I'm deep into Book 3, planning where the load-bearing beams will go and pouring footers.

Character profiles, setting details, plot points and major themes are all mapped out in rough form and I'm going through, putting finer details in here and there, calling out connections and setting up resonating imagery.

The Beeble's latest music obsession: March of the Siamese Children from The King and I.

He calls it "the Prince" because I told him that the Prince comes in when the music gets louder.

I turned it off before the end of the song this morning as we got to daycare and he had a nuclear meltdown.

Showtunes are serious business.

Nora Jones' dulcet, smooth style perfectly compliments my mood today.

I struggled to find my "happy place" earlier, when I awoke before the sun, desperately dashing the 20 feet from bedroom to bathroom. But the soft, brushed flannel duvet beckoned me, so I tiptoed downstairs to grab my computer and return to its still warm embrace.

I admit no small appreciation of working in bed, alone, in the hushed pre-dawn mornings. With windows closed, I can't hear the birds' morning conversations or the thwack of morning paper delivery. But a bit of quiet jazz or classical music often accompanies my musings - or, as was the case this morning, my attempts to refashion a syllabus for a class of intro to professional writing students who desperately need refreshers in mechanics and style.

A productive hour passed; my son's door opened and he burst into my room with a joyous energy that's as much a part of this four-(and a half)-year-old's being as his impish grins and penchant for panda parties in the forts we build together.

We squiggled down under the covers and snuggled, while he recounted his dreams from last night. Apparently, while visiting his Nana and Pop-Pop, their house was attacked by zombies. But everyone safely escaped.

Patrick called. "The highways are a mess this morning," he reported. "Best to go through town and avoid 22. I think 78's closed for an accident."

Ugh. Traffic. The clichéd yet apt bane of my existence.

Ben and I motivated - he attempted to levitate from the bed and satisfied himself, instead, with a conciliatory round of jumping-jackson on the mattress. 

The normal 20-minute commute from Fountain Hill to preschool morphed into a 45-minute circumnavigation around school and city buses, broken down cars, traffic lights refusing to turn green, and 18-wheelers determindly negotiating narrow city-street turns.

Our journey's soundtrack? Benjamin rapping along to his latest obsession: Disney Junior's "Blue Ribbon Bunny" and "DJ Shuffle."  I absolutely cannot succumb to road rage with these songs and my son's lilting little-boy voice surrounding me.

"Momma, we're gonna be late," Ben worried.

"We're lucky because we'll get where we're going, even if we're a little late, and we'll get there safe and sound. Other people won't be so lucky today," I replied.

I joined him in singing the theme song to Jake and the Neverland Pirates, and we pulled into the preschool's parking lot joining the congo line of traffic-delayed moms and dads.

Now, Nora's singing "Thinking About You," and while she thinks about me, I'm thinking about Ben, and a conference call later this afternoon, and revising an assignment for Thursday night's class.

I'm tucked away in a corner at Starbucks drinking my tall, skinny (sigh) Caramel Macchiato,  quietly amused by everyone (myself included) tapping away on their Macs and smart phones.

A W-shaped flock of Canadian geese aims south in the whitish-blue sky, and I watch them disappear over the red gold maple trees. I sip my coffee, content.

For those not paying attention, Home Star Runner is so back. Including a new Number One Jam.

Homestar is the gift that keeps on giving. Ever since I first stepped into its little ridiculous yet internally consistent universe I've been hooked on phonics.

Of course, they went away for several years, without a word of explanation, as artists will do when they damn well feel like it.

They first rose from their slumber to release a Windows 98 theme. Nice metacommentary on your "enduring relevance," bros chaps.

But then Strongbad appeared on Twitter. And now we have a steady stream of new ludicrousness in our lives.

I want to write the Long Day's Journey Into Night version of The Munsters. 

I know NBC tried pushing a Munsters reboot with an addiction metaphor, and I suspect I might be the only person who saw it that way. 

Am I the only person who sees The Munsters as a metaphor for living with addiction? And, if Herman was created to be Lily's partner, what does this mean for that poor schmuck? I feel very sorry for him. Is he supposed to be her enabler, or to keep her from being an addict? 

Think about it. Of the entire family, you have three vampires, one, uh, re-animated corpse construction, and one family member who passes for human. This scares me the most. Marilyn says she's "the ugly one of the family," but she's the one who passes for normal in society. She's a niece of Lily and Herman's, and she's part of the family in a full and consistent way. So, I can see how the show creators see her as a bridge between the "normals" and the Munsters, but how does she fulfill the metaphor? 

As the NBC reboot pushed it, she's the lure for Grampa's addiction issues. which makes sense. But what does a woman who has nothing and everything in common with her family want for herself? She really could leave them, but there has to be something that she wants. which means that either she's a really functional addict, or she's never been addicted, but something else makes her want to be there. 

which would mean she's controlling the addicts for her own purposes. a family of pet vampires. jeez, who wouldn't want that? 

Herman's conflicts seem obvious. he's made to be a partner for Lily, someone who won't be afraid of her addiction but doesn't share it. Then they've got a child. If you go by traditional vampire canon, either he's a child from outside the biological family who was turned, or he's the biological product of Herman and Lily. which asks the question if vampires can reproduce. I will not use Twilight as a reference. 

I am, however, stuck on the notion of Herman and Eddie sitting in the living room quietly trying to function with the fact that Lily is addicted upstairs and Grampa is addicted in the basement. 

