Not quite the Ithaca of Tennyson or even Tallahassee on the telly, but it will suffice.

WORD COUNT: 6,212

I have work to do, and not just on rebuilding our house (which is actually this close to being done, just got some touch-up work our handyman and our electrician need to do) and getting back in NEXT weekend instead of this past one. But so it's not such a pain to move in, we're getting boxes of non-essentials – that is, what Martha, Sarah, Jeffrey, and I don't absolutely need to eat or wear or otherwise use in a week – out to our house day by day after they're packed into our van. Just. Don't. Refer. To. Our. Elantra. As. Mary's. Car. Again. So this weekend was a little … more relaxed hat I would have liked, but I realized why – I'm jealous of some members of Martha's family. It annoys me that I am.

But I digress … I also have words to catch up on in my National Novel Writing Month story “Rivalry” and I will do that. Today's title is the last line I wrote for my novel, which I had to write longhand as opposed to type into a computer because my home computer is temperamental right now and won't go on the Internet. Charming how a decade ago that was so not an issue for me, being online (well, not as much anyway). But I'm learning to make it less of an issue. Oh, the Tallahassee reference comes from last night's episode of Once Upon A Time where the main character Emma Swann eleven years before the main story closed her eyes and pointed to where she wanted to go.

Once Upon A Time is one of the handful of reasons I'll even watch television anymore, because it sucks you in. Instead I've got more books I start and do not finish that you imagine possible – yesterday I brought the kids to Story Time at Main Street Books after church where Krista and I had eight sixth graders in Parable Playhouse and actually enough people to perform the play, and some really got into it after a serving of Breakfast with the Boys' apple crisp, which is what I've been wanting all along. (The play, for someone to “get” it and laugh, not the apple crisp, though that was good too.) Can't believe the parents of one of the sixth graders let their kids get away with bringing his Nintendo 3DS to church … got to be careful of that every day, our definition of the sacrosanct.

And according to the book I just read about the artist Rembrandt (that should be redundant, as the painter of the Night Watch, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, and a plethora of self-portraits and Bible scenes is pretty much associated WITH paintings – though he was better known in his lifetime for his etchings – and the next Rembrandt on my cultural list is a main character on the 1990s television show Sliders), that is very important. Dang, I'm not sure where I was going with that. But if I write this efficiently – this body of text you're reading took just over an hour to right, I need to be pounding out several K of text for “Rivalry” today! Check up on me, would you please?

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. David