Saturday, July 6, 2002
Today I slept most of the day while Patrick wrote. He's got 5 pages left in his final revision. We had an early dinner at Eric's—yum! We hadn't been in a long time, so it was a treat. We had the appetizer platter, Eric's special salmon (with black beans, red bell peppers, and asparagus), mu shu pork, steamed rice, tea—all for under US$30! I love getting the bill at Eric's. We did the Find Your Spot again, this time choosing our answers together and choosing in between when we disagreed. Our top 5 cities were: 1. Little Rock, AR; 2. Baton Rouge, LA; 3. Alexandria, LA; 4. Portland, OR; 5. Salisbury, MD. Patrick said, "Baton Rouge sucks!" We looked at the rest of our results, and they were almost all cities in either Oregon, Louisiana, Maryland, and Arkansas. Because of this, we suspect that their quiz logic picks certain states based on the data, then picks certain cities within those states. If this is true, we feel it is a flawed methodology because we don't necessarily consider a state-wide rating more important than a city's rating. Indeed, there's no way to weight any one question or any of the 8 different sections in the quiz. I did more relocating research by looking at race data at the U.S. Census website and at sodomy laws and domestic partner protections at the Lamda Legal Defense Fund website. Patrick's writing has picked up since he's gotten over his flu—by midday today he had 3 pages left, and as we went to bed shortly before midnight, he had 2 pages left. He's now at the last scene of the novel.