Accomplishment....

A long day, a hot day, a beautiful day. I finished my second draft of my current Clex story, "Pharaoh", which I desperately wanted to do this weekend. Second drafts always seem to go on forever: they lack the excitement of writing the first draft, when the whole story is a discovery, and the polished quality of the third draft. They are just hard slogging. But what satisfaction when it's done!

I saw the Bog People. I have a lot to say about them, but I'm too tired. Perhaps tomorrow. Lisa, Lynne and I had a picnic at the Museum of Civilisation, sitting on the north bank of the Ottawa River. There's a little waterfall there, and we found some rocks to sit on with a bit of shade. A very little bit of shade.

Lynne showed me a place at the Museum that I'd never seen before: the zen garden. It was very beautiful, peaceful - as zen gardens ought to be - and so beautiful I wondered why it was deserted except for us. Sitting there in a bit of shade from the wall, resting our feet after hours of tramping through the museum, listening to the water of the fountain in front of the main doors -it was like being in another world.

I bought an insulated bag to carry my lunches in, and put a LuthorCorp logo on it.

Went to a pub called The Black Rose on Murray Street with Lisa and Lynne, and drank a delicious spritzer. I liked the place: it was in a vaguely decrepit historical style, made me think of the deserted villa in "The English Patient". Poised somewhere between gothic, old barn, and Tudor. "Old pub style," Lynne called it. We talked about Emma Goldman - I tried to remember if she was the woman in "Reds", and failed - and Susan B. Anthony, and Lisa's daughter's teeth, and all manner of things.

The baby budgie now has a name: Domino. Domino is peeping now, being too young to quite understand that the cage is covered, it's nighttime, and he ought to be asleep.

I named him because I thought having a name might attach him to this life a little more firmly.