So a friend of mine recommended zinc for my laryngitis so I went out and got some zinc supplements–but of course, I couldn’t have too many of them since even one is 300 times the normal RDA for zinc.
I swear to God, I didn’t know they made zinc-based cough drops until someone told me today!

What is the point in flying to California to see family if I can’t have a window seat to look out at the mountains?
Okay, the point is I’m now in California and seeing my amazing 13-year-old niece, and my brother and sister-in-law, but I so love staring out the window and watching the mountains below, it pains me to fly without that.
(In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m on vacation this week).

Forced, that is, by my alternator going on the fritz. Plans for a ride into work having fallen through, I decided to resort to Okaloosa Transit. It’s not my first time having to do so, and it’s a lot cheaper than renting a car for the day; on the downside, the lag time when I transfer between bus routes has sometimes left me sitting around too long if I arrive at the transition point right after one bus has left.
No such problem today though, perhaps because I left early enough that all the buses were just starting out. Took the WAVE service from near my home over to Uptown Station where I found the transit shuttle to Okaloosa Island gearing up to leave. When I arrived, I waited a few minutes before the shuttle that took me into Destin showed up. Total running time, 1 hour between FWB and Destin, plus 15 minutes for the WAVE trip. Satisfactory.
Some of the riders with me were obviously regulars, some even having paid for monthly passes. Others, like me, were temporarily stranded by lack of other transportation. A lot of them were quite talkative, even with strangers. One or two had the look I associate with the homeless (grungy, with apparently all their possessions wrapped up in a plastic bag) and one smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in some time.
I’m glad the service is available, but I’m even gladder to have my car back and running.

My short story “Learning Curve” is up on byzarium.com starting today. Feel free to check it out.

(In the Shenandoah Valley area of Virginia, in case you were wondering)
•I can carry everything for a four-day stay (clothes, laptop, books) in my carry-on backpack and computer bag, but it’s sure heavy. Possibly I should have confined my reading material to paperbacks.
•Coming in three hours late on the return trip is no fun at all.
•We really don’t have seasons here, do we? The trees were still turning fall colors up there when I arrived.

A variation on a post on books I did earlier:
A movie that made you cry: It’s a Wonderful Life made me cry for joy the first time I saw it. Remains of the Day made me weep.
A movie that scared you: The Innocents, the blood-chilling adaptation of Turn of the Screw. And Snow White, when I was a kid.
A movie that made you laugh: Only one? I’ll go with Fierce Creatures (”We have eliminated the non-event interest deficit!”).
A movie that disgusted you: Deep Throat.
A movie you loved in elementary school: You Only Live Twice, my first Bond film.
A movie you loved in middle school: Captain Blood.
A movie you loved in high school: Blazing Saddles.
A movie you hated in high school: Can’t think of one.
A movie you loved in college: Casablanca, Citizen Kane. Or for contemporary movies, Logan’s Run and Foul Play.
A movie that challenged your identity: Dark City raised a question that’s always fascinated me: Are we who are memories say we are, or are we who we really are?
A series that you love: Marx Brothers, Thin Man films, Star Wars (original trilogy).
Your favorite horror film: The Innocents. Or Carl Dreyer’s silent movie,”Vampyr”
Your favorite science fiction film: Star Wars (Episode IV), Dark City, Nausicaa in the Valley of the Wind.
Your favorite fantasy movie: Cast a Deadly Spell or Spirited Away.
Your favorite mystery film: Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely (Robert Mitchum’s shot at Raymond Chandler) or a TV film called Killjoy.
Your favorite biopic: Seabiscuit or Life of Emil Zola
Your favorite “coming-of-age” film: My Life as a Dog.
Your favorite movie not on this list: Hellboy, Speed, Double Indemnity, Young Frankenstein, Being John Malkovitch.

