Stuff that's good…

I spent so much of May in a rough mood, I wanted to write a post about stuff that's good. So without further ado, here are some awesome things.

1. A new season of The Bachelorette. My favorite guilty TV pleasure…until Instant Watcher posts another season of Celebrity Rehab, anyhow. I'm saving yesterday's episode for tomorrow afternoon, once I've hit my word count goal and tackled a bit of design freelance and wine o'clock rolls around. And whenever possible, I like to complement a new-sale bottle of champagne with an episode of The Bachelor or Bachelorette. I figure if I poison both my mind and body at once, they'll cancel each other out. So far this season I'm rooting for two of the dudes—West and JP. Not sure they've got the best chemistry with Ashley out of the whole group, but I hereby declare them my top-pick foxy front runners.

2. Neko Case. I've been listening to her 2006 album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood practically non-stop for the past month. Love love love. It's already right up there in my moody-folky-chick-rock favorites list beside Patty Griffin's Flaming Red and Tori Amos' Boys for Pélé.

3. Weekly writing goals. In just the past three weeks I've switched from daily word count goals to a weekly one. It's tough to predict whether I'll be able to churn out 4,000 words before lunch, or struggle all day to type a measly 500, so instead of saying, "I'm going to write 2,000 words every day this week," I'm saying, "I'm going to write 10,000 words this week." It's an ambitious number for me, but I try to take weekends off from writing and editing (work-life-balance and all that) so if I'm still a thousand words short on Saturday morning, I can play a little catch up. I think the key has been not capping myself at 2K for any given day, as I used to, as once I'd hit that number, I was off the hook, mentally clocked out for the rest of the day. Now I think, "I hit 2,000 easily. Better push for 3,000 in case tomorrow brings a word drought." It's working great so far, and I recommend it to other writers with fluctuating daily counts. A good month for me used to 30,000 words, and now I'm looking poised to bank about 45K.

4. Dog the Bounty Hunter's autobiography. Well, his second autobiography, anyhow. I'm just about done with Where Mercy is Shown, Mercy is Given. I grabbed it randomly from the library and checked it out without shame. It's not a literary masterpiece, but it's endlessly entertaining and surprisingly heartfelt.

5. No sugar = I lost three pounds. Actually, I couldn't tell you if it's absence of sugar or my getting back into yoga and calisthenics in the past couple weeks, but I've lost weight. It's likely both, of course. But ditching the sugar has definitely reduced the random carb cravings. As with meat last month, I'm really not missing it—the odd wistful twinge as the manfriend enjoys a block of chocolate or an ice cream sandwich, but nothing I could classify as true temptation.

6. Klondike. I've absolutely re-addicted myself to Klondike. Found the nifty free Real Solitaire app for my iPad and both the manfriend and I can't quit. Every morning over coffee, over lunch, over beers while dinner's cooking, before bed… In fact, new Angry Birds Rio levels came out yesterday and we haven't even opened them yet—the deck's got us by the throats.

6. Crank 2. We watched this movie randomly because for whatever reason, Revolver (another Jason Statham movie) decided not to play on Instant Watcher. I can't remember the last time the manfriend was so delighted by a movie. We'd never seen the original Crank, but that didn't matter. This action movie was spastic, incessant, ridiculous, nearly seizure-inducing…but really fun. Plus it's got Statham in a fitted hoodie, running really fast, all throughout the movie. And you know what a fast-running, desperate man does to me. He also electrocutes himself with jumper cables every ten minutes or so, which I found oddly stirring.

Hope everyone's enjoying their Junes so far!