author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Turns out food coma is a thing, even on vacation. Especially on vacation. Thus the Friday Fictionette which I said to expect on Saturday will come out on Sunday instead (which you probably saw coming), but not for lack of trying. I'm working on it right now. But it's 10:30 at night and I am a realist.

My day was pleasantly full of travel. I like public transportation, for the most part, and I got to sample several flavors of it today. I'd especially been looking forward to the Greyhound portion because all their buses are now equipped with wi-fi and electrical outlets. But of course that wi-fi is only as good as the signal strength where the bus is traveling, and signal strength is poor on mountain roads. But even knowing that, I was surprised by the stretch of I-70 where I could download and install a Java upgrade, play Puzzle Pirates, and yet be unable to load web pages. (This is why no blockade post today.) So I played Puzzle Pirates and read ebooks until the Greyhound arrived in Vail.

Twenty minutes later I arrived in Avon on the westbound Highway 6 bus, and my annual week of "run away and hide from the world and get lots of writing done!" commenced. It was sunny and bright and warmer than I'd expected, the forecast snow not having arrived yet. I figured I'd better enjoy the weather while it lasted. Besides, I'd arrived too early to check into my room. So I wandered down the street in search of dinner.

Used to be, my first meal in Avon would be at Finnegan's Wake, the Irish pub next door to Loaded Joe's. Used to be. Some years ago, I arrived to discover Finnegan's Wake was gone and had been replaced by some barbecue and sports bar thing called Montana's Smokehouse. I've eaten there once. It didn't really speak to me.

I think my new Welcome to Avon ritual is going to be China Garden. I already make sure to get there at least once per stay; why not on Day 1? Today I had the crispy duck and a pot of tea, and I consumed it all. (OK, maybe not all the fried rice. But close.) And of course this gluttony occurred after a day full of travel, which itself included the altitude spike of Vail Pass and also the ant-under-a-magnifying-glass factor of several hours in buses on a sunny day. Thus the food coma to which I succumbed the moment I got to my room.

So the "get lots of writing done!" aspect of the week is starting a little later than usual. But it is starting.

I still don't have the hang of Wednesdays. Their insistence on coming after Tuesdays is one problem--although, admittedly, last night's roller derby practice was much lighter than usual, so I didn't wake up feeling beat up. But I had another rough night of constantly interrupted sleep, which kind of killed my morning.

That, plus, I had dreams. They were compelling dreams. They compelled me to go back to sleep to remember them better. They resonated oddly with all the novel planning I'd been doing, especially the idea of a "company store" environment in which Delta, one of my protagonists, is trying, futilely, to work her way out of perjury debt.

OK, so, it goes like this: In Balvion, the country in which the novel takes place, contracts are not legally but inevitably binding. Inevitable, like gravity. When you sign your name to a contract, you are offering it up as collateral. If you fail to uphold the terms of the contract, you lose your name and identity. You can theoretically earn enough to buy it back under a new contract, but you need a job to earn money, and to get a job you need things like a resume and references and a work history--which you no longer have because your identity isn't yours anymore. You can't even claim your own high school diploma.

So what you do is this: You rent an identity. At ruinous interest. So you can work a crap job that pays less than minimum wage and play along with the fiction that this will somehow make it possible to scrape together enough money to buy your name back.

That's the situation that "Delta Echoes" is in. It's not her real name. We won't know her real name until later in the story. Meanwhile, I'm having nightmares of being beholden to shady corporations that will compromise me morally if I continue working for them but will seriously punish me if I escape their evil clutches. Fun!

Meanwhile, after my appointment at Cafe of Life, I went back to that terrible super buffet. I AM NOT ASHAMED. It was strangely less terrible this time. Even the green-lipped mussels and the so-called seafood pie were acceptable, although this is possibly because I was choosier about where in the pan I selected my portion from. But I suspect it really isn't about the food. It's about the routine, which I find comforting and comfortable. I completed one of my writing tasks over my first plateful of vaguely OK food items and a bowl of perfectly adequate egg drop soup. Then, as a reward for accomplishing that writing task, I picked my way through a bunch of crab legs while rereading a few chapters of The Goblin Emperor. (This included the chapter with Maia's nineteenth birthday, which meant a little bit of crying in public. I am not embarrassed. That scene is beautiful and wrecks me every time.)

