My poor lil' blog. I've been neglecting you, I know. The novel is time-consuming, which is not a surprise, but it's going well. I'm at about 5,000 words as of last night. Now all I have to do is write 10 times that. Eek. Making things worse is the alluring pull of my new mandolin, which has been a little neglected lately. Much like my apartment, which is quite the mess right now. My parents are visiting next week, though, so it'll have to be majorly cleaned soon. Majorly.

So I have all these things dividing my attention, and what do I do? Add something else. Here's the big announcement: Geoffrey and I bought an XBox last night. See you, novel. See you, cleaning. See you, mandolin. See you, everything else I've been meaning to do. It came with two games, and we bought Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, which is like crack, only more addictive. Oh, I love it. There's a 2-player game called "slap" in which Geoffrey and I can skate around with the aim of knocking the crap out of each other. Very therapeutic. We've taken to calling the XBox "our baby" and baby-talking it, which is significantly less healthy, I fear. The XBox brings us into the future in that it can play DVDs. I am so advanced it hurts.

So forgive me if my blog is a little slow this month. Blame the novel, which is a good excuse. But know that it's partly XBox' s fault, too. Stupid XBox.

LISTENING TO: ALISON KRAUSS AND UNION STATION/Live. Two CDs of live AKUS goodness. It just came out yesterday, so I haven't had a chance to get through the whole thing yet. So far, though, SO good.