Well, as the header says, I have nothing I have to do today! Yesterday I slaved for hours trying to get the plants that were growing in the 3 inch layer of dust on my furniture out of my room!  

I hope to get some more Bonanza eps on DVD today. I want to buy them uncut eventually, but nobody has any Candysodes avaliable, so I'm putting them on DVD for myself until they realize their horrible mistake! I've aleady done The Prime of Life, and I'm hoping to get Sam Hill and The Smiler on DVD today.

I think I'll put a snippet in here of one of my novelettes... Let me know what you think on the tagboard. (no flaming please)

This one's from a novel I started about a year ago. It's science fiction, and it's incomplete... This section is pretty self-explanatory, so I won't put a header on it.

Captain Andrews paced through the next couple of hours. Once in a while, Connors turned and gave the captain a report on their situation. When there was only five minutes till contact, Captain Andrews stood by the window and stared at the approaching gas field. Soon, the whole room had gone completely silent. Only the occasional call of the countdown and the tapping and clicking of the computer systems were to be heard.

“Three minutes and counting…” a man said in a low, even tone.

The captain took a seat at the main control panel and started fidgeting with the keys. He was going to treat this almost like a landing.

“One minute and counting…” The tension grew even thicker. Some throughout the ship were bracing themselves. Others were quite confident in Captain Andrews’ and the other pilots’ abilities and Doctor Peterson’s concoction, so they remained calm.

“19…18…17…16…” the numbers rang slow and true through the control room. “15…14…13…12…11…10…” A million and one thoughts went suddenly racing through their minds as if this was their last ten seconds to be alive. “9…8…7…6…” The speckled field drew ever closer. Captain Andrews felt as if he could just reach out and touch it. “5…4…3…2…” Everyone grew tense. “1…” The front window in the control room was filled with the view of the gasses.  

The whole room was quiet for a moment. Then, suddenly, as everyone began to let their breath out, there was a great jolt of the ship. Not one person was spared from being tossed roughly to the floor.

A low, swelling buzz broke out throughout the ship. Faces turned pale in the control room.

“The spare oxygen tank!” Captain Andrews shouted as he leaped from his fallen chair and half ran half stumbled for the door. The violent shaking of the ship made it difficult to get around. Light fixtures were falling out of the ceilings of the hallways. Lamps and tables were falling down in peoples’ quarters. Beds were turning over. The only things that had not tumbled were the in-wall control panels. Everything in that room was bolted to something else.

Captain Andrews raced down the corridors, slipping and falling on the way there. In the halls were people strewn out on the floor, making it very hard to let him get past. As he met people he shouted, “Hold on to something solid! Grab hold of the ship if you can! Be careful of the falling lights!”

Only one more corridor and he would be at the oxygen room. It was sealed off from the rest of the ship by a great, metal door. When the captain reached the door, he punched in the code as quickly as he could with the jolts being so severe. “396…” his feet were kicked out from under him by a sliding pipe from the mechanics’ room next door.  He landed on the floor with a thud. But he got up as soon as his legs would let him. That leaking oxygen tank would endanger the whole ship! He punched in the rest of the code and the door lashed up into the ceiling. He staggered in and, to his horror, found a jagged hole in the side of the ship, and another one in the oxygen tank closest to it. The gasses had eaten away at the metal. Quickly, Captain Andrews opened a large box next to him and slipped on one of the oxygen masks. If he breathed in any of the fumes from outside, he might die. With the gaping hole in the ship, sucking out the air and everything else into oblivion, breathing in the gasses wasn’t as big of a deal as just breathing in general.

Captain Andrews made his way over to a control panel on one of the walls. The suction was almost too much for his human body to stand. His ears were aching, his head was pounding, and his muscles felt like they were going to just give out at any time…

He reached for the levers and keys and watched the screen above him carefully. He tried password after password, trying to gain access to the tank’s shut off valve. Through all the chaos around him, it was hard for him to concentrate. He had to dodge the occasional flying object as it passed his head. He knew he didn’t have long.

Finally, he typed the right password and there was a loud creak coming from the tank’s wall as a second layer of metal closed behind the first to contain the precious oxygen.

Once the tank was closed, the captain moved carefully to another control panel, groping for anything along the way that might steady him from the shaking floor. The throbbing buzz of the alarm grew quieter as the one from the oxygen tank quit, but was still loud enough to make the captain’s head continue pounding.

There was a triumphant thud as the layer of metal closed over the gaping hole in the side of the ship. All at once, the room began to re-pressurize itself. Though the quakes kept rocking the ship, an overwhelming sense of accomplishment and relief flooded into Phillip’s mind.

Suddenly, he was tossed to the floor. He got up and began to crawl on his hands and knees toward the door. When he reached the outside hall, he was back into the world of shouts and hysteria. He looked ahead of him to see Doctor Gildon waving his arms and shouting to him.

“Watch out! The light!”

Captain Andrews glanced up to see what the doctor was yelling about, saw a blackened light fixture hanging above him by a wire, then his whole world went black.

* * * * *

This is me, signing off