7:58 p.m. Well, I stayed up until 4:30, cleaned up the kitchen sink drainers and all those round things under the stove burners ... I was working my way over to the oven when I realized that I wasn't going to get any more writing done that evening, not with a rabid foaming Brillo pad in my hands.

I went to bed, got up, steeled myself to my own inadequacies, and pounded it out. Hooray. Now, there's this entry to create, for which I don't have the luxury of staying up all night because we have to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow. It's a big adventure: we're driving to beautiful Carmel, CA! to interview an important legend in the TV and movie-monster creation world: Wah Ming Chang.

He was the designer for the original Star Trek series, as well as creating the monsters for Outer Limits, and most cool of all in my book, the gadgets for the old movie, The Time Machine. Boy! Did I love that movie. I went to see it with A Boy, as in an almost real date, a long time ago. Very romantic.

Igor is co-writing another Star Trek book, this time about all the behind-the-scenes fun of creating the sets and the aliens and the gadgetry. We're driving up with one of the co-authors, Alan Sims, who's the property master for the show Voyager.

So, there's going to be about ten hours of driving up and down the center spine of California and I know I'll be getting in late, so I expect tomorrow's piece to be yet another example of what a babbling brook sounds like if you've fallen asleep beside it. I will have lots of neat-o photographs, however, and I'm hoping that will help a little.

I've been to Carmel twice in my life -- once back in 1968 during the Vietnam war, and once back in maybe 1988 or '89 during a book tour for my cookbook. In honor of The Time Machine, I've posted here a couple of photos from the year of my first visit.

My daughter was barely one year old, and I was living with my parents-in-law and just hating the evening news. I remember how Laugh-In could not cheer me up, how Bob Hope's platitudes gave me the willies, and how Star Trek was somehow soothing and comforting. Maybe it was the promise of a safe and exciting future for all of us that it just so sweetly took for granted. Maybe it was the little home-away-from-home feeling of crew camaraderie.

Who knows?

I do know that brilliant as Wah Ming Chang's time machine design for the movie was, it can't compete with my flowered shoe box of photos. To thumb through them is to be transported -- and there are no tinkling sound effects and glitter and no nasty Morlocks to worry about, either.

But I wouldn't turn the dials and pull the levers to go back in time, even if I could climb into a padded Victorian carriage with a spinning brass satellite dish on top. Much as I loved my babies, I couldn't possibly give up knowing the adults they have become today.