter for a small daily newspaper (the Clinton Herald if you must know). Now I'm lazy. I'm lucky if I turn out a few words a week. Hell, I even quit noding -- of course that was more for political reasons.

I ran into a buddy of mine the other day. He's got four unpublished novels under his belt. Without commenting on the quality of his work let's just say it's coherent. He's not Fitzgerald, but then neither was Fitzgerald. He's put butt in chair and pen to paper for well over 2000 pages of readable material. I'm so jealous. Oh well...

4:30 AM. I woke up around 3:30, I think. Too much water before bed. Still half asleep, I almost knocked the cat out of bed when I came back. Poor little beastie. My husband was awake, and told me that my friend Elisabeth had called a little while ago, around 1 o'clock, to say that she had come home to find her apartment building burnt to the ground.

As the news sank in, I started to feel cold. "Is Amber still in New Jersey?" I asked. Amber, Elisabeth's roommate, is also a friend of ours. I thought about it for a few minutes. All of Amber and Elisabeth's stuff, gone. "Where's Ed?" My husband replied, "You thought of him quicker than I did. It took me about fifteen minutes." Ed is (was?) Amber's cat. I feel sick.

The Red Cross is putting Elisabeth up at a nearby hotel. I want to call her, but if she's asleep I don't want to wake her. So I called the fire department instead. Not 911, the fire department. The non-emergency number. The sergeant I spoke to said he didn't know anything about Amber's whereabouts.

I called the local Red Cross office, but it's 4:30 in the morning and they're not answering the phone. If it's an emergency, they say, stay on the line and you'll be connected to an operator. Fuck. I don't know. My body says it's an emergency. My mind says she could still be on the road. It's not unusual for Amber to be awake at this ungodly hour - awake, making a godawful mess in the studio, sipping coffee because it calms her down, smoking cigarettes, reading a book which she'll later leave open on top of the toaster oven...

4:43. I just gave in and called Elisabeth's hotel to see if I could leave her a message. Nobody answered the phone. Not even a machine.

Fuck.

---

7 AM. Amber is okay. (insert wobbly smile here) We still don't know where Ed is, but Amber is okay.

5 PM. Ed is thoroughly traumatized, but alive. He's currently hiding under a pile of boxes in my studio. Poor beastie.

Ach, the weekend's over, and I'm just about done with my version of Monday -- Sunday night at 9:00PM to Monday morning at 6:00AM, which I spend at work.

Friday morning, I decided rather spur-of-the-moment like that I was sick of my hair and how it wouldn't behave and all that, so I cut it all off. My head is now covered with very short, naturally-coloured hairs that make riding my bike on a windy day feel quite good. My roots were getting overgrown before the haircut, and so none of the black dye remains. So weird. I'd been dying my hair black for years and years on a fairly regular basis. Now I don't even have hair long enough to dye. Viva la revolútion!

Friday night, I bit the bullet and decided to go to Empire, the once-monthly industrial dance event in the French Quarter, a the Shim Sham Club. I hadn't been in a long, long time, nearly six months. Six months is a long time when I used to go every week when it was a weekly event. The decision to go was a pretty bad idea. Once there, I didn't talk to anybody and nobody talked to me. I spent most of the two hours I was there fighting off a panic attack while I nervously paced around the place. After a while, I didn't want to deal with it anymore, so I just slipped away, completely unnoticed. I felt better once I got outside. This didn't last long, however, as I was biking down Camp Street on my way uptown, a passing car drove rather fast through a nearby puddle and I got sprayed with puddle-water. Ugh. The wind had dried it by the time I got home, but still, having pebbles fall off you as you remove your clothes isn't my idea of fun.

Saturday night I went and had soul food at Dunbar's with Strange Fruit, discofever, and sauth. It was really good, although by the time I was done I felt like I'd been drinking from the frier with a straw. Afterwards, I came home and revised my very first writeup -- Assemblage 23. It's now non-sucky.

Oh, and by the way, the problems mentioned in my last daylog have been resolved. I was just having a bad day.