(Also it is strange looking back at yesterday's blog post and my use of the term "brainstorm" while in the midst of rereading a novel in which that word is used as a synonym for a cerebral stroke.)

I will admit that sometime during the sleeplessness of Monday night I was attacked by an intense and specific craving for lumps of crab meat mixed into butter and eaten with a spoon. That's how long I have been looking forward to my Wednesday evening dinner at China Buffet. Have you met my brain? This is my brain.

And now I have discovered that they have ambrosia on their dessert table--you know, the chunks of fruit and the mini marshmallows in some sort of creamy matrix involving either sour cream or yogurt and also the unconfessed sins of childhood? They used to serve it at my school under the name "pineapple delight." I was routinely the only person at the table who actually liked it, so everyone gave me theirs. This is one of my ultimate comfort foods, and this restaurant has it, and I am no longer ashamed of returning. So there.

Hey! hey! guess what?! It is still, by the skin of its teeth, Friday, and here is a Fictionette: "Aya's Last Spell" (Patron-only links: ebook, audiobook), which is not nearly as sad a story as the title makes it out to be. Although maybe there's something sad about anything that's the last of its kind, provided that the thing in question is in some way a good thing. The last warm day of fall, for instance.

But hey, despite all my whining about winter in yesterday's post, I am here to tell you that there is at least one thing that does not suck about it. I went grocery shopping this morning, and there they were, piled up in a gorgeous and juicy display in the front of the produce section: It's satsuma season. Satsumas are serious comfort food. I bought a whole bunch of them. Also beet chips and plantain chips and peanut butter pretzel bites and pistachio nuts. I am all about healthy snacking this weekend.

Also a jar of "harvest pumpkin pasta sauce." It's orange. It's pasta sauce. It's a pasta sauce that is orange and made of pumpkins. I do not understand. But I have faith enough to commit to upending it over a stir-fried heap of spaghetti squash innards for lunch tomorrow.

There is also leftover butternut squash soup in the refrigerator. Soup is a cold-weather joy. Accordingly, I have stocked supplies for making udon noodle bowls too. Oh! And there's milk, for making hot chocolate. Which reminds me, the Hammond's candy display at the Niwot Market had these darling little hot chocolate stirring spoons--basically, a little wooden spoon stuck in a block of chocolate coated in peppermint sprinkles. You stick it in a cup of heated milk and stir until it's a cup of peppermint-flavored hot chocolate. I should go get some on my way home from practice Sunday, 'cause we've finally got hot chocolate weather now.

FINE. I suppose winter can stay.

There's this particular style of Chinese restaurants in the U.S. known as the "super buffet," which is exactly what it claims to be: an all-day all-you-can-eat buffet of about a bazillion different things upon which you stuff your face until your stomach begs for mercy. I have been to some very good ones. Recently, I went to a terrible one. I went back to it tonight. I'm still not sure why.

I was first introduced to the concept in my home town of Metairie, Louisiana. My parents took my husband and me out to Mandarin House on Severn Avenue. It was perfect, they said, because everyone could have what they wanted no matter how different their tastes. This was true. Dad filled plate after plate with spicy boiled crawfish (available year round, as far as I can tell), boiled shrimp, and oysters on the half-shell. I followed his lead, but made room for green-lipped mussels with dynamite sauce, black bean mussels, and sushi. Mom had a lot of some sort of fried chicken dish. And John had mac 'n cheese and mashed potatoes and dinner rolls.

(Mandarin House was the first place I ever had raw oysters, by the way. Up until then, despite priding myself on living up to the Justin Wilson joke about how Cajuns will eat "any damm t'ing", I'd never been able to make myself put that big, wobbly, unappetizing blob in my mouth. But I'd had a bit of a practice run with little raw bivalves at Legal's Seafood during a visit to Boston, so I gave it a shot. Thus the monster was created.)

Then there's the Great Wall Super Buffet in Lakewood, south of Denver, on Wadsworth just a little ways north of Hampden. I treated myself to a big lunch there coming home from a scrimmage with RMRG just before heading to playoffs. (Damn, I still haven't done the D2 round-up post. Seems a little anti-climactic now that Championships are done, though.) I was astounded at the extent to which their buffet contents matched those of Mandarin House. They even had boiled crawfish, although not, it must be said, very well spiced. If there is a spectrum that ranges from "picky eater" to "adventurous omnivore," if you'll forgive the American-centric description, Great Wall was a few clicks past Mandarin House toward the adventurous side.

