Window shopping

Captain’s Log, Stardate 03.14.2005

Knee update: I went to the doctor today for a checkup, and saw his assistant. I’ve been concerned because there’s still inflammation in my knee joint, and it’s been almost 4 months since the surgery. She said she’d talk to the doctor about it tomorrow and call me. Sometimes he suggests laying off the PT to see if that causes the inflammation to go away, but I don’t know if that will work because lately I’ve been pretty active outside of PT.

At PT today, the therapist did ultrasound and some sort of electrical current on the joint. Hopefully that will make the inflammation start to go down. I’ll know by tomorrow, probably.

Writing: Mt. Hermon conference starts this Friday! On Thursday night, I’ll be at the Santana Row Borders bookstore to help out (and hopefully learn a bit, too) at a booksigning for several of the ACFW authors who are attending Mt. Hermon. That should be lots of fun.

I had a good brainstorming time at work today while I was counting cells on the FACS cytometer. I worked on the GMC for the characters in my “mall” Chicklit for the anthology project.

My theme is “layers,” or in mall terms: Window-shopping versus Walking inside the store. My heroine “window-shops” when she interacts with people. She sees the surface personality and stereotype the same way a shopper looks at a window display, which is geared to attract the largest number of people but isn’t necessarily indicative of everything inside the store.

My heroine doesn’t bother to foster relationships and dig deeper, discovering layers in a person’s personality. Like a shopper who won’t go into a store to see what other things are inside, because the window display doesn’t show anything particularly spectacular.

So heroine feels disconnected with most people, because she compartmentalizes them based on their surface personality, or window display. She doesn’t realize that deeper layers of their personality might resonate with her. She thinks the surface is all there is to the person.

I thought I was being clever, but seeing the theme in black and white looks strange. I’ll have to develop this more.

Diet: Doing very good today. Had a fabulous salad from YaBon coffeeshop--chicken (juicy and not dry), gorgonzola cheese, walnuts and a really great balsamic vinaigrette dressing. I felt so healthy. Yay me! Dinner was soup and vegetables. Yay me again! My sweating at PT took care of my latte earlier today (snicker snicker).