Time to email my hours to payroll and then spend the rest of the morning doing nothing in particular.

I have just left the worst lecture in history (In my opinion). The entire third year Master of Engineering class at University of Southampton received a lecture from some HR bird about how to do HR.

It got off to a bad start with the question "Hands up who has worked for a company before?". Not only is this question vacuous, but every single person receiving the lecture is required to obtain an internship in their summer holidays. Worse, the same person had given this lecture for the two previous years.

The content of the lecture was basically about how to manage manual labourers, who, at Proctor&Gamble, don't even merit the title "Staff": staff are the white-collar workers. Given that the point of them realeasing one of their valuable coffee-drinkers to lecture us is to persuade us to take recruitment material from them, advertising that a section of their staff have a sub-human rating is not the best way to make us want to work for them.

Fatigued by buzzwords and vague statements, half the engineers rushed to sign the attendance form at the end of the first half of the lecture, and left, to attend to more productive things. Or e2.

The erotic nature of storms, a rebuttal.

I have a strange phobia. A nightmare affliction, if you will. I am afraid of lightning. Deathly afraid. Paranoid, shaking, freaked out afraid.

Sounds pretty funny doesn't it. I know it doesn't make sense. I know the odds of getting hit but lightning average about 14 million to 1 (I looked it up). I know full well that it is an unfounded fear.

It doesn't help.

Somewhere in my ancient lizard hindbrain, lightning equals death. I can feel the crawling fear building when the thunder roll in the distance. Raw. Animal. Fear.

Storms are my personal torture, every summer for months on end. I wish it filled me with the thrill and desire that it seems to give others. It fills me with only terror.

Why Should I?

Get married. Why should I?
Have chidren. Why should I?
Get a Job. Why should I?
Don't do drugs. Why shouldn't I?

Today in our society things have become what I like to call "damn near genetic." They are so built into our society that they are almost second nature. We do them without even thinking about it.

Why do we have to wake up in the morning. The answer is that we don't. We choose to. We don't give much thought to it. We just intend on waking up every morning and going about our daily business then going to sleep when the sun is down. This may be a small example of my ultimate perception of the whole thing, but it makes a good point. Why don't we go about our business while the sun is down? The sun causes cancer, does it not?

Why should we get married? One out of three marriages fail in the United States. We get married on impulses. We get married because we knocked up our girlfriend. How many marriages are really thought out and done the nature of true love, and how many are done due to the precepts of family values.

This brings up a good point; family values. What are they? Who invented them? What's the big deal? The answer, nothing. They are a set of rules accepted by society, yet created by no one. Accepted as the norm, they rule is in every aspect of our lives. Why is sex taboo? Why shouldn't you run around naked? Why? Why? Why? I know, because society tells you not to.

I am sick of everyone telling me what to do. Plain and simple. Why can't everything be accepted as "OK"? Why can't I color my hair green, peirce my nose, and go to my job at the local police station?

About two months ago, I started at this new job doing network admin/tech support for a bank. Total about 55 users. At the time my boss told me I would be taking part in the converstion of the core banking system, Liberty, to CIF 20-20. Anyway this week is the week of conversion.

Tomorrow, Jack Henry, the company that created 20-20, will be arriving here for a week and get started on the whole project. Its quite complex, a lot more then what I know. The good news is that I'm hourly, so this week will be full of overtime. The problem will be the majority of the work will take place Thursday thru Saturday, which means I will not see my fiancee for the weekend. I guess the good is that it will help pay for our wedding.
Back to work.....

Happy anniversary to me

Two years of marriage. Two teenagers (one step, one foster). Two babies (one our foster child, one our foster child's child).

Thank the heavens this isn't something I'll be continuing at a constant rate.

"What a waste of food!"

I observed an interesting and thought provoking encounter today on my way home from work. Circumstances had caused me to take a differing route home to my usual, and I ended up walking past the "green man and pomegranate" (name of pub changed to protect the innocent) - not my usual pub, but I fancied a change.