Turns out that super buffets also exist on a spectrum from Must Eat All The Things to TERRIBLE, and in the latter end of that swimming pool is Longmont's China Buffet. I cannot bear to link to them for fear that they will read this. I feel rotten saying bad things about them, especially considering that, Gods help me, I will probably go back. Again. But I am afraid it's true. Their food is terrible.

The jalapeño beef was tough. The salmon, swimming in its own juices on the steam table, nevertheless turned out to be dry. The green-lipped mussels were dessicated and their mayonnaise sauce had congealed. The "seafood pie"--sort of a mock-crab casserole, really--looked delicious, but its seemingly crispy-crunchy edges turned out to be made of leather. The hot and sour soup had a flavor I didn't care for, though that might have been the not-so-fresh chopped scallions I was fooled into garnishing it with. Even the little cream puffs on the dessert table were awful, the shell unpleasantly tough and chewy around a half-frozen filling. I guess they were defrosted badly. There were sushi rolls. Vegetarian, it looked like. Mostly cucumber. They were sitting under plastic wrap. I did not venture to try them.

I admit, the king crab legs were just fine. They were served with drawn butter that was also just fine. I cleaned out about five crab legs into a small cup of drawn butter and ate it all up with a spoon. That was just fine. My mistake was in eating anything else.

And I went back today.

The notion crept into my head as I was thinking about my appointment at Cafe of Life, and about how I needed to stay out and get some work done. I have not had a great start to this week, work-wise, because I keep screwing up my sleep cycle. I lost my Tuesday afternoon to food coma because I can't seem to keep from eating the whole serving of Five Spice Wok at Jin Chan Zhang. (Seriously, I have got to learn to either package away leftovers before I start eating, so as to blunt temptation, or just save Jin Chan lunches for days when I can afford the afternoon nap.) So I stayed up until 3 AM last night to get everything done. So I slept until noon today. So I really, really had to not collapse after my appointment. And one nice thing about a super buffet is, they typically don't seem to mind if I take up a table for several hours, nibbling leisurely and poking at my computer and not requiring much in the way of frequent refills or table-clearing.

I kept trying to talk myself out of it all day. Go literally anywhere else! Don't go there! You will eat a finite amount of meals in your lifetime; why waste one on bad food? These were good arguments. I agreed with them completely. And I still kept planning to go. Even as I was locking up my bike in front of the restaurant, the smart voice in my head was saying, "It's not too late. You could still go to Leenie's Cafe next door." But apparently not-smart me was in charge of the body today.

And everything was just about the same as it was last time. I tried items I did not try last time, and they were bad too. I employed strategy, by which I mean, I watched the kitchen doors for new trays to come out, hot and fresh and theoretically not yet dried out. The next fresh tray to come out contained a battered fried chicken. It was hot and fresh, true, but it consisted of a small, sad, bland nugget that rattled around inside a bready shell that managed somehow to be mushy and crispy at the same time. Strategy failed. (Also, I do not like fried chicken at a super buffet. It is simply not interesting enough to take up stomach real estate in an all-you-can-eat situation. Strategy failed twice.)

New strategy is to more or less just eat the crab legs and maybe one or two other items that might be improved by drawn butter. The stir-fried button mushrooms were OK that way. Also the flan did not seem to have come to any harm, so dessert was not a total loss.

The best strategy would surely be to not go back. And yet, I'm pretty sure I will. Because of nostalgia. Because of being able to get work done. Because they are right there and I'm stubborn. Because, despite all the reviews on Yelp that seem to agree with me, the place still gets busy around 6 PM--that many customers clearly see something worthwhile there. And because I guess all-you-can-eat crab legs for $11.99 is not actually a bad deal.

But you should probably not go there. This is not a recommendation. This is an admission of weakness. Don't be fooled.

First order of business: I have finally posted the Friday Fictionette for October 21. It is "Shoulda Been a Wizard" (for subscribers, here are full text links for the ebook and audiobook editions). It's about this guy who wants to relive his past and get it right this time. He actually knows just enough magic to do it, too. All he needs is a volunteer.

