‘zup?
I keep meaning to post an update, honest. Busy.
Lessee. Work gave me a pen in honor of my third anniversary of working there. One more year and I get a sabbatical! Not holding my breath, though; last time I was on the verge of a sabbatical, I got laid off—three days short of my sabbatical eligibility.
Pens also figured semi-prominently at WorldCon; I think I neglected to mention that Hugo losers each get a pair of fairly nice pens. Mary Anne has the SH ones, of course.
Unrelated: two people I know had sudden major kidney problems Labor Day weekend, to the point of needing hospitalization. Scary. Fortunately, both are out now, and recovering. And then one of the submissions last week prominently featured a kidney. Odd. I don't often think about kidneys in the course of my day-to-day life. Early last week, Mary Anne and I visited one friend in the hospital, where we discovered that in California, even hospital coffee stands feature things like raspberry lattes.
Speaking of California (ooh! segue!), the weather's been lovely lately. Temperatures probably in the 70s, nary a cloud to be seen, none of that nasty precipitation one hears about in less enlightened climes. No doubt that'll change as the autumn (such as it is) progresses, though.
More miscellany:
Kam successfully completed her first Burning Man experience. Now she's off wandering around the country. Last I heard, she was in Idaho, but she might be in Salt Lake City by now. It is difficult to tell where one's itinerant friends are at any given moment. A la Heisenberg, one may know their state of mind but not their precise location, or something like that.
Lots of reading, a fair tad bit of editing (though the latter's going very slowly indeed). Last week ended up joining a three-way tie for most submissions in a week, at 65, and this week looks like it might be pretty far up there as well.
I admit that I've been reading the fourth Harry Potter book (I'd been waiting for it to come out in paperback) in my spare moments, usually at times of night or morning when I'm too groggy to focus on editing. I can see what people meant about it being a bit darker and edgier than the others; it almost seems, so far, to admit to a certain degree of moral complexity. We shall see whether that continues. As with the previous books, I find it not so much hard to put down as easy to keep reading; even as I sigh at various predictable and/or obvious and/or contrived bits, it moves along smoothly and reasonably swiftly. It's going far faster than any other book of this length that I've tried.
There's more (Mondegreens, politics, Jon Carroll, upcoming workshop, etc), but it'll have to wait; I need to go edit.