Updates
Was good to see Mary Anne this past week. A week's too short, but it's better than a weekend.
Have made substantial progress toward preparing for WorldCon; for example, have reserved hotel room for M and me, and a suite for the Strange Horizons tea party. We and Ideomancer are hoping to co-host the party this year, but I'm not sure whether that's finalized yet. It'll be SH's third anniversary! Exciting! Anyway, we're also hoping to get the tea party listed as an official programming item, but I'm not sure exactly how that'll work yet. Various things still to be resolved, including buying plane tickets. I should've done that months ago, but I still haven't worked out when I'm going on my sabbatical, which may affect whether I attend the Oregon workshop, which may affect when I leave for WorldCon. Gotta get on that soon.
Also need to read the Hugo short-fiction nominees soon (I rarely read any of the novels; no time), and vote on those. Deadline at end of month.
Had hoped to have a story for workshop this month, but that's looking pretty doubtful. We'll see if I have time tomorrow night.
Got huge roll of thick soundproofing foam. Last night, finally cut it to fit my window. Unfortunately, it tends to sag in the middle, which made me worried that it was going to fall out of the window with a huge crash in the middle of the night, and fretting about that made me sleep even less than usual. Tonight briefly tried to hold it in place with nails, decided it wasn't going to work, gave up and removed it from the window. (Also, I'd been hoping it would keep the room cool, but unfortunately it held the heat in, so my room was at least as hot as it was last night, which was too hot.) May try a couple other things to hold the material in place; may give it up as a lost cause. We'll see.
Talked with mortgage broker on Friday, by phone. He ran some numbers, and said that the price range I'd been thinking about was one I could afford without a problem. I'll go in on Wednesday and talk with him more and submit my formal loan application. On NPR tonight on the way home from Oakland I heard a bit of a money show in which they said that interest rates for loans appear to be finally moving upward again (half a percent in the past two weeks, in one case), so this really is the best time for me to do this, I think.
On Saturday, M and I drove around and looked at various Mountain View condos listed at MLSlistings (thanks to Kam for pointing out that extremely informative site to me!). Most of them weren't exciting, but one town house two blocks from my current apartment looked great. Within my price range, looks huge, shares only one wall, very easy access to freeway, apparently two "master suite" bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, all very nice. I'm trying not to get my hopes up—I still have a lot of hoops to jump through, and for all I know this place has been sold already by now, and I might hate the interior—but I did call the realtor and ask to see it. We'll see.
This afternoon, Mary Anne took a couple of us out on a boat on Lake Merritt, which was very nice; then we had her birthday party in the park. Good people, huge quantities of good food, sunshine (I'm afraid I got slightly burned, but not too badly), all sorts of good stuff.
I think that about covers everything except work. Busy busy this coming week, and probably the next couple weeks as well. I haven't been keeping up with journals very often (esp. LJs—sorry about that), and probably won't have time to do so much in the next couple weeks. Alas.
Okay, enough. I gotta go read subs.