I was having trouble coming up with a title, so I went back and riffed off of one of my writing prompts, which were the song titles "Boot Scootin' Boogie" and "Shoulda Been a Cowboy." Virtual Writers has been doing a lot with song titles and song lyrics for their writers' dash prompts lately, which is, oddly, doing very little for me.

Which leads to my second order of business here, which is this: I am bored of the whole Virtual Writers plus Watchout4Snakes plus Tarot Card writing prompt spread. I think this is why I am having a damn hard time forcing myself to do my daily freewriting.

Trying to freshen things up, I did a Google search for "silly writing prompts" and I got Scholastic's "Story Starters" which are awesome. It's a lot like Gabriela Pereira's "Writer Igniter" with its four-column slot machine design, only you get to choose from four genre or genre-like categories first. Also the Scholastic version is aimed at kids, which is perfect given that I want to inject some playfulness into my daily freewriting.

I tried out the Fantasy category and got "Write about a magical event with a lionhearted elder who brews a love potion." I had a lot of fun with that. The results might even turn into November's Week 3 Fictionette.

Third order of business: I'm hungry and, thanks to my very dear friend in Salt Lake City, I have tamales in the freezer. Also I have green tomatillo salsa in the freezer thanks to my CSA. Also I have a microwave with a defrost function. DINNER HERE I COME.

I was wrong--today was not a day with no appointments. Thankfully I remembered before it was too late. Tuesday! Tuesdays mean farm share! So I went and picked that up around 1:00 PM. There were sweet bell peppers and hot poblano peppers and another little half pound baggie of tomatillos and a lovely bunch of carrots and some tasty green chard. Dinner was peppers stuffed with a mixture of sausage, rice, and kale. The leftover stuffing mixture will get rolled up in those chard leaves. The fridge is full of tasty veg and life is good.

I was moving unaccountably slow today and also trying to do all the chores along with my writing, so I didn't quite get to everything I wanted to accomplish. But the daily gotta-dos got done, and "It's For You" went back out on submission. It joins the one I sent out last week (a drabble newly retitled "A Few Words Before We Begin") in the field. I'm sending stories out, y'all! That's what a writer does! (Also the laundry and the dishes are clean, and tomorrow I might just vacuum. RUN AWAY.)

I bought an ebook copy of Rachel Aaron's 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love and have been reading it this afternoon. I wasn't sure at first whether it would hit the spot with me; my problem isn't lack of word count when I'm generating draft, but rather lack of progress when I'm revising. Still, I'm finding many things she says apply. Or might apply, anyway.

I'm thinking very hard about her theory of not-writing, which is to say, writing avoidance--put simply, she says it's because you don't like what you're writing. That can be either because the story is boring, or you're off on the wrong track, or the scene you're working on doesn't actually belong in the book, or you've got the wrong main character; something, in any case, is wrong. Once you put it right, she says, the writing will be enjoyable again and you won't avoid it anymore because you'll want to do it.

Like I said, I'm thinking very hard about it. It makes sense in terms of the short story I'm having such a hard time revising, but its applicability is less obvious as regards my difficulty starting the work day in the first place. Maybe the answer is "You're bored with the routine of doing morning pages and then freewriting and then a half hour on the week's fictionette." Maybe I need to shake up the daily task list, reorder it, put in the number one slot whatever seems the most fun. Maybe the daily freewriting would be more fun if... something. If I changed it up somehow. I mean, it's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be playtime. Maybe I'm just bored with the current crop of writing prompts and I need something more silly and playful.

Anyway, Part II has a chapter called "Editing for People Who Hate Editing," which sounds like it just might be something I need to read. I'm looking forward to it, anyway.

The Friday Fictionette nominally for September 23, 2016 but functionally for September 30 has gone up. I put it up last night, but then I pretty much collapsed, so you get the blog post today. It's "Living It Up," and, as mentioned before, it's mostly a shameless hate-fic in reaction to one of my least favorite stories of recent years. (Because of the Puppying of the Hugos, I feel I should specify that nothing makes it onto my "least favorite stories" list if it didn't stand a chance of not being on that list in the first place. Otherwise the list would be unmanageably long.) But as I wrote it and had to give examples of the main character's boyfriend being a jerk, I wound up coloring him in with the broad brush I obtained as a small child being bullied by my older cousins and one particular uncle. The rest of the family had various enabling spins on the bullying; one of them was that I clearly had no sense of humor or else I'd find the bullying funny. So... that kind of informed the development of the antagonist of this fictionette.

