Zzzz...

I don't know why I'm so tired today.

Well, actually, I do. And for once, it's not Penny's fault.

To start with, Matt's boss got laid off yesterday. Well, he's not actually gone yet; he's working until the end of the week. But then he's gone. He was deemed "redundant" by the tofu-brained upper management.

(Yes, sorry. I'm aware that's an insult to bean curd everywhere. Tofu at least would have the sense not to try to fix what isn't broken.)

I wonder if the office is going to fall apart. Personal loyalty to Matt's boss is what has kept a lot of people in that office from fleeing the hideously poorly-managed corporate. How long can you keep working for a company that announces layoffs every single fall?

They're reassuring everyone that it's not a preliminary move in shutting the office down, but Matt's concern is that in about six months they'll decide to move the office up to DC, where corporate is. And they'll offer to relocate everyone, and those who don't want to relocate will be told, "Best of luck in your future endeavors," and then Matt will be out of a job, because it would take a very huge amount of money to convince us to move anywhere near Washington, DC.

And I don't think that concern is entirely unfounded.

So there was that to worry about.

On a lighter note, there was K.T.'s 7th Sea play-by-email game. Yesterday's moves were... exciting, to say the least. I was actually physically shaking as I wrote up my responses.

Let me be clear: I trust K.T. as a GM. Implicitly. She's not going to kill the party just to prove to us how tough the world is. Hell, she's not going to kill us at all if there's anything at all she can do about it.

So when we're facing a horrible storm and a waterspout prepared to smash the ship into splinters, and on top of that my character peers into the distance and spots the most feared pirate in the world right there... I trust that K.T. isn't about to have us all messily slaughtered. I trust that he'll hail us as fellow pirates, or that we'll get away in our wonderfully fast ship, or... something.

But it was still a thrill.

And then finally, as I was getting caught up on my journals and blogs (I tend to let them go for a while and then get caught up all at once) and I hit this. (If you don't feel like following the link - it's a call for submissions to a post-apocalyptic story anthology.)

I'm not sure why it surprised me that she opened it up to everyone. For some reason, when she'd said she was planning on soliciting submissions elsewhere, I thought... I don't know what I thought. But I do remember thinking, Ooh, I'd love to write something for this.

And now I can. The only question is... well, can I? Pondering this kept me awake for a good hour after I'd gone to bed. I don't want to make it a first-person thing. I don't want to write as if it were me in this situation. I don't even want to think about me being in this situation.

But of course I did. I laid awake and thought about how I'd feel, and how scared I'd be, and what I'd pack, and how I'd pack it, and - gosh, that's a lot of stuff; how would I move it all? And like that. So far, I have yet to actually come up with a plot that might be useable.

Eventually, I had to get up and get a glass of milk and force myself to concentrate on something else entirely, just to get to sleep. Which is not easy, but eventually I managed it.

But I'm sure all that stuff was still floating through my subconscious, because I had a hell of a restless night.

So, yeah. Tired today. Not Penny's fault. Penny, lately, has been just amazingly wonderful. Occasionally whiney, but nothing really especially terrible. She's full of life and fun and exploring. She keeps getting closer and closer to real words. (She says, "Kah! Kah!" now when she sees a duck. Which is as close as she can come to "Quack! Quack!" And the list of words she understands is getting longer every day.)

And, of course, she's learning all the things that a geek-gamer child should know, like how to handle a sword and a blaster.

--Liz