Things I have done to pass the time until Jared gets here

Stained my new coffee table. Using some of the wood stain generously given to me by morethings5, I picked the darkest color and went over the whole thing twice. It is imperfect, you can still tell the difference between the marked and unmarked parts of the surface, but it looks a hundred percent better and is now closer in color to the end tables. I am quite pleased with it.

Reading Stonesoup, an awesome, beautifully photographed blog on keeping a minimalist kitchen recommended to me by captainecchi. My anti-stuff nature and desire to eat deliciously but healthfully is appealed to by the notion of keeping a small number of essential kitchen tools to prepare things with just a handful of tasty ingredients. She recently released a free e-cookbook that looks lovely, and I have especially enjoyed her interesting, thoughful entries on topics like how to season your cooking and the best things to have in minimalist kitchen.

Worked on my new cowboy-themed larp bid for Intercon, The Stand. I am currently working on fleshing out a backstory that will provide a mystery to solve and will hopefully be a plot that affects a large percentage of if not the entire game. One notion that occupies me strongly as a larp writer is that in-game mysteries must be solvable-- there must be evidence of some sort that is possible for players to put together to figure things out. The trick is making is that evidence neither too obvious nor too obscure, a surprisingly difficult thing.

I've also been doing a lot of staring at the clock, but that's less interesting than the other things. Just five and a half more hours to go.