The pub was doing quite good business for a Monday night, and I had difficulty finding a table in the Non-Smoking area. To get a seat in the Non-Smoking, I had to sit slap bang in the middle of this section - I normally prefer sitting with my back to a wall. Diagonally to my right and in front of me, was a solitary man; to my immediate right were a couple who were dining, and to their right was sitting the landlord of my normal pub. We clocked each other when I walked past him, and I thought it was a surprise seeing him in the green man, eyeing up the competition.

I am guessing that the couple had not known each other that long, and they had over ordered their food. The man was eating "surf and turf" - a steak with accompanying fried scampi, the woman had ham and eggs. When the couple departed, most of the ham and eggs was untouched, but the man has eaten most of the steak, but their were plenty of scampi and chips (fries) left on his plate.

A minute after the couple left, there was an exclamation from the solitary gentleman "What a waste of food!" My thoughts were in agreement about this couple's eating habits. But then the man sidles up to the table where the couple were sitting, and takes both their plates onto his table.

My pub landlord's jaw hits the floor as the man polishes off first the ham and eggs, then what was remaining of the surf and turf. I am wondering how this landlord would have acted if someone had done this in his pub.

The gentleman did not look hard done by - his appearance and attire was not at all dishevelled, and if anything he did not look thin. I was torn between despising him for a total disregard to etiquette in a public place, and admiring his gall for challenging one of our strongest social taboos. Then I reflected that I had better not adopt his call, as I am overweight enough as it is.

After leaving this pub, I mused on the implications of food in upbringing, particularly my own. I can trace some of my sympathy for this man to lectures from my mother and father about "The Starving Millions in Africa". I was the youngest of five, with a large age gap to the next sibling, and I do have recollections of any surplus food - second helpings - being eaten quickly by the others if I was not fast enough, getting my bid in.

I guess this childhood legacy might explain why I am overweight. When it comes to challenging the social taboo of eating someone's leftovers, I know that to eke out an existence, one of my sisters would have no hesitation. Indeed (so I'm told) she used to eat my leftovers when I was a one year old.

Today, I did not want to do my homework. So I stalked myself on the internet. This is an idea I got, I believe from P_I, who has his name and real name plastered all over cyberspace. But today, I looked up me.

So into the google search engine, I typed my own name. There were about 1,490 results. Yikes! That's a lot of me. Except, it isn't all me. I have a fairly common name. Most of us live in North America, England and Australia.

People with my name include:

• a Wake Forest University Women's Volleyball Star
• a male Tennis Player from : New South Wales, Australia, who's six feet tall and has won $ 111,554 so far.
• A Street Racer from Ohio who races a red Pontiac.
• A gymnast from Eugene, Oregon
• An ugly little blond girl from Texas
• An Alpha Omicron Pi scholarship winner from the University of Louisiana
• A soprano member of the Butler High School Women's Choir
• An English teacher and varsity cheerleading coach from South Carolina
• A championship-winning cheerleader from the Isle of Wight
• A horse-breeder
• A seven-year-old, diagnosed with Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia and currently in remission and living the life of a healthy young girl, thanks to some fundraiser in Orlando, Florida.
• A Birder, bird artist and photographer from Shefield
• A young boy scout from Liverpool
• A Beaver Leader and Photographer from Langley, British Columbia
• A gravestone in North Carolina: me, (b. 19 Oct 1880 - d. 1 Jun 1933)

  There's a lot of us out there.

Mom is having heart surgery tomorrow morning at 9:00am, at Riverside Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

During the heart cath today, they found that one of her bypasses from 4 years ago has gotten blocked in two places - both places are 99% blocked.

This is Not Good.

I will be going to Columbus, following my A & P II class. Calls, e-mails, well-wishes are welcome, and I will pass them on to my mother, but do not expect me to be online much.

Please, if you pray, pray for my mother.

Two years ago today I did the scariest thing ever and got married.

