In which I’m so boring I did laundry AND cleaned my room AND went to bed early last night.

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ast weekend was the first annual Walla Walla Guitar Festival. It was a raging success, especially considering this was its first year; we sold out and everything!

I had a fantastic time, and seriously loved having so many players in town at once — I spent at least three hours just hanging out in the green room chatting with the other players.

Here’s an image of my performance with Coyote Kings. We opened the festival:

(The amazing Kenny ‘Blue’ Ray sat in with us, as did Cookie, but they’re not in this picture.)

I got hit on by — not one, but two — boys in their 20’s. It was, for reasons I can’t articulate and suspect are entirely due to being socialized, immensely gratifying.

(I went home alone, of course.) (What? What am I going to do with a boy in his twenties? Be jaded at him?) (Also, I couldn’t care less about sex, to be honest.)

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Yes, I’m still quitting smoking.

I do not want to do this, and I am not at all gung ho and positive about it: I just don’t want to have to pull a goddamned tank of oxygen around with me at the grocery store when I’m 45.

Quitting means that, for awhile, my life consists of two things: Being At Work, and Being At Home. There are no other portions, because Other Portions (read: having any kind of social life whatsoever) cause me to lame out and smoke.

In other words, I really try not to but I still bum cigarettes in many social circumstances. But, since this is Still Better Than Smoking Every Day, I am counting it A Triumph every time I get to put ‘Cigs: 0’ on my Google calendar, even if it’s only Five or Six, and not Seven, Times each week.

I’ve been smoking for a long time. (Hell, I’ve been quitting for a long time.) Baby steps. Self-isolating, new-habit-building baby steps.

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Not smoking means not drinking, because drinking makes me smoke. Cutting out both for the last month means I have extra munny.

I added up that unspent money and spent it on clothes. I’m expecting a new skirt, thigh high socks, tights, and a long sleeved t-shirt by Friday.

(Since I now ride a bike everywhere, I’ve decided to experiment with a short skirt-and-tights look for those parts of the year that are not winter. All my current skirts are floor length, and periodically get caught in the chain and threaten my life thereby. Boo!)

I also bought two cheap bikinis, because mine are older than the boys who hit on me last weekend, and seriously need to be replaced. (Of course I’m too old to hang out in bikinis a lot, I realize that, but I do wear them under other things, particularly at summer gigs.)

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Yesterday after work I didn’t want to go straight home, so I stopped for a latte. Here’s a picture of my Kindle Fire tablet and my cuppow at Starbucks:

I know, right?

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I’m reading a huge amount of non-fiction right now. All of the following are currently in heavy rotation on my tablet:

Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language by Robin Dunbar – This is the Dunbar’s Number guy, and his premise is that we evolved language in order to gossip in order to be able to manage larger groups.

The Panic Virus by Seth Mnookin – This is indirectly about that idiot who inadvertently brought back a bunch of nearly-eradicated childhood diseases by making false claims against the MMR vaccine, and about vaccination and science in general.

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner – People kept telling me to watch the movie so I did and it was okay so I bought the book thinking it’d have, like, moar insight, but it doesn’t appear to. Sorta meh about this, considering JUST HOW EXCITED people were when they told me about it.

Liars & Outliers by Bruce Schneier – This is a book about trust, society, security, and cryptography, and interestingly it’s a lot like Dunbar’s book about how humans build society.

AdWords for Dummies by Howie Jacobson – A bullshit book written by someone who obviously has been hocking crap via spam and infomercial for the past decade.

They’re all awesome (except for the last one, which completely sucks and which I will not finish. I was supposed to read it for work, but honestly, that POS is un-fucking-readable and it has pretty much soured me on the entire For Dummies franchise) and if you want to borrow any of them (in Kindle format), just let me know.

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Tonight, I’ll get off work at six and ride my bike home. I’ll stretch, read, meditate, eat tostadas, and knit while watching ancient episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I will go to bed early. I will not smoke. It’ll be awesome*.

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* Where “awesome” equals OMFG GIVE ME A GODDAMNED CIGARETTE ALREADY.