Saturday night at Sarah Louise's Garett

Well, when I got home there was a message on my machine. Someone trying to sell me something, nothing new there. I watched Just Shoot Me and two episodes of Friends. The one where Ross and Phoebe's boyfriend Paul hang out is hysterical, because they are so uncomfortable. I howled with laughter. That felt good.

I ate dinner somewhere in there and was settled in for a quiet evening at home.

Then my home phone rang and I talked with a friend about not going out. My plans were to stay in and watch The Truman Show. When the phone rang, I had just started reading Vive La Paris!, the new book by Esmee Raji Codell.

So when I got off the phone, I turned on The Truman Show, but gosh, I had forgotten how depressing it is! So I was surprised but pleased when my cell phone rang and it was an old friend from Fox Books, a regular reader of this blog. "Let me turn off the movie," I said. "Was it The Truman Show?" So my friend told me about Philip K. Dick, who was never credited with the idea for the movie, but had a short story that was very similar in a lot of ways to The TS. Old friends are the best kind...my friend now has two daughters who are lovely and is starting Library School on Tuesday. It was nice to shoot the breeze, to talk to someone who has seen me at my best and yes, at my absolute worst. We talked about our Fox Books closing, and he couldn't believe, "Wow, that guy is still there?" and was glad that our former co-workers were getting farmed out to other nearby Fox Bookstores.

And when I got off the phone with my friend, I decided it was too late to get back into The Truman Show, that I needed something a little more upbeat, so I sat on the couch and finished Vive La Paris! which is a beautiful book, one that I would recommend to any fourth or fifth grade girl. It was so beautiful that I cried at the end. Which is a lovely way to end a Saturday evening at home among friends.

I've started typing out one of my old stories--ack! It is so bizarre to think about writing fiction again, but it helps to remember I did it before so I can do it again. And typing it out gives my "fiction fingers" practice. I still have not found the audio tape I made of the story that will be my main piece for the application, so if you've seen it, it's a yellow audio cassette that says "Story" on the label. It's here somewhere...