Two years of marriage, but many more years of laughter, tears, parenthood, debt, devotion, and so much more. He has seen me through so many hard times and I him. We have fought, oh how we have fought! Throwing dishes and eyes like daggers but at the end of the day, there is still love. To believe that it is all wedded bliss is to be foolish indeed. What matters is what your heart feels at the end of the day. His father said to me on our wedding day, "Don't go to bed angry, and you'll both be fine" and I've taken that to heart.

I could not imagine my life in any other way today. I could not have imagined I would ever get to this point, but here I am. And I am happy. So maybe this marriage thing isn't so scary after all...

One night many moons ago, I was sixteen. My best friend at the time, John, whom I called Mickey because of his uncanny similarity to Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees, and got everyone else to call him that too, decided we should go drinking in the cemetary. Because the next day was report card day, and he was failing math, and figured this would be his last hurrah for a while.

Anyway. We went and he brought along his friends, Shawn and Jason and I brought along my friend Lisa. I had to lead everyone through this trail that goes along behind the cemetary because John is deathly afraid of spiders and I had to "clear out the webs". True story. We get to this spot under a willow tree and John proceeds to get very, very drunk.

I had never met Shawn before, he seemed quiet but nice. Blue eyes to die for, tall lanky boy. Jason I had met before, more's the pity. He tried to get me drunk. And failed miserably.

John got drunk out of his tree. He tripped over everything, apologised to grave stones, and lit the wrong end of at least three cigarettes before finally giving up. By this time Jason and Lisa were busy talking it up (poor Lisa, she was too nice to tell him to go, so she just kept listening to him). Meanwhile it was time to go home. So Shawn and I got a hold of each side of John and practically had to carry him.

About halfway there, we passed by a house with a really magnificent garden. In the garden were tons of daffodils. We of course got on the conversation and I mentioned I really loved daffodils, I wasn't sure why I just liked their shape and their look and their smell. We kept walking and talking and carrying John. We reached a corner and he said "wait a minute, I have to do something" And he threw John in my arms. I figured he had to pee or somethin, right? So anyway, he comes backa few minutes later and hands me a daffodil.

I was so pleased. I was smiling the whole way home. I put the daffodil in a book to press it.

Shawn and I never got together then. Things were hinted at and mentioned and rumored but nothing ever came of it. Actually, the night he was going to ask me out, some other boy did instead and I said yes. And after that it was just a series of bad timing and one or the other or both having an SO in the picture. So then I break up with someone, its a nasty break up leaving me feeling pretty damn raw and scared. Anyway, he's still going out with this girl Tanya, whom I end up living with for a year (the same year she breaks up with Shawn and Shawn and I get together, oh man is *THAT* a story). I'm of course infatuated with him but I don't know what to do. So I let things be. Move in with Tanya and my friend Erin (who is dating my friend John).

At this point I am noticing a mutual attraction between Shawn and I (well it had been going on for some time, I just kept lying to myself about it). But I don't want to do anything to jeopardize his relationship, even though she was screwing around on him with his best friend at the time. He and she finally broke up. I was there on that day. So he said he was coming back that night with John to go out and celebrate. He came back and we all got drunk and he ended up spending the night in my bed, but I swear to God nothing sexual happened. We ended up talking all hours of the night. He stayed the whole weekend.

Then he called me on Tuesday and told me he couldn't stop thinking about me. I told him that I really liked him, but I wanted him to wait things out and I wanted to give him space. I told him I would wait for whatever decision he had to make, but I wouldn't wait forever. He told me he didn't need time. He had been thinking and the only conclusion he was coming to was that there was only one woman for him, and her name was Grace. Then I hung up the phone because I didn't know what else to do.

This leaves me feeling so confused, and scared and happy all at once. I didn't know what to think. Because there was something about the look in his eye. So I sort of clean things up a bit and I'm crying because I am emotionally overwrought. I'm alone in the house Tanya had gone home for the weekend and Erin was at a late class. I start shuffling things around and this book, "FireStarter", a hardcover of the King novel, falls off the shelf. This book falls off the shelf and lays open to what page? A page with that very daffodil on it. And it lay there, mocking me as if to say I knew all along this would happen.

And we got together the very next weekend.

I still have that daffodil.