Look, I never promised you subtlety in this exercise. You get an ebook and an audiobook version depending on your subscription tier, you get them four times a month, you get sentences and paragraphs that more or less make sense and add up to a story-like object, and you get a glimpse into my writing process whether you want it or not. You don't necessarily get literature.

I had a nice long day in Metairie after my nice long day on the train: rental car adventures, traffic on I-10 West, the last 15 minutes of game play (which is to say, the better part of an hour) of my high school's homecoming game--which they won by a comfortable margin and with several showy interceptions too--and then dinner courtesy of My Father the Cook. (Venison and green onion sausage with a side of garden-fresh okra? Yes please thank you any time!) Stayed up late talking with Dad and exchanging stand-up comedian recommendations--not the best of ideas, as it turns out; he didn't get Maria Bamford, and I'll be happy not to hear any more of Anthony Jeselnik pretty much ever. But we both partake of the geek/nerd/fan nature and want so much to share with each other the things we enjoy! In any case, we didn't part ways for the night until well past 9:00 PM. Generally I consider that downright early, but after all the day's activity and travel I was ready to drop.

Oh, right, predictions for Thursday. They were good! Everything happened as hope--including skating in Chicago! There was no rain falling when I got there, though it clearly had fallen (and was still falling in Naperville). I did indeed skate the Lakefront Trail to Navy Pier. The trail's paving is not the best for skates--it's very bumpy--but it goes all the way there. Then a very diligent security guard made me de-wheel myself on the pier itself. I met my friend for dinner at Giordanos by the Children's Museum and we had a far too short visit before he had to drive me back to the train station.

Once I got settled on the train, I spent some time trying to prepare "Stand By For Your Assignment" for submission. That story is giving me such trouble. I can't seem to make the words do what I want them to do. The story goes clunk, clunk, clunk. I think I need to stand back and give it more of an eagle's eye once-over, ask myself what I'm trying to do with the story overall, and only once I have the larger structure pointing in that direction will I be able to get any joy on a line-by-line level.

I'm terribly afraid I'm stuck in the perfection trap, though. The one where you never finish and you never move on because you can't seem to get it perfect. I keep telling myself, just let the story stand as a record of where your craft is now, so you can move on to where your craft is trying to go. But the story needs to be at least publishable before I let it go, right? In theory?

Anyway, that was Thursday night. Friday morning, instead of doing more work on "Stand By...," I played around with a new story idea inspired by an anecdote I overheard, told by one of the train staff (assistant conductor, maybe?) in the sightseer lounge. I'm not going to get this right, and I have no idea how true it is, but it began, "This town we're passing through here, Stanton, Iowa..." Seems there was a woman who traveled from France to the U.S., took a job as a nanny for some family somewhere, but turned out to be unsuited for the job, possibly due to mental illness, also possibly due to not having the proper immigration documents, and she just... ran away? Disappeared into the midwest, I guess, and wound up in Stanton, Iowa. And that's where the immigration officials finally caught up with her, months later. Or at least found out what became of her? I'm not sure; I just remember that the last thing the storyteller said, which seemed like a complete non sequitor, not to mention at right angles to reality, was, "I guess the feral cats got to her."

*Blink. Blink.* Feral cats? Did I mishear? I don't know, but that day's freewriting exercise had the writing prompt "The feral cats of Stanton, Iowa." (It may also have been influenced by having recently read "If You Were a Tiger, I'd Have to Wear White" by Maria Dahvana Headley.) It seems likely to turn into a real story, too. And that's good, because I need to stockpile submission-ready short stories this month--but that's another story which I shall tell at another time.

This week's Friday Fictionette will trickle on into the weekend, because it's been One of Those Weeks. So instead I present you with a picture of this week's farm share, also late for the same reason. The sharp-eyed among you will notice the little baggie of tomatillos next to the jalapeño and are possibly wondering "So, when's salsa night?" Salsa night will be Sunday. John and I will make salsa, eat salsa with chips, and possibly watch the latest episode of Steven Universe. Details are still up in the air.

Tonight was zucchnni, garlic, kale (or possibly kohlrabi leaves), and sausage night. With bits of farm bread added to the pan at the last minute to soak up the sausage grease. The sausage was cheddar bratwurst.

