The other night I went to go hang out with Evilpheemy, which I don’t do as often as I wish I could. Sadly, we both have lives, which sometimes gets in the way of these things. We went and ate sushi along with his three-month-old daughter, who was amazingly well-behaved throughout the meal, and then went back to his place to shoot the breeze and ponder the creative project we’ve been trying to put together for over three years now. To his credit, Evilpheemy has been doing a lot more on this project than I have. While I was churning out 50,000 words of Unfallen for NaNoWriMo, Evilpheemy was churning out 30,000 words of Outer Darkness. But now that the novel is done, I’ll have time to churn out 50,000 words of OD. Yeah, right.

For those of you who want to know, Unfallen is a novelization of a role-playing game which I started running about two years ago, with AB, SL, Daughter-of-Midnight (wife of Evilphemmy), and Purplkat. It involved modern mages in a dark version of San Francisco, monsters, a worldwide epidemic of nightmares, and even other levels of reality. And the 50,000 words that I wrote is apparently only Part One. Somehow, a new villain showed up at the end of Part One; I let him show up just to watch what he did, and I found myself surprised that his presence helped clarify a lot of long-term plot confusions that I’d been having. The bigger challenge will be writing Parts Two and Three of this thing, since they involve traveling through time to periods of history that I know nothing about.

After visiting with Evilpheemy, I decided that I missed the old gang, so I went to the UC Davis campus where Second Progeny, a live-action role-playing game which is a spinoff of a game I once ran, was being played. It was good to see some of the friends that I hadn’t seen for a long time, and catch up with some of them. I even made a promise that I would play an occasional character in the storyteller’s new game when it begins in January. Once I had forsworn all live-action role-playing. Now it looks like I’m allowing myself to be sucked in again… but only a little bit.

What else is going on in my life these days? I took Jennifer down to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving, and that was great. I know that she had a good time, and my family thinks that Jennifer is the cat’s pyjamas. I come from a smart family. Weight Watchers went to hell over Thanksgiving weekend, and I gained a couple of pounds. But life goes on.

But speaking of weight, today I went and saw my doctor for the first time in nearly ten months. Thanksgiving-related poundage aside, he was pleased with me for having lost nearly thirty pounds since the first time he’d seen me, and more pleased (as I was) that my blood pressure is starting to look like a normal person’s blood pressure. Unfortunately, I will probably have to stay on hypertension medication for quite awhile longer, but now it’s at least working.

The job hunt continues, but not very encouragingly. I’ve had exactly one interview since I got laid off, in spite of all of the resumes, the contacts, the leads that turn out to be red herrings. I remember when I was looking for work when I had first decided to make my career change; I couldn’t keep the recruiters back. Now, none of the recruiters that I worked with before have anything for me. Sign of the times, I suppose. Ah, well. I’ve decided that if this keeps up through January, I’ll take a part-time job, at least. I don’t think I’d mind that; some of the best jobs I’ve ever had were the part-time McJobs that you can’t avoid after college. I think working in the video store was best. I’m hoping that I can get that one again.

On the schooling front, I’ve been continuig to do the research for the professor in hydrology. This week I’m in the main library at UC Davis researching comparative efficacies of different rainfall simulators. And the professor has also asked me to help out in his water analysis lab as well, so this Friday I’m meeting with the graduate student that I’ll be replacing so that I can learn the ropes. That’ll be interesting.

My wife has engaged in something called "Holidailies", and she challenged me the other night to participate as well. I had to decline. While I had no doubt that I could come up with 50,000 words in November, I doubt that I could come up with a journal entry every single day of the entire month.

And that’s what’s going on in my head today. Nothing profound or even interesting.