For several years now, I’ve been a member of Mensa, the high-IQ society. One of the best parts is going to the “regional gatherings” Mensa chapters around the country hold, such as the one I attended last weekend in Atlanta. Among the highlights:
•Playing a game called Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow, which is much like “murder” or “assassins” (if you’ve played either): Two or more players are secretly werewolves who kill a villager each night, then the survivors try to identify the werewolves in their midst and have them killed. The surviving villagers win if they destroy the lycanthropes, the werewolves win if they’re the last ones standing.
As usual, I wound up dead both games I played, but I was pleased that I managed to identify two werewolves in the first game—unfortunately it was a large group so there were two werewolves left after that—and one in the second game (when my very competitive and sharp friend Courtney became so vague about her suspicions, it was a sure sign she had to be One Of Them) before I died.
•Playing in one of those boxed murder-mystery games where everyone dresses up in character (in my case as Victorian actor “Hamilton MacTorr”) and tries to spot the killer. Great fun and a delicious meal (cold acorn squash soup, hummus with cheese, vegetables over rice), but I’m hopeless at spotting the murderer when I play these things.
•Totally kicking butt on one of the teams in a quiz-bowl contest. We won handily both rounds (Best comment overheard: “All the other team needs is a single 120-point bonus question and they’ll retake the lead!”).
•Participating in an “extreme problem-solving contest” where the referee gives teams an assortment of odd items (Play-Doh, wooden cubes, plastic eggs, PVC pipe, a miniature umbrella), a technical challenge (build six objects and a launcher that can throw them 10 feet into a cardboard box) and an artistic one to come up with a story to explain everything. Okay, artistic may not be the right word—our storyline involved our being toys sacrificing the objects to the Great Box in the Attic to prevent us being put away forever—but we must have done something right, because we won the contest, despite only landing one item in the box (one team managed five—I’m very impressed with their launcher design—but they ran out of story after about two minutes).
•Eating a lot.
•Hanging out with my fellow Mensans and just talking: Jolie and Doug from Atlanta, Terri, Courtney and so on, playing board games wandering around for food or just chatting.
Even after dragging in at 10 pm. Sunday night, I still feel jubilant.

Even though it is sometimes inconvenient to carry my stuff around in both a backpack and a computer satchel, my laptop is way too heavy for me to add it to my backpack for convenience. My back was not happy.

•My iBook
Two years ago, I used my bonus from the Log (coupled with a gift from my father) to replace my outdated desktop Mac with a new iBook. I loved it. And when my schedule became busier, I started using my laptop to write during lunch hours, or breaks before meetings, to squeeze in extra time.
And since I had it at work, it only made sense to use it to cover meetings once in a while, since it’s much faster for me to type than to take shorthand (I haven’t tested my speed in a while but it must be well over 100 words a minute by now).
Then I started bringing the ibook whenever I had an in-person interview, so that I could make sure all the quotes are accurate. Don’t get me wrong, my shorthand interviews are accurate, but sometimes I have to paraphrase because I don’t have the exact quote, and that’s a shame.
By now, the thought of tackling meetings without my laptop is positively unsettling, to say nothing of how hard it would be to find time for my own writing.
•Books.
An even stronger addiction. I love to read, and to some extent I have to read: if my schedule doesn’t permit me to crack a book, after a few days I become very fidgety. Both from lack of reading and the sense that the books I want to read are piling up while I’m wasting my time on other things (so to speak).
I have a huge library at home and an acute inability to keep from adding to it. Or to resist new books on the library shelves, even if I have a bunch of my own to read waiting at home. And I have a couple of hundred listed on my computer to get to “someday” in addition to the authors and subjects that I read regularly.
I’m a literature addict. And I like it.

Last week, Drollerie Press told me my short story “Red Moon Rising” has been accepted for an anthology of Red Riding Hood stories they’re publishing next year.
It’s the first time I’ve ever made it into an anthology, and my third short story accepted this year (the others being “Everybody’s Doing It,” to come out in Allegory, and “You Are What You Eat,” due from Tales of the Talisman). And the nice thing is, the kick of getting published doesn’t fade from repetition, it still feels great.