An Open Letter to Tom Felton . . . and a Day with the Moms.

[gabe_speaks]

Dear Tom Felton,

Please take note—



—you always look better with hair covering that fivehead.

With warmest regards,

G~abe

I had a wonderful day with my mom. We went to Half-Priced Books so she could renew her stock of tawdry romance novellas, I set up her Blackberry's internet connection, and then we went to Denny's, where we both had their new Grand Slamwich. You can tell just from the name what that sandwich's ingredients are: sausage, egg, bacon, cheese, and ham slapped between two pieces of bread. My arteries scream just re-thinking about it . . . but—oh!—was it delicious.

[If you should try it sometime, and you all should at least once before you leave this mortal realm, do yourself a favor and ask for sourdough bread. Yum, yum gimme some!]

I bought a [supposedly] true story of a British intelligence officer who, after being shot in the head, developed psychic powers. It's written pseudo-biography style, but has those Bartimaeus-like footnotes on almost every page, where the author says "hey, I don't want to take up space and time describing what such-and-sch is . . ." before basically describe, in detail, such-and-such and so-and-so. Still, it looked fun! And funny.

I also scored a 1969 edition of Funk & Wagnalls Modern Guide to Synonyms, which will go nicely with my 1939 edition of the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Encyclopedia and the 1931 Modern English Dictionary. That's been my new thing, old dictionaries and thesaural publications. Why Funk & Wagnalls? No particular reason; I just keep finding them. I'd like to score some old British ones, but they'd probably be really expensive. Is there an equivalent of Half-Priced Books in the UK?

Anyways. Then my mom helped me box up a bunch of old programming books and Photoshop/Flash books that are like . . . four and five years out-of-date, and we drove them to the library in the less . . . savory part of town. We just set the boxes in front of the door with a note saying "donated". My hope is that some kid will see the book, pick it up because of the pretty colors, get hooked on it, then become a bad-ass graphic designer or programmer or web developer or whatever. It could happen, right? So best to donate books like that to libraries than give them to Half-Priced Books to [maybe] make money from.

[To their credit, they do donate to libraries, a lot.]

And now, I'm sitting here, writing a bit on Colliver, a bit on MarcJam, working more on my CGabrielWright website, reading a very interesting plot outline for a certain someone's hd_careeerfest [I think that's what it's called, innit?] story, and perusing the world of LJ. I was going to go to Chicago for Pride, but I just spent $205 on books for second summer session of school. AND THAT'S JUST ONE CLASS!!!

~le sigh~

No worries. I've made $57 last 2 weeks before. I can do it again!

So that's that. Anything interesting afoot?

G~abe