Last night, we went out to eat (Tam wanted to make steaks but were too tired after sleeping for only 4 or 5 hours). I remember at one point standing in the parking lot at Easton, looking at the closing CompUSA and feeling the wind buffeting at me, not hard enough to push me over, and not constant. I thought, for a moment, that I could smell the salt in the air. The temperate and wind was just like standing at the entrance to the beach, right before you can see and hear the breaking waves.

I stood there for a moment, while SexyWife and JB discussed the weather. (Maybe I do need a tag?) While she went into Archivers, I walked down to Barnes & Nobles. I didn’t buy anything, although there was a book or two that intrigued me. I’m still looking at Practical Poser 7. With the discount it’s about the same as the Amazon price, but I hate buying technical books — either I don’t really sit down and use the tools I bought the book for, or the books themselves are trivial. They are often trivial after reading them, anyway. If they were 10-15 dollars, like a trade paperback, it’d be cool, but they aren’t.

I finished Unshapely Things, which was a decent mystery, with some interesting characters. Hopefully there’ll be another one, although this one didn’t draw me as strongly as others. The world was sometimes more interesting than the main character (who wasn’t uninteresting). I am about halfway through Don of the Dead, when I found myself chuckling at an odd reaction I had.

Don is firmly in the mystery genre, with a female protagonist. It isn’t a romance novel, so there’s no guarantee that she’ll find love by the end — which is fine with me. So she meets up with this (evidently hunky) doctor who is only interested in her brain (and head injury). Later she meets an (evidently hunky) cop who is mostly just interested in her body (and lets her know). I was at first a bit startled at her language about them, describing how they looked, her reactions to them, what she wanted to do with them, etc.

And then I laughed at myself. These guys are so obviously the femmes fatales for our protagonist. She’s following the detective novel format for that, just reversing the gender roles. And for some reason it bothered me — it didn’t upset me, it just didn’t ring true for just a moment. Given the women I hang around, it really shouldn’t surprise me, and once I realized my reaction it didn’t bother me again, but every now and then I guess we trip up on our societal conditioning.

Tonight, if things go the way I expect, Tam and I have the night together. I think we’re going to go up the Starbuck’s at Easton and flirt with the pleasantly large-breasted BBW barista there. It’s always fun to flirt, and BBWs need all the flirting they can get (or we can give them). I dunno what else we’ll do, we really don’t have a plan. It’ll be nice to be alone together, that seems to be a bit of a theme this week.

Tomorrow, probably as close to midnight as I can make it (assuming I’m up and not distracted), there will be a story. The first in an ongoing (and mostly unplanned) series, called Girl #16180. And that means you’re getting a post on a non-work day! Smart, ain’t I?