Meet me in St. Louis

Adam will be gone for a week. He leaves this afternoon for St. Louis, Missouri. He'll be driving the fourteen hours and 850 or so miles with a coworker, stopping to sleep in hotels along the way. He'll need to be there by Monday morning, to meet the NASA people in charge of the project. NASA is one of his company's biggest clients, and they'll be holding a conference in St. Louis for a peer review service. Adam will be setting up all the computers and printers.
Adam has been in other Missouri cities, but this will be his first time in St. Louis.

So, we'll miss his birthday on the eighth, but we can celebrate when he comes home next Saturday.

We went shopping at Bloom to make sure I have sesame hard rolls and cheese to make sandwiches for the week, and he showed me how to saute a chicken breast in olive oil, so I can slice it up for lunch meat (he's the cook in the house).

We taught the kitten how to fetch today. It was very entertaining. She gallops. Her favorite toys are the two-tone furry mice with feather tails. She carries them around everywhere.
*snuggles with Rose*

Welcome Back, Writerbrain

The rush is fantastic. I feel like I've been separated from my writerbrain for ages. I'm several pages into Chapter 25. This, after months of being stalled on Chapter 24.
I'm now almost at 93,000 words. I suspect there will be about six chapters left, and that the whole thing will fall just short of 120,000 words. That's massive for a first novel, I imagine.
I'm starting to worry that any agent I query will look at the completed manuscript and tell me it's way too long to be published. I certainly don't mind cutting out chunks here and there to tighten and clean it up, but I don't want to cut too much. It's a big story.
Right now, however, I just need to concentrate on finishing it. I can feel it. I'll get there.
It'll be sweet.

One more day off. I think tomorrow, I'll go for a long walk, maybe a bus ride or a metro ride to a shopping center (it's not like I need to pay for my transportation, thank you disability ID). I'll do something good for myself. Something small to praise myself, tell myself I'm doing well.

I'm doing well, you know.