BIG Day and the Widgets Are Working!

Today was a good Friday. I was sad that I missed my French class, but it was because I won the "lunch lottery" with my Shakespeare professor by sending him an email of less than two sentences saying I wanted to talk about his dog, Roselyn with him, and I ended up being one of the four students chosen by his wife to go to lunch with him. He drove three of us in his nice BMW (with plates that read, SHKSPR, of course) to a very nice restaurant called La Riviera, where we had a great lunch there, and I got to know my teacher and a couple of my classmates better.

Then, on the writing front... I worked in the library after a fascinating Linguistics class today (we're finally getting into historical- and sociolinguistics (which involves finding common ancestors of language families). Anyway, I was feeling a little depressed because it was that time of day when the sun is going away, and I realized that almost all of my friends are gone for the weekend: My roommate, my next door neighbors, my high school friends, and my friend Anna is here, but her parents are visiting. I was thinking it was a little sad that I had nothing to do on a Friday night, but I was able to get out about 1,000 words before dinner, where I fortunately ran into my Sbisa friend Steven. Interestingly, he was going to the production of A Midsummer Night's Dream tonight, which I had planned on going to alone, but while I would have loved to join him and his friends, just prior to dinner, I learned that some wrimos from the area were having an impromptu writein at the local Barnes and Noble, so I ended up going there, and it was great.

It's funny how writers are often "strange" people, but isn't everyone a little strange if you think about it? They weren't anywhere near as "weird" as a lot of the Austinite bunch, but it was immense fun to write with four other wrimos and learn about similar interests. We had two "word wars" (in which everyone tries to write as much as possible within a set time limit-- in our case, 30 minutes-- before comparing totals), which helped me get another couple thousand words written. Then we had fun browsing the sci-fi and fantasy section of the bookstore and giving our input on various authors and series, after which we left because it was closing, only to stand outside for another half hour talking about video games and programming.

I know, it was kind of a nerd fest, but I haven't had people like that to talk to forever, and it was a lot of fun.

Anyway, as you can see my by nifty widget, which is *finally* working, I now have a grand total of 13,282 words, which puts me where I need to be by the end of Sunday! Good thing, too, since I have a lot of work to do this weekend.