Limited access
In the morning, I'm heading up to Seattle. I seem to have neglected to mention this here. My grandmother's 95th birthday will be on Monday, and she's having a party on Sunday, and I spent a long time waffling about whether to go but finally earlier this week decided to go. I'm flying up on Saturday, seeing college friends Saturday afternoon and evening, seeing family on Sunday, flying back on Monday morning—that was the only way to get the cheap web fare. (I waited long enough to decide that regular tickets had become prohibitively expensive.)
Tonight, sometime in the half-hour or so before my deadline for sending a 'zine for the APA I'm in (to avoid minac), my cable modem suddenly went on the blink. (Literally: when it's not connecting properly, it flashes a little orange light.) I tried power-cycling and such, but no dice. Called the APA's editor, who graciously offered to give me a month's grace on the minac thing. (Thanks much, C!)
Occurred to me that I could dial up using the dialup number for work, but couldn't get it to work. Occurred to me that if I wanted to have any access at all this weekend, I was going to need dialup. Reopened my AOL account. I could've just signed up as a new user and gotten a free month, but it seems hardly fair to use their service every time I need dialup and never pay them for it. Even though their approach to billing is ridiculously unfair in various ways. (Like, when I was trying to find a way to decode Alex's AOL mail files, before concluding that I oughtn't to be reading his mail, I ended up signing on to his account at one point. I didn't actually use the service at all except to try to find some information in their help system, but they charged me for a month's use anyway. I explained the situation to them, and pointed out that I'd only signed on once and that was to search for a help file, but they pointed out with implacable logic that I had in fact used it so I owed them money. Grr. But y'know, I've used their service for a few days for free more than once, so I'm hardly in a position to complain.)
So anyway, I set up AOL. I always forget how slow phone connections can be—if I ever put too much graphics-intensive stuff on these pages, remind me. It took two hours to download the latest version of AOL for OS X.
And sometime around ten or fifteen minutes after the download finished, my cable modem came back. A relief.
Anyway, this entry was really meant to be just a quick note that I'm going to be offline most of the weekend, and that if I do manage to get online it'll be briefly and with a slow connection. So if anything needs my attention urgently, better send it before 10 a.m. Pacific time on Saturday.
(Note, for any authors reading this, that that means you may not get autoresponses until Monday for stories submitted over the weekend. Sorry about that.)
(One more thing, speaking of submissions: this month will almost certainly be our highest-ever submission volume. Unsurprisingly. I'm guessing we'll end up somewhere around 250 subs for the month, up from last January's record of 226. We'll see.)