pretty little maids, all in a row.
Humans have an innate tendency to attribute significance to anomalies and coincidences. An event with a one-in-a-million chance of happening to any American on any given day will, in fact, occur 260 times each day in this country.
A Chicago question for Dorothy: There are people paying as much as $9000 at auction for a cow from Chicago. What's so damn special about these cows?
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
On Sunday Darin and I had brunch with Fernando and Nancy and Fernando's parents, who gave us our first baby present: a tiny jumper. It's so small. It's so cute. I can't believe I'm going to have someone to put in it.
We went to Delmonico's, which Fernando liked a great deal more than the last time we went. (And I was able to eat something this time, as opposed to last time we were there and everything seemed unappetizing.) Lots of crab and shrimp and mushroom salads and gnocchi and prime rib and other tasty, tasty morsels.
Afterward Fernando and his family went out to hit the Sunday afternoon open houses. He and Nancy have been scouring the market for some time--it's not pretty. The market has definitely had an upturn in this area in the past few years--Darin and I evidently got in at the end of the doldrums (thank goodness).
We still can't afford to move back to Palo Alto, however. Not that we're planning to, anytime soon, but I think I'm going through a nesting phase. I keep checking the real estate ads in various areas to see what prices are like there: New York, San Francisco, Palo Alto. Most pregnant women's nesting instinct leads them to clean the house--me, I look at real estate ads.
Okay, maybe it's not a nesting instinct.
Final Draft has announced that its version 5 software is incompatible with System 9--it trashes files, amongst other ill-considered behavior--and there'll be updates realsoonnow. Well, that'll sure stop me from forging ahead with my writing. (Ha. I haven't put pen to paper in a while. I'm still trying to get a focus on my characters so I can do my first-draft-which-is-really-the-outline draft.)
But FDv5 has been nothing but buggy since they put it out a few weeks/months ago. In fact, evidently they knew that the original 5.0 was DOA and put it out anyhow.
This is a real good way to lose your customers, who now have a choice among Macintosh screenwriting programs (whereas they really didn't a few years ago). After using 5.0 or 5.0.1 I sent them a blistering e-mail about all the bugs I found in it, some of which were fairly severe, and got a fairly annoyed e-mail in reply. Hey, guys: I'm not the one who screwed up your screenplay files, okay? You're in the wrong. Fix it, post-haste; otherwise, I paid $50 for a downgrade, not an upgrade.
(No, do not get me started on how I should "Just use macros with a word processing program." Yes, you can do this. Yes, there are professional writers who do this. I used to do this, and I was quite handy with both Microsoft Word and its macro feature--I used to show other tech writers at Apple how to use it. I thought that dedicated screenwriting programs were a waste of time too...right up until the moment I used one. Are they essential? No. Actually, nothing's more essential than a manual typewriter, and I don't see too many people still using those either. Do dedicated screenwriting programs make your life a hell of a lot easier? Oh, you betcha they do. I wouldn't go back to using Word or anything else.)
Hey! Wordplay is blocking me out! It says that my ISP is hitting them thousands of times a day! I know I check Wordplay a lot, but it's not that much. I wonder what's going on.
The title of this entry refers to information we gleaned about Bug yesterday. We will continue to use "Bug" and not "Bugette" or a silly nickname like that.
Darin says it was as clear as day on the monitor to him. It looked like a big Impressionist swirl to me. Like I've said before, Darin is simply more evolved than I am. Maybe it was the position I was in--lying on my side on one of those oh-so-comfy examining tables. (Bug had managed to wedge herself into the same position she was in for the last ultrasound, and the tech thought that turning on my side would help clear things up a bit.)
So now the next baby has all the pressure on which gender to be.
The answer to yesterday's question: According to an article in Salon magazine, there have been exactly zero confirmed cases of Halloween candy tampering by strangers since 1958.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com