Kelly's flight was delayed 2 hours yesterday, but I picked her up from Dulles at 7 PM and we headed back to her place. I think she was glad to be home because it had been a long trip for her.

We slept in this morning and then made pancakes for breakfast. After breakfast, Kelly went to the gym while I lazily read more of In Memory Yet Green. Then we packed up stuff into our cars (including my new telescope) and headed over to my house.

I was in a cleaning mood. I cleaned up the kitchen, and took piles of books from the living room and put them in the office. I mopped the floors. I emptied trash. While Kelly did her taxes, I went grocery shopping. I had to stop and get litter for Zeke and found that it was on a rather incredible sale. I got 2-14 lbs boxes of litter for $3 each. They normally cost $15.99 each. Crazy! I also got us stuff to make dinner. Later in the evening, we had a 3-course meal: salad with sliced tomatoes and broccoli; ravioli and pasta sauce; and apple pie for dessert. Meanwhile, I put my telescope together while Kelly did laundry. I took it outside to get it aligned. It was so cool. I managed to lose a small screw and spent about 20 minutes searching for it but to no avail. I gave up when I realized I could find an exact match at Home Depot for less than a dollar. Unfortunately, it was overcast out so I couldn't use the telescope to look at stars tonight.

I gassed up my car today (over $30!), and then, gassed up Kelly's car before she left this evening so that she could drive straight home. She left at about 8:20. I'm heading off to bed in order to get a good night's sleep.

I have a number of things to do today in preparation for the trip up to New York this weekend. I figured I'd list them here for good measure:

• Confirm dinner reservations (this morning)
  
• Get a new tie (this morning)
  
• Buy more spring water (on the way home from work)
  
• Do laundry (this evening)
  
• Pack for the trip (this evening)
  
• Don't forget GPS and EZ-Pass (this evening)
  
• Gas up the car (for the first time since mid-March) (on the way home from work)
  
• Clean/vacuum car (since I will have passengers) (on the way home from work)
  
• Empty trash (this evening)
  
• Clean dishes in sink (this evening)
  
• Prepare iBook for Lisa (and don't forget to pack the iBook either) (this evening)
  
• ADDED: Pack the smashing thing for Denisse (thanks to Kelly for the reminder)
  
• ADDED: Flummox the UCLA baseketball game tomorrow

That's all I can think of at the moment. There may be more.

Also, I have to try and get to bed by 8:30 tonight. I've been staying up later (I was up until just after 10 PM last night for instance), which doesn't sound like much, until you understand that I still get up at 4:20 AM. I need a good night's sleep tonight because I'm still getting up early tomorrow, and because I have to drive up to New York tomorrow afternoon and need to be alert for that.


Oh yeah, and a significant streak of mine is coming to an end tomorrow, but I'll have more to say about that tomorrow. Stay tuned...

We slept in until 9 AM, which was the beginning of the lazy day we had today. We seemed to linger about until nearly 1 PM before actually doing anything. (That's not quite true. Kelly did a lot of laundry and wrote a letter of recommendation. I did a little reading.) At around 1 PM we headed out to grab a bite to eat, and then went up to Greenbelt to walk around the lake. It was cool, but pleasant. It was nearly 4 PM by the time we got back and an hour later, Kelly headed home.

I did some reading. It was my plan to work on my application to Viable Paradise, but I never got to it today. I rented The Usual Suspects from the iTunes store and watched that. This was the third time I've seen the movie, but the first time in quite a while. I also downloaded some music from the iTunes store, something I haven't done much of lately.

Yesterday, I got the coolest poster in the mail, a birthday gift from kevnyc. It's a kind of visual history of the "Race to the Moon", an almost ideal poster for a science fiction writer, and one that will look great in my office, once it's suitably framed. Thanks, Kevin!

Got a phone call from Michelle tonight. First time I'd talked to her in a long time. We spoke for nearly an hour and it was good to hear from her.

It's late. I'm heading off to bed only to get up in less than 6 hours and get started on my day. I've got a lot of little things to do tomorrow. I guess getting a good night's sleep is not among them.

First of all, I slept in pretty late. Granted, we didn't get back from poker until after 1 AM. But I still managed to sleep in until nearly 10 AM. Kelly had gone to the gym and returned by the time I got up this morning.

I headed home around 11 AM and went straight to the grocery store to do shopping for the week. When I got home, I ate my lunch, and watched he second half of Firefox on AMC. I hadn't seen that movie since they used to play it on HBO back in the early 1980s (I remember seeing that movie in the theater in West Warwick, Rhode Island when I was a kid.) Then I sat down to read.

I read until about 3 PM and then couldn't keep my eyes open any longer. I napped until about 5 PM and then read some more. I've been reading on and off since then. I packed my lunch for tomorrow, cleaned up the house a bit, and did some laundry.

Tomorrow evening, Kelly and I are going to dinner with her friend Sarah and some others. It's "restaurant week" in D.C. and we're going to to some place in Dupont Circle after work. Should be a lot of fun.

I'm about 285 pages through Our Oriental Heritage and I'm eating it up. I think that in some alternate universe, I was made to be a historian. Of course, it may simply be Will Durant's writing style, which, as far as history writing goes, is the best I've ever come across. Why don't they teach The Story of Civilization in high school? Certainly the reading level is not too difficult. It makes for fascinating reading, far, far better than any historical reading I recall doing when I was in high school.

We went to bed early last night and so we were up pretty early this morning. I had a craving for strawberry banana pancakes and so we headed up to IHOP for breakfast. I wolfed down my pancakes while Kelly had cinnamon-swirl french toast and eggs (the eggs were not cinnamon-swirl).

After a breakfast like that, l felt like I needed some exercise to we headed over to the lake at Buddy Attick park and did a single lap. The weather was quite nice for it, cool but not cold, and bright and sunny.

Back to the house, where I cleaned out my closet and dresser of old clothes and clothes that no longer fit me. Kelly seemed to take a perverse delight in this. In the space of 20 minutes or so, I'd gone through the closet, dresser and clothes strewn about here and there and filled up four garbage bags worth of clothes that Kelly is going to take to Goodwill, along with some clothes of her own.

We left the house around 1 PM and headed over to Kelly's. Kelly was in a cleaning/organizing mood today too and immediately started tidying up the place, but I quickly stopped her from doing that We walked over to the shops in Clarendon and went to Eastern Mountain Sports. I was looking for something I could wear under my new leather jacket on those extra cold days. Kelly suggested something from The North Face. I chose the only greenish North Face jacket that they had in the store. I liked it because it was the only one. It fits well under my leather jacket. It's waterproof ("hydrophobic" the label says) and windproof down to very cold temperatures. It was $129, but what the heck, I bought it on the spot.

We had a late lunch/early dinner at Baja Fresh. We've got poker night tonight at Todd and Jenn's and we wanted to eat something before heading over there.

After eating it was back to Kelly's. Kelly went into a fit of cleaning, cleaning out her closets. I sat down on the couch to read for a while. My reading was periodically interrupted when Kelly came out in a variety of skirts, asking, "How about this one?" or "What do you think of this one?" Then it was shirts. Then back to skirts. Then dresses. I really liked the dresses.

I dozed off for a while and when I finally woke up, I was craving ginger snaps. So I walked over to the grocery store (testing out my new North Face jacket) and got a one pound bag of ginger snaps. When I got back, Kelly was sitting on the floor shredding what seemed to be hundreds of receipts she had collected.

We just finished making brownies to take with us to Todd and Jenn's this evening. We're heading over there at around 7:30 and it should be a lot of fun.

Oh, and I'm about 240 pages through Our Oriental Heritage.