Today was a home improvement day. I had two weeks to improve the Castle while Doolies was gone. Not surprisingly, I failed. I think I needed Doolies around for inspiration and a kick in the pants. Things we checked off our list: Cleaned our part of the newly paved back road (David with Doolies’s help at the end); Washed our cars (Doolies while David was raking and shoveling the road); Fixed the bedroom Tatami door (Doolies because David failed at it and hadn’t even put it on the list); and Finally finished fixing the toilet downstairs (David, thanks to a timely stop in Lowes for a large wrench ). As you can see, it was part inspiration and part having Doolies here to do some of the work. She’s good that way.

I wrote exactly five hundred words in my ping-pong story today. I decided to throw down the ending in case I ran out of steam over the next couple of days. My internal editor is not happy with the quality, as it’s even lower than my Garden story. I have a few elements in the story that I like, and most I don’t. I just need to keep reminding myself that it’s the first draft, and Chuck will kill me if I don’t finish it by the end of the month.

I’ve been toying with a name for my doodles: “Cast of Horribles.” I reserved the URL a while ago, as I liked the sound of it—it was the title of a so-so story I wrote in 2005. After finishing the redesign of our wedding website (as a warning: it will not be impressive), I will put together a site for my little doodles. It will be very simple. I don’t want a complicated PHP backend as I have for the family of sewcrates sites.