Tomorrow night will be marinated chicken night. I have all this beer I didn't drink in time to enjoy as beer, so I will enjoy it as a marinade. The chicken will be a bunch of boneless, skinless thighs from the SALE bin at Whole Foods. Like it just knew I had all this beer to marinate it in, or something.

Next week is looking a little less likely to be One of Those Weeks, because of Deliberate, Assertive Action and also I'll be getting on a train for New Orleans. Traaaaaaain. Five days back home bracketed by hours and hours of just me and my computer on a train. BLISS.

About this, more later, inevitably.

The Friday Fictionette for September 16 is up. It's "The Starring Role" (subscriber links: ebook, audiobook) and it's about fairy tales and protagonizing in them. It's not a lot of fun, really. Lots of ashes to sweep. Lots of fiddly grains and seeds to sort. And then at the end of it all, what do you get? A prince, sure, but is he really all that and a bag of Zapp's Cajun Dill Gator-Tators? Also, fairy tales generally don't stock Zapp's potato chips. *Sad.*

It's bout weekend for the Boulder County Bombers "Bombshells" team--tournament weekend, actually. Two days. Seven teams. A heck of a lot of roller derby. We went in this evening and taped the track, set up tables and chairs, erected a scoreboard projection screen, and arranged other assorted props and items of furniture. The place is set up and more or less ready to go. Skaters begin checking in bright and early tomorrow morning, and the first bout begins at 10:00 AM. The last bout of the day won't be over until at least 7:30 PM, and then we do it all over again on Sunday. YOU WANT TO BE THERE. No, you do, you really do. I'm going to be there. So should you.

Dang. This blog post is a complete and balanced breakfast, isn't it? Writing, derby, grains and legumes, potato chips. All it needs is coffee or something.

I'm just back from viewing D2 footage with some of my teammates. I have thoughts. I will probably incorporate those thoughts into the long-delayed blog post, tentatively titled "What I Did On My Summer Vacation in Wichita," that I've been meaning to write for going on a month now. I will probably write it tomorrow. Definitely not tonight. Tonight I do not have any thoughts. It is late and I am tired. I am also inordinately full of beer, having hung out at Skeye Brewing again after my chiro appointment and having purchased a growler of their Jinxie Wheat. It's a little more bitter than I generally like my wheat beers, but that did not stop me from drinking it all afternoon and evening.

(When I do write that long-delayed D2 blog post, I need to remember Whiskey's comment about back-block penalties and chiropractic treatments. Not now. Tomorrow. I'm just dropping this parenthetical here so I stand a chance of remembering tomorrow.)

Note: Turns out, the restaurant I ordered the crispy duck from last week was Spicy House. I ordered from them again today. They're on Eat24.com, so I placed my order over the internet while I was still at Cafe of Life enjoying a post-traction ice pack on my neck. Food arrived maybe five minutes after I arrived at Skeye. Super convenient! I had the Seafood Delight this time. Its portions of jumbo shrimp, fish, scallop, and squid are exceedingly generous.

Anyway, I arrived home tired and a little tipsy, but not so much of either that I couldn't accept a little help from Papa Whiskey with my push-up form. We got to talking on the drive home about what I need to be a more effective blocker on the track, and, in his opinion, it's more muscle. He made an off-hand comment about "if we could just pack about 50 pounds more muscle on you," then, after acknowledging that this was quite probably an exaggeration, he noted that, realistically, when I go to block an opponent and my timing is good, my technique is good, but the execution still somehow just fails, it's a matter of strength.

Honestly, says he, what I really need to do is start lifting. I say, cool. Please to suggest some baby steps toward incorporating lifting into my life. So what we come up with is, let's start with 10 push-ups twice a week, then add some kettle-bell hell in a couple weeks. So we spent a few minutes finding space in the house where we could have me do push-ups and swing a kettle-bell to make sure my form is correct, which is to say, likely to work the target muscle groups and also unlikely to injure me.

I should point out that extra-curricular one-on-one strength-training is not in the job description of the Boulder County Bombers Head Coach position. That John tolerates, even encourages, my continuing to pick his brain at home, is rather above and beyond the call of duty. I recognize this and appreciate it accordingly.

But anyway, so, that's why Fleur is just that much more tired tonight. Yay?