Chapter Sixteen

"I'm supposed to be meeting someone for dinner here?" Bitsy asked the restaurant host.

Looking at her in a way she didn't think seemed judgmental but couldn't help worrying might be, the snappily uniformed android replied, "And do you have a reservation?"

"Oh, yes! Of course!" she said immediately. Then, looking around and seeing how packed the place looked, "I mean ... I assume so. I mean, it certainly looks like the kind of place you would need one. I mean, based on other placed I've been to where you'd need one -- not because I've never been to a place where you needed one."

"And the name?" Neither his tone nor his expression changed at all. But now Bitsy felt even more like some kind of judgement might be lurking in them.

"Bitsy. Bitsy BO9."

The host's brow dinted every so slighly in the middle. "Hmm. I'm afraid I don't --"

"Oh, haha, sorry, you want the name its under, not my name! Probably it would help if I gave you that. It's Cord. Cord 76S."

"Ah," he said. "I see it here now. The other party has not yet arrived, but if you'll follow me, I can take you to your table."

She started to say it was fine and she'd just wait in the receiving area, but then noticed there didn't seem to be much of a receiving area, so she nodded and gave a smile she hoped wasn't too tier-in-the-exabytes and walked after him when he turned into the dining room.

YEEEEEHAWWW, TEJAS!!!

that is all. whew, all those capital letters took a lot out of me!

and another thing ...

the same thing as i just wrote about writing in my book goes for getting to my blogging goal for the year, doesn't it?

so bing-bang-boom!, here's another post. now i can average a smidge under 7 posts a month and still hit 80+ for 2026 -- and there's still two days of october left for me to get even farther ahead of the game!

that was easy!

whoo, baby. literally a whole freaking month i've been back to my doofy old mode of, i ought to write a new chapter in my book! but what if i try to start and i can't think of anything good and i just ramble and i can't put together anything worth calling a chapter? 

and then i looked at the date on last chapter and looked at the calendar and thought, holy cow. i could've written half a sentence a day and by now there'd be enough to be way longer than plenty of my old chapters were, right?

so i braced myself and i opened a new post and i typed "Chapter Fifteen" as the title and almost as quick as slipping on a banana peel and hitting the floor, there the chapter was. i mean, it's not long. but i like it!

i soooo need to remember that basically this writing thing is just about actually doing it, not about whether or not any bit of it that you do is going to be enough.

Chapter Fifteen

Finally, the workday ended, and Bitsy found herself standing outside of the Sitemapson Lincorporated building without even a memory of closing down her workstation or tidying her cubical or taking the lift or walking out through the lobby.

Oh no, she thought. What if I didn't shut it down? Or didn't tidy the cube? Or ... but then she realized she'd obviously taken the lift and clearly walked out through the lobby, so probably she'd done the rest of her end-of-day routine too.

I am out front, aren't I? A look back up and over her shoulder reassured her that she was, except ... Do I know what the back door looks like? I always come out the front! What if the back is exactly the same?

But no, half a block down the street she saw the tube station, with the MacDiodel's right across from it. The world outside the back door can't just 100% mirror the one out front, can it? Then she realized that if it did, she could just take the mirror tube train to the mirror restaurant and have dinner with the mirror Cord, and if she glitched the whole thing up, it would be mirror Bitsy who had to deal with it after that.

Oh, Loj. Her feet still didn't seem to be moving. She looked down at them, then looked up, then had it dawn on her that people were having to shift their paths to step around her while she stood like a frozen vid-call image after a signal dropout. With a deep breath, she shook herself and turned toward the tube station.

Hopefully, along the walk there, she'd remember where she told Cord she'd meet him for dinner.

vote!

here in the great state of tejas, we have a lot of good-hearted, well-meaning people and a few absolute rot-brained varmints. somehow, a high percentage of the varmints have gotten themselves elected over the years, and they keep saying we need to re-elect them or else all the problems we're facing are going to get worse. and it seems like every time an election rolls around, the problems they say we're facing get farther and farther from real-life problems like school funding and infrastructure, because the varmints can't talk about those being problems since they've had, i dunno, like 30 years in power to fix them and they haven't done it. so now they're running on the supposed problems of boys being turned into girls at school and ordinary people being crushed by a wave of new taxes, neither of which anybody is actually proposing.

and you know how it got this way? not by most texas voters voting for varmints, but by a huge chunk of voters staying home and letting the varmint voters win. seriously, we don't even average 50% voter participation for the century so far.

so just go vote, people. early voting gives you tons of time to do it, and if everyone just got out and did their civic duty, who knows, maybe the varmints would get the thrashing they deserve.

the look

we had another one of our talks. you know, those ones you readers are probably getting kinda tired of where he's all worried he's not doing enough.

and this time i looked at him and i said, "you know, babe, maybe you need to put more energy into appreciating the absolutely incredible fact that we have a life together."

we.

have.

a.

life.

together.

those are five crazy-big words, you know?

one after another all in a row, they add up to something enormous. something so much bigger than whether or not we've averaged at least x minutes every day chatting or y hours per week gazing soulfully into each other's eyes or z days that included us getting it on.

and then i said, "take a good long gander at this look i'm giving you right now. see it? that's my 'we-have-a-life-together' look. if you see this look on my face, you know i'm thinking, 'wow.' and once you know that, i sure hope you'll instantly be thinking and feeling 'wow' yourself. okay?"

and he said it was more than okay and we just spent a second giving each other a 'wow' look, and it's been a pretty damn good day since then.