I even got myself a new hiking backpack and a new sleeping bag (I never had a hiking pack before, and my sleeping bag is so old it barely keeps me warm on a summer night...) and I'm just itching to use them. Thank goodness for friends who know what they're doing, though - I've always gone camping where you drove up to your site and unloaded the car right there. I wouldn't know what to bring :-)

I had an idea for an article, but now it's gone.

I have a question for anybody who cares to answer: is it wrong to want people to stop doing things for your own good? I hate it when people ask me to do something because it'll be "good for me". I know they mean well and are trying to help, but it still makes me just want to tell them to back off and not help. Of course, I've been told that there are people who wish they could have such help so I should take it and be grateful... maybe I'm just being self-destructive. Wouldn't be the first time. But that argument reminds me of the whole "eat your veggies, there are starving kids in Africa!" argument. There are much better reasons to be grateful or to accept having something than the fact that somebody else doesn't, especially when it's impractical or impossible to give what you have to them.

I've been busy busy writing new features for the program that runs this site - who knew that there would be people willing to pay for it? Even better, the folks paying are quite happy to let me put the stuff I write into the main distribution, so some of them may be showing up here, in time.

Oooh, I found my article idea! It was about language (big surprise), specifically about how language both reflects and affects (by reinforcement) how we think about the world. I was thinking about presenting it via our habitual metaphors ("time is money", "fighting for peace", etc) and how our society reflects it. And yes, it is related to writing because I was going to talk about word choice and metaphor choice affecting the tone of our writing, and maybe a bit of SF stuff with some examples from my novel of the society I'm describing and their habitual metaphors.

What do you think?

(I should get back to work...)