I am longing for gothic beauty. I desire a more gothic look and wish to grow my hair long. I'm going to stop visiting Regis for a long time till everything is all grown out, then I'm going to have my layers evened out and dye my hair black again. I want it black again. I miss the shine it created.

I also want to paint my nails white, but every night I am too tired or lazy. I hope to accomplish it this weekend.

I am too sad that I don't presently have a web home for this much-beloved journal which will soon celebrate its third anniversary. But when I get my web host transferred, I will have a home, and I plan to improve the look of the page, which I know is very Spartan. But of course the whole point of this journal is its low maintenance: ideally everything would be controlled through my phone, but that is not entirely possible.

Three years does not seem like a long enough time to encompass all the things I have done. I am so matured since I left Bethyl. It's the first time in my life I can look back and truly say I have matured. I am still pretty green and flawed I suppose, and I have learned that hard lesson of necessary indifference. I have had to stop caring about things so much and shut off my worries, because my time has become so precious I can't afford to ruin it with distress.

Winter light's address has changed.

You can now find this journal at http://winter-light.net/.

I named my ivy this morning. What a tool I have become. Her name is Yves, in honor of the Yves Rocher site I visit every day, which is ambiguously off-task. Yves is a man's name, I know.



I am melting a buttercream tart in my pot this morning. It is simply the best scent.



Today is Thursday, special day-- chocolate raspberry coffee in the trellis room.

I could make Demeter scents for each of my stories. They each have very specific scents. Maybe not buy these, but I could at least pretend. I am at a loss for things to do, so I am going to play this game.

I realized if I wore Dust and Honey together, I would have The Beekeeper. That's how I thought of this.

The Shrine
Dandelion
Strawberries
Dust (that is in all my stories)
Sun-warmed marble
Ivy

The Siren
Beach
Driftwood
Salt
Mahogany
The homey pie scents

The Glass House
Dust
Greenhouse
Tarnish
Paint
Glue
Varnish
Leather
Mahogany
(She restores art)
Violet
Rose
Funeral
Absinthe
Fireplace
Pipe smoke
Mesquite
Holy Water

I'm sure I'm missing something, but there's a lot that happens in the story. After ten drafts, there ought to be. This novel will become the center of my existence in November, at the end of which I will send it to a publisher.

Tonight I'm going to be a little more serious. I have been lazing around the past two evenings, forgetting the goals I made, and that I have some things due at the end of this month.

I am starting a more intense reading system for myself. I realized I will never read these books if I don't make goals. This month I will complete Hamlet and The Tempest. I have loved both for so long, but have never read them straight through.

Next month, my goal is to complete The Siren. That shouldn't be hard considering the story is already wrapping up and I've decided on an ending, bittersweet, in the tradition of Peter S. Beagle.

I have some very lofty goals next year. I am going to complete Finnegans Wake and understand it. I am doing this for myself, not to say I did. I have already seen a lot of beauty in the text and the Modernists sometimes transfix me in ways the Romantics never could. I dreamed of that book last night. I dreamed that after the first few pages it was absolutely readable, and that it was somewhat like The Sound and the Fury, but better. However, I do not expect to understand the story at all. I will read some preparatory texts this year before I start on it in January. There are many, many sites dedicated to Finnegans Wake.

I also had a very frightening dream last night. I looked up into the sky and realized I was actually at the bottom of an enormous cave, with sunlight coming through so that I could scarcely see the ceiling. The more I peered into the sky, the more layers I saw to the ceiling. They were very cracked and fragile, so that light came through, but I was afraid it would cave in, as it seemed about to do. I felt any move I made or sound would send it crashing on me, and I was terrified. Nathan did not seem to care and lingered, so I dashed off till I realized there was nothing but blue sky overhead. I was so happy, but realized Nathan was still under the rock, and waited impatiently for him to join me. There was a mixture of relief and horror-- I did not want to go back beneath that terrifying roof to get him, but he could come away from it any time he liked. I didn't know if I should go back.

To sleep, perchance to dream, ay there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause;
William Shakespeare, Hamlet

For once, I have very specific things in mind for my new site. I know just what I want and how I want to do it, but it is not coming together like I hoped, and I am disappointed about this.

There are a few problems.

This site must employ RSS feeds, podcasting and vodcasting, a blog with picture upload, and preferably an associated photo gallery. I want it to be completely portable, so that one can subscribe to any or all elements through an external program. Wordpress can do this.

I have Wordpress on Winter-light.net, but I must set it up myself on mont.cc.

There are two problems: they are external/presentation issues, but unless they feel right to me I positively cannot proceed. That is because if I make a change, all the work I will have done will have to be redone.

The first problem is URL. I have those two domain names. For reasons long to explain it would be far easier to do this on winter-light.net, but The Garden of Virtues doesn't sound anything like Winter Light. I don't want to put it on a subdomain because it is My Site and I want it to have special distinction. Mont.cc might be best now that I consider it. There are instructions with my registrar that can walk me through making my own database, though I sure don't want to.

But basically, A Garden of Virtues will be a perfectly portable, perfectly explicit place to harbor all of the things I love to great extent-- I will be able to email posts to it, as well. But it must be perfect, otherwise, there seems no point.

Which comes to my discussion on site layouts. There are so many unattractive site layouts. Mine have never been objectionable, but over the years I have slowly shrunk into cowardice at CSS, etc. And have used defaults.

But Wordpress is free license software, not corporate like Blogger or Livejournal, and its layouts are somewhat unprofessional. That and I have no ability to modify them. I may be able to tweak a little, but I don't know where to start. The thought of it is overwhelming.

But I have devised a plan. I will put the Garden on mont.cc and make a database, no matter how difficult. Then I will upload all of the templates I think have promise to the Garden and slowly learn to modify them. This will be long and not as gratifying as a ready-made, but I really cannot start my site until I am sure it can be as perfect as I need it to be.

I am at Waffle House today. I desperately craved a change, and some sweet tea. I am also editing Glass House.

Today has not been bad. I have not been loafing, but I will very likely have that opportunity this afternoon. When I loaf, I do not edit my stories, because they require too much concentration, so a slow day is actually not gratifying to me.

By the way "Fray" thank you for your comments as of late. There are many advantages to being an adult, or have you forgotten them? Shall I remind you?