brrr, and other related things.

It took me a good fifteen minutes to get into my car this morning, between the doors being frozen shut and the hard frost on the windows that took ages to get off. This is after my wipers froze to my windshield last night, and it's good that I needed to take my car in to get the oil changed soon because now the right one doesn't move at all.

The moon was setting when I got up with the dogs this morning, as they ran out onto the crunchy grass with every evidence of delight. It was a pale golden color as it was sinking down in front of the house. Then the dogs did their thing and we went back inside, Pip made an unsuccessful lobby to be left in the big bed while I showered, and it was morning and things were moving again.

I lost my glasses for a bit this morning as I was running around and trying to get myself ready to go. Then it was the car thing. Then there was a patch of ice by the entrance to the work parking lot and I did manage to correct before I went sliding into the curb, but not by much. Not my morning so far.

Well, not my weekend at all, really. I went grocery shopping Saturday night, popped over to Trader Joe's, and then headed to Fred Meyer. Which it took me ages to get to and then was closed because someone had run into a power pole on 180th and plunged a few square blocks of houses and businesses into darkness. I went down to Winco, but it was definitely not the quick shopping trip I'd envisioned.

But I'm working on The Water and the Wild and re-learning how to write in a slightly younger voice, getting reacquainted with Grainne and her family and friends. It's going slowly so far, but I'm hoping it'll pick up once I have the rhythms of the speech I'm rewriting down. (Anyone have any suggestions for movies to watch that have a lot of mid-19th to early-20th century Irish accents in them?) And I got to walk the puppies with Laura, as well.

We did go out to see a movie last night, the execrable In The Name of the King. It was so, so bad, but I enjoyed it anyway despite falling asleep during a couple of the extremely long battle sequences. It had dryads (who looked like humans with silly hair and pouts, rather than the obviously non-human and generally viciously nasty dryads of the game the movie's based on) and ninjas. Because what fantasy movie is complete without ninjas?

I wonder, sometimes, why villains in fantasy movies are so often just laughable rather than anything approaching scary. One of the evil sorcerer's allies, the whiny nephew of the king--he was in the perfect place to add dramatic tension rather than be an obviously bumbling idiot. I realize there's probably no place in movies like this for moral ambiguity, but couldn't there have been just a little "hey, the nephew's got a point there"?

I have to make phone calls today. I am procrastinating. Sigh.

Oh, yes, and I got Scott Kelby's 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3 on Friday, and I'm looking forward to having a couple of hours of image editing time to practice with the techniques. So much of what I read online about editing with Photoshop is kind of beyond me, so I'm looking forward to having some step-by-step instruction in the sort of things I want to do with my images--clean them up, make the colors come alive, etc.

For the moment, though, have a picture of a cupcake. Because raspberry chocolate cupcakes are love.