I Finished.

That's it, I'm done. I finished the first draft of a novel. A year and a half worth of work. Such a relief. My next move is getting it published. I'm self-publishing so I need to save some money and get it edited and printed. But I'm done. And there is one lesson from all of this. Once you finish one project, it's on to the next one. I've got some political and historical books I'd like to do, and several more fiction projects. It's fun, but it's hard too. It's like a boulder's off my back.

UC Santa Barbara

This past Saturday, the wife and I went to my stepdaughter's college graduation at, you guessed it, University of California Santa Barbara.  We left later than we should but made it in time for the taco truck for lunch, in front of the beachfront senior sorority house.  She shared a room with 3 other girls, and it was essentially the messiest room I've ever seen in my life.  We hung out for a while, then went to the ceremony.  Because they let her choose what ceremony she could be a part of we waited because she was nearly all the way at the end.  No big deal, she wanted to graduate with her friends, which is part of the college experience I suppose.  Some woman got up a couple of times to announce different things, and she seemed like taught at Hogwarts instead of being an administrator at a university.  Her accent was very heavy.  It was kinda over the top it seemed, because she was singing the praises of the people who put the chairs out for the ceremony, so we could sit.  It was sort of a Braveheart speech for chair putter outers I suppose.

Now for the funny part.  I'm only 12 years older than her even though I'm her stepdad.  Her mom is 12 years older than me, and my wife's other daughter is only 10 years younger than me.  Not to worry, I didn't marry for money.  I married for looks.  The wife was a model when she was younger, and she was the prettiest woman I'd ever known, so I scooped her up fast.  We get along really well, and she takes care of me, and she's my trophy wife.  It's funny though because the first I went with my wife back before we were married, some friend of my stepdaughter's asked if I had a brother.  Ha.  This time after graduation, one of her roommates came in drunk as a skunk, and seemed like she was trying to start a threesome with another roommate and that girl's boyfriend.  We were moving my stepdaughter out of the senior house and taking her stuff back home, and this drunk girl asked my kid's boyfriend, who his friend with the beard was.  She was talking to about me.  I just smirked.  See? I'm still very popular among college girls, but apparently they have to be stupid drunk to think I'm attractive.  I've been making jokes about this for the last couple of days, it's kind of an ego boost, but mostly I just like teasing the wife about it.

Memorial Day Weekend

Why is Harry Potter on every week?  There's nothing else on for Millennials to watch besides this nonsense?  Eep.  At any rate, I got a new laptop this weekend and spent half the weekend trying to get old devices to sync up to it.  How irritating.  I've got a general idea of how to use most things technology, but they really need to make stuff for normal people.  After several hours of unsuccessfully trying to figure all that crap out, I took to writing.  I'm on the last chapter of my novel.
So far it's going really well, I did more prep work for the last chapter than I did for the whole rest of it, and it shows, at least to me it does.  I think I've got just another month or two to wind it up, and figure out how to get it edited.  I've really tried my best with this, and I'm eager to finish.