Yamaraashi-chan gets her ears pierced.

Yamaraashi-chan's birthday is coming up soon, and she announced that she wanted to get her ears pierced. Before I could put any plans in motion to get that done, her mother asked me if she could do it and I readily acceded.

When she told me where she'd set the appointment, I was a little put off. "Claires?" I said, repeating the name of one of those teeniebopper jewelry places at the local mall. "Why not get one of the community people to do it? Between you, me, and Cern, we've got to know half a dozen piercers." Cern is her boyfriend.

She told me that she couldn't find a single professional piercer who would do it for an eleven-year-old. They wouldn't take anyone less than sixteen. That doesn't make much sense to me. Not to put down Claires too much, I'm sure they're okay and I'm sure Yamaraashi-chan will be fine with the jewelry she got from them. It just seemed sad to me that paranoia about The Law Coming Down has had a deleterious effect and made us go someplace second-best for Yamaraashi-chan's first body jewelry.

I met them at the store, and they had two piercers, both young women in their early 20's, each doing one ear with a tiny, disposable gun. Yamaraashi-chan didn't even blink as the pin went through. "Did it hurt?" I asked. She nodded. Then that puzzled look crossed her face and she said, "It kinda burns, now, too."

"Yeah, it'll do that." She bounded out of the chair while the woman told her about aftercare. Her mother and I read the instructions while Yamaraashi-chan bounced up in front of a wall. "Daddy! I can't see them!" She was trying to jump high enough to see herself in an angled mirror mounted on the ceiling.

"Yamaraashi," I said. "Over there." I pointed to her immediate left, where a floor-length mirror was mounted to the wall not four feet away. "Oh," she said and bounded off.

"Observation skills, kid. Observation skills."

Food!

Anyway, I left them to the rest of their weekend. I gave Yamaraashi-chan a hug and then begged off to go feed the rest of my family. I made Moroccan chicken with couscous and braised asparagus, and between the tumeric and the (cheap, powdered) saffron the chicken was a bright radioactive yellow color. Kouryou-chan was still unhappy with it and she generally likes chicken.

Project #1: Epic Fail!

I have two major projects today: repair my broken headphones, and finish the monkey bars on the kid's swingset. I have a failure of epic proportions on the headphones.

At first, I thought I'd done a good job. The lines inside are painted, not plastic-coated, so it took me a while to figure out how to scrape them clean. And then, after putting it all together, it worked. I could listen to music through my ipod. It was fabulous.

And then I tried playing Half-Life. And it kept screwing up. I kept looking at the wrong things, turning in the wrong direction. I had wired the left and right speakers wrong, and this is one of those sets of headphones that's not comfortable to reverse. Frack! I've replaced the jack three times now, and each time I lose about three-quarters of an inch of cable. It's going to be too short soon to keep doing this.

The other project: Monkey Bars

Kouryou-chan tries out the Monkey Bars

The other big project of the day was finishing the monkey bars. The crosspiece had to be bolted to the legs, holes had to be drilled into the 'A' frame, and then the crosspiece had to be attached to the 'A' frame. After that, it was a matter of digging two holes for the legs and doing a lot of back and forth with the bubble level to make sure I had it even with the ground. The ground, however, is uneven, so it doesn't look right even though my instruments assure me that it is, in fact, perpendicular to the pull of gravity.

Anyway, Kouryou-chan loved it and was enjoying swinging on it all morning.

Driving to the Story...

I wrote 2,000 words yesterday, not one of which will end up in a story anywhere. Essentially, they're backstory; my fumbling around with explaining how Orville got to where he's going.

I've been playing recently with writing "routine" stuff. That is, stories that don't really say much but are fun to write just because they're, well, routine. Writers, especially television and comic book writers, do this a lot. 99% of what they write is just meant to fulfill an expectation in the reader, and I need to master that merely routine aspect of writing on a regular basis. So, I though, I'd go through TVTropes and pick a few that I liked and try to write them.

Hence, the two Sterlings short arcs, Polestar and Curling, two short (well, relatively; we're still talking about 40,000 words when all of them ared one) arcs in which a Pendorian woman and a Pendorian man from the Einstein's Canvas, respectively live on the oldest and most diverse of the Sterling planets, Athena, and get very different views of what the planet is like. Both were, essentially, harem stories where the protagonist is seduced by a series of characters ... just because.

The settings start out isolating: Aderyn is on a cruise ship and all that entails, Orville is at a closed-down college in the far north in the middle of winter with the members of the college's trophy-winning Curling Club, each member of which has bet the others that she can seduce Orville. Orville is going to go willingly. But everything I've written over the past two days is too much setup and not enough of the main point, which is writing about people having sex, so out it goes, and we'll dive straight in later with Tudi, the team Skip. And I have to remind myself: It's Tudi, not Trudi, Tudy, or Trudy. I've written it all four ways.