If you didn’t already know, the correct time for the US is always displayed at time.gov and there are some links from there about how “standard time” and later “daylight time” developed. Before “standard time” there was no concept of time zones, and noon was periodically established in each particular city when the sun reached the high point in the sky. The various “city time” systems were synchronized in the early 1900’s by federal law, under pressure from the train companies, if I read it right.

Anyway, I went to bed at 11:45 and set my mini-alarm for 8:00 am. This means 8 hours of sleep, or 9 hours if the clock sets itself sometime after 2 am pdt becomes 1am pst.

This worked, the alarm clock set itself. However, I still woke up at 5:45 due to the automatic cat-litter box getting stuck and scraping over and over. Of the three self-setting clocks, only the one by the bed got the right time. So I triggered the wall-clock to try and set itself again (that eventually worked) and went back to bed for a couple hours.

I didn’t really get up at 8:00 but I got up at 8:45 or so. I did dishes, paid bills, and spent the rest of the day browsing the web. I read The Transmundane by Trip, it’s really quite good.

6pm, Miche and I went to dinner at Rockin Tacos (which is now renamed “Muchos”). I talked about my ideas for writing. I had already thought about a contemporary/fantasy mix or crossover, and Transmundane made me start thinking on these lines again. I want to stay somewhat close to the contemporary setting, because if I have the story set entirely in a fantasy world, then I have to start dreaming up populations, continents, rulers, rebels, economy and production, etc. But, imagining something in some level of detail is not the same as research, though it still takes some prep-work. Perhaps a “contemporary fantasy” (akin to Buffy the Vampire Slayer) might be more quickly jump-started into writing… it’s a lot easier to figure out what a character’s “motivation” is if I already know some details about his social, policital and economic factors.

After this we went to see “13 Ghosts”. This was OK, if a little bit on the gore side.