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Note to self: Stick with morning voting next time.

“Oh, it’s only a midterm election! How crowded could it be?” (Yes, that was me.)

Feh.

Katie and I arrived at the polling place at 6:30 PM. The people who got in line behind us decided to leave, have dinner, and come back. Of the two of us, she voted first. I walked out of the voting booth at 7:58 PM.

It wasn’t as bad as the last time we voted in the evening, which was either the 2003 recall election or the 2004 presidential election. That time we were still in line at 8:00, and they made the cut-off anyone who was in line by 8 PM. IIRC the local Starbucks had actually sent over free coffee for people waiting in line.

But it was a far cry from last November, when we arrived and only one person was in line ahead of us.

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Friday night: mad dash through Nanowrimo. Still nebulous, not much in the way of direction. Still behind a day.

Sunday night: Mad writing until way too late in the morning… and forgot to update my word count until after midnight, so it looks like I skipped two days. Grrr.

Work today, then most of the evening madly typing, with a break for Heroes. As of when I started this entry, I’m officially 126 words ahead of goal. Of course by the time I finish, it’ll be after midnight, so I’ll be 1500 words behind…

Edit: Realized that the numbers didn’t add up, and the progress gauge above doesn’t measure what I thought it did. I thought it measured your word count against the count you should reach by the end of the day to be on track to 50,000 at the end of the month. It actually measures the count you should have reached by the beginning of the day. So I hadn’t actually caught up, and I’m still ~1200 words behind. And I don’t think I’ll have time to write ~2900 words today.

Word count: 8922

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I’ve decided to break nearly a decade of writer’s block by joining NaNoWriMo. Technically I’ve written quite a bit — 250 posts on LiveJournal, 1000+ posts at K-Squared Ramblings, hundreds of articles about Flash comics, the Alternate Browser Alliance website, etc. But aside from some Literary Guild projects back in college, I can only think of two works of fiction that I’ve finished since 1996: one short story and one short-short story.

Part of the problem is just getting started. I’ll have an idea but decide it’s not worth writing about, or I won’t have any ideas at all. I started a couple of fanfics, but they petered out when I realized I had a setting, but no plot.

I still didn’t have any ideas for Nanowrimo. I figured I’d just start writing and see what happened. Maybe it’ll be total crap, maybe it’ll be 50,000 words that I can chop down to a decent 10,000-word story. I started a day late, but managed to get 1150 words last night. I’m still trying to nail down the genre, when/where it’s set, the main character’s background. I have no idea where it’s going. But it’s two pages, and I made myself write description and narration instead of just dialogue. (That’s always been my Achilles heel with writing — I tend to fall back on dialogue and end up with something that looks like a script in prose format.)

Word count: 1150

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After a great deal of painstaking research[1], I have uncovered the true[2] origins of the “nucular” pronunciation of the word nuclear.

Nukular turns out to be an abbreviation of “Nuke-you-la’r,” a traditional Texan leave-taking[3]. The phrase is a contraction of “Nuke you later,” and refers to the intense heat of a Texas barbecue grill. Essentially, one is saying that the other person is always welcome at a barbecue.

The word appears to have become conflated with nuclear due to their similarity, much as many people confuse affect and effect, or use infer when they obviously mean imply[4].

Nukular in its original sense has fallen out of use except in some rural parts of Texas, and most speakers are no longer aware of the saying.

—

  1. In other words, 30 seconds of making stuff up.
  2. No, not really.
  3. Or greeting. It’s kind of like aloha in Hawaiian: it can be used for both hello and goodbye.
  4. This isn’t hand grenades, after all.

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Here are a couple of photos, one just before sunset, the other just after, over the past month.

First up is a twilight view of South Coast Plaza. On Friday the 13th, we went to the nearest Borders to pick up The End of Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events and Neil Gaiman’s new short story collection, Fragile Things. We ended up crossing the bridge over to the main section of the mall, turned around, and saw an amazing twilight display with clouds silhouetted against the blue.

We stopped to take pictures. We weren’t the only ones.

Looking across a yellow-lit parking lot toward a long, low building, and above it a blue sky (fading to yellow closer to the horizon) with clusters of clouds, some dark gray, some lit from below.

Perhaps an hour later, the rainstorm arrived.

Next up is from this past Monday, October 23. I was driving up the 405 after work and noticed that there were some feathery clouds in the right area, so I started looking for sundogs. Normally I don’t find anything. It’s Southern California, after all, so the right conditions are relatively rare. (Though occasionally I see something spectacular like the full halo I caught in February.)

To my surprise, I saw a faint bright spot in the clouds, level with and to the right of the sun. It got brighter over the course of my drive, with hints of red, orange and yellow creeping in on the sunward side: a classic sundog. Once I got onto city streets, I had a chance to stop and take a picture.

The long boom of a traffic signal and street sign are silhouetted against a blue-gray sky banded with clouds. There is a bright spot in the clouds, white fading to yellow and red toward the left.