I actually liked the NBC reboot (even though I generally dislike reboots).  I saw a lot of potential for it as a metaphor for addiction. Since Grampa becomes younger, sexier, and stronger after he's fed, it brings up the really sad part of dysfunctional families. Sometimes things are better when they're at their worst. Sometimes the happy memories of a gleefully drunk parent or remembering the smoky smell of a loving grandparent can be the worst parts of dealing with addiction. But the episode ended with a dead body in the basement, who would certainly be missed by the outside community. 

Pretty heavy stuff for something that's trying to get PG-13 audience numbers. 

I thought about writing a story about a family with a vampire-like curse, but not actually bloodsucking, fanged creatures. Let's say they suck the breath out of you or something. and you have that happening in three direct generations of the family, plus two family members who are half outside, half in, who are either enablers or protectors, who are stuck half in and half out of the family. Maybe this is worth pursuing. 

I've been watching a lot of American Horror Story in the past week. Probably not a good idea. I'm colossally bored with everything and I seem to be able to parcel this out to myself as a cheap treat.  I watched the whole first season, most of it in one marathon on Saturday night. I started watching the second season, and I'm into it so far. I like horror as a metaphor for other things. The writing is compact and it moves fast. It's a good reminder of everything I learned in school about writing. 

We added a feature this week to help solve the "where is everybody" problem:

1. Click "Read." (You're probably there already.)

2. Just below "Read," you'll see three buttons: "following," "network," and "public."

3. "Following" is your usual feed. "Network" is, basically, friends of friends - people followed by people you follow, but not by you, not yet anyway. Naturally it shows only public posts. And "Public" is the firehose: all the public posts in the entire OPWverse.

It won't be long before the "public" feed is impractical to keep up with, which is why we added "network." But "public" will probably always be a fun way to sample the zeitgeist.

I haven't posted in a little bit, so let me say a little about Wellfleet Oysterfest.  I look forward to this event every year and even drive 6 hours each way for the weekend just to attend.

It's an outdoor festival in "downtown" Wellfleet on Cape Cod and basically you go from vendor to vendor eating plates of fresh oysters on the half shell, drinking oyster stout beer, checking out nautically oriented crafts, and listening to NRBQ. There is also a highly anticipated shucking competition.

The lemon on the oyster (teehee) for me is that many of my friends from college convene every year in what has become somewhat of an annual tradition.

It was awesome and now...back to work.

So the new OSX operating system version 10.10 shipped recently. They're calling it Yosemite. It makes a lot of things better/nicer/prettier. More in line with my sense of style.

Except the system font.  (The system font is what "system" things are drawn with. Things like menu bars and buttons. Stuff you look at all the time.)

The system font in OSX used to be Lucida Grande.  Now it's Helvetica Neue. That's bad.

Here's an image that shows the difference, courtesy of 64notes.com.

Helvetica is a regressive step for text like system captions because it's harder to read at small point sizes. It runs a little narrower in width for the same amount of text, which can be good for screen space conservation, but that is partly due to the things that make the font harder to read. And I think we can agree that harder to read is a bad direction to go for any important typeface. 

Here's a list of things wrong with Helvetica, as compared to other typefaces in its genre, that make it a poor choice for a utility font.

1. The x-height is short.  X height is a measurement of the height of the x character, and is a shorthand metric for the overall height of lowercase characters. In general, the taller the lowercase characters are in proportion to uppercase characters, the easier a font is to read at small sizes. (Yes, there is a point where this effect reverses itself.)  Small type sizes call for a proportionally larger X height.  (Admittedly, Lucida Grande's x-height is slightly shorter than Helvetica's. I never said it was perfect, only that it was overall, better.)

2. The bowls are enlarged and almost circular. The bowls are parts of the letterform that need to be distinctly round; letter with bowls are a, c, o, p, d, b and so on. Big, round bowls take up more space and, with their large interiors, tend to make text look uneven. Some roundness is needed, but an exaggerated, almost circular roundness is a specific stylistic choice. Small type sizes call for a more oval bowl shape to allow balanced density.

3. The kerning is too tight. This is where Helvetica gains space efficiency, by jamming characters together. By and large, the tight kerning is a response to the big round bowls. With all that whitespace within the characters, the only way to optically balance a line of text is to push characters closer together, visually augmenting their black lines. Tight kerning is particularly dangerous at small sizes, when characters can appear to run into each other. Bad kerning leading to character collisions is amusingly called keming for this very reason. Small type sizes call for a modestly kerned font.

4. The characters are too closed. The degree of open-ness of a typeface is represented by how much whitespace there is between disjoint features of the character. A simple measure of this is how much space there is between the two endpoints on the letter c, or between the upswing on the lowercase e and the crossbar, or between the two ends of the s and the middle sweep. A tightly closed typeface like Helvetica is harder to read at small sizes because the whitespace that should flow through the letterforms is more closed off. Small type sizes call for a moderately open font.

Helvetica is not a bad font. It's fine at large sizes, especially when used in moderation.

But it's a bad choice for a computer system font where readability at small point sizes is critical, and I think Apple has made a real mistake here.

Unfortunately, I think we're stuck with it. Apple's made a huge deal about the typography in iOS7 (where we first saw Helvetica used as a system font) and iOS8, and now it's all over OSX in Mavericks.  Crap.

Here's an interesting thing, though. You'd think if Apple was really in love with Helvetica, they'd use it all over their website, too. After all, the website is the first impression any company makes on a new customer. But, they don't use Helvetica there at all: Apple.com's CSS font-family specifier is "Myriad Set Pro", "Lucida Grande", "Helvetica Neue" , ...  in exactly that order. Which, interestingly, is about the order in which I'd like to see those fonts used.

I guess the folks behind the website still have some independence. I wonder how long it will be until Jony Ive whips them into conformance.