azurelunatic | Sand in places where no sand should be

I woke up still plot-stuck, and commenced various forms of to-do-list activity, included but not limited to sorting papers and dealing with the patio.

I live within wind-blowing-sand distance of sandy cliffs, if not the beach itself. There's a lot of sand loose around. A lot of that sand winds up in the wind-shadow of my building. Guess which side my patio is on. Multiply this by leaves, rain, and how the fence keeps that guy with the leafblower on the outside, and there you have it. So I have a repeating-item task to go sweep the mofo. This is one of the tasks that I blow off until it becomes enormous, and then it's all soggy too. I finally got myself a shovel, which is the correct tool. I will eventually have a usable patio that I use.

Talking with

sithjawa eventually unstuck the stuck plot: I'd been emotionally wanting something connected to the threesome thing, but none of Amber's possible blurts for that were sufficiently distinct from what Max actually said for Julia to notice the difference. So it had to be something wildly different. And I was focused too much on Amber being worried that Max would betray her crush on Julia, when Amber was about to do that well enough on her own. So Amber had the "Julia likes Max and Max just rejected her cruelly" scenario playing out in her head, and her babble in the wake of that assumption was more than enough to start outing her to Julia.

In the middle of that banter, I realized that at some point Julia had actually seen Max naked. Do you know how hard it is to get two 16-year-olds who aren't attracted to each other particularly (Julia because she is only attracted to women; Max because he has her firmly in the friend zone by this time and if "bros" was the slang it is today, they would totes be bros) naked together? I mean, sure, a ritual that has to be performed skyclad or the symbolism won't be right, or just a plain old skyclad just because ritual, or locker room shenanigans -- but Amber would be there for any sort of group ritual, so that would not work for the banter, and Max and Julia basically only see each other at work so far, and outside of work Amber is usually there. With some help from IRC and Twitter and I think people in IM, I figured that a skyclad ritual would be the best way, just I needed an excuse. "Practice" was the best thing, just impromptu whatever. So we got an excuse for them to hang out, and then started building so nudity would follow.

In doing so, I realized what they started out practicing, and that meant that we were going to explore the physics of Max's magic. GUYS, I JUST THREW THE EXPLODING PIE IN FOR A LARK, AND MAX IN FOR SOMEONE TO BLAME, AND LOOK HERE, IT'S THE PLOT.

IRC shenanigans are amazing. Bec was relating the antics of her boyfriend vs. dinner.

Tonight was a write-in, and omg traffic, so close and yet so far away. OMG traffic. But I made it there in something like time, and good fun was had by all. There was some bouncing-of-ideas back and forth, and I added some of the people on the NaNo forums. Good times.

Then I came back home and there was more writing and also a lot of Solitaire. And now it is past bedtime.