The end of August, already. Sheesh. Tempus fugit and all that.

So Penny went to have her tubes checked out yesterday, and they were both already out. One was gone completely; one was still in her ear, but no longer in a position where it might do any good. (The doctor went in with tweezers to pull that one the rest of the way out. Go on and guess how happy that made Penny.)

The doctor called her a "tube-spitter," and said that there was fluid in one ear again already, so she's on a run of antibiotics, and she'll go back in three weeks for a special hearing test. If the fluid is affecting her hearing, they'll want to operate again, and this time they'll put in special tubes that are less prone to falling out, or something. If her hearing is unaffected, I guess we just have to keep a closer watch on her for ear infections again.

Sigh. The whole reason we got the tubes was the ear infections. Well, maybe now that she's a bit bigger, they won't get infected so readily.

I think I finally have an idea of where my new story is going, which is good, because it's hard to write a story when all you have is a character's past - and I didn't even have this character's past. I had her parents' past.

But now, I think I have a future for her. So that's good.

Of course, in a fit of guilt over a long-standing work project that wasn't getting done, I broke it down into pieces and assigned the pieces to myself over the next week. My hope is that if I can get into the habit of doing this, then I'll be able to regularly schedule writing time and working time, and neither will suffer.

But we'll see. My job is a bit fluid; there aren't often projects that can easily be broken down into pieces like this one.

Kind of a slow news day, I know. But you probably don't want to hear about the Buffy episodes Matt and I watched on DVD last night, or about the wart-freezing kit I bought while I was at the drugstore. And that's all that happened yesterday, really.

--Liz