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Inquired with my tax accountant yesterday as to the status of my tax return (which wasn't filed before April 15 due to delays and bad decisions on my part, exacerbated by communication difficulties between him and me); he thanked me for the reminder and said he would let me know when it was done. I pointed out, relatively gently I hope, that that was what he'd said a month ago when I asked. He didn't reply. Today I got four different phone calls, to two different numbers, from someone in his office, telling me that my return was ready and I could come pick it up. Only I no longer work in the area so picking it up ain't so easy. I called back to let them know that, but got no answer at one of their numbers and an answering machine at the other. They never did answer my question from some time ago about electronic filing; I provided them with a voided check, at their request, to allow them to file electronically, but apparently now that's not an option and I have to mail in the forms.

Meanwhile, it's now been over a week since I paid for some music at the iTunes Music Store, and still no word from their customer service people as to why I still can't download said music. Last Thursday night their autoresponder said they would get back to me in 24 hours; after getting no further response, I pinged them again on Monday; Tuesday I got a note apologizing for the delay and saying they would look into it and get back to me within "24 to 72 hours"; 72 hours expired this morning, so I wrote them again and got the autoresponder saying 24 hours.

(I'm getting an eerie sense of deja vu about all that, 'cause last week I wrote to Amazon to ask about a missing downloadable free music file. I'd written to them a month previous and had been told that they would look into it and would resolve things in 2-3 weeks; so I wrote again last week to ask what was up, and got the same 2-3 week autoresponder; so I wrote again asking if perhaps they could escalate this request, and they wrote back to tell me the song in question was no longer available. Come to think of it, something similar happened on the iTunes Music Store a while back: I kept writing them to ask them to provide the correct sound clips for disc 1 of the album Platinum Glenn Miller, and after several months of my pestering them about it, they removed disc 1 entirely. Now they're selling disc 2 of a 2-disc set for the full album price without any indication that the CD is a 2-disc set; full price, half the number of songs. (If you buy it at Amazon, you get 40 songs for $20 instead of only 20 songs.) It seems to me that customer service requests about a problem with service oughtn't to be answered by a long period of no response at all followed by removing the service entirely and providing no indication that it's been removed. But I guess nobody asked me.)

On the plus side, restaurants have been very good to me this week. Naomi and I went to Aperto in SF, which turns out to be only about a 20-minute walk from my new office; I think it's been four or five years since I was last there. Yummy food still, though a bit smaller entree portions than I'd remembered, and the chocolate souffle for dessert is still excellent. Also, good service and good conversation. Later in the week, Kam and I went to Rangoon in Palo Alto, that Burmese/Chinese place that we tried on a whim a year and some ago and then, for no good reason, never went back to; a similar combination of good food, good service, and good company held true there as well. In particular, the paratha (like green-onion pancakes without the green onion) and Kala Hin (veggie curry) were delicious as before, and the green beans we tried were fine though not spectacular.

In magazine news, we discovered that 20 rejections that we'd sent to people at hotmail addresses over the course of a three-week period in late May and early June had disappeared in transit. We went through the awkward exercise of emailing 25 people to ask them if they'd received our responses to their stories, and then re-sending the rejections to the ones who hadn't received 'em. No fun for anybody. Particularly no fun for the authors, to learn that we'd sent them rejections a month ago that never showed up. I hope it was just a temporary thing, but we're not entirely certain that the problem's gone now. I guess my only real advice about this is to keep an eye on the Rumor Mill and/or The Write Hemisphere; I post news of what date we're caught up through to the Rumor Mill roughly once a month, and Scott then posts the info to Write Hemisphere. Unfortunately, a bunch of authors who submit to us don't seem to be aware of those sites.

(Have I mentioned lately that email used to be reliable? These days, between spam filters throwing stuff away and service outages and malware and denial-of-service attacks, it's probably a miracle that any email gets through at all. Just what we needed: another reason for editors not to take email subs.)

I'm sure there's other news (like the fact that I entirely missed the Summer Solstice as it went by last weekend), but the only other thing I can think of offhand is that as of yesterday, Kam's on an extended visit to LA to help out her grandmother, who had a nasty fall recently. While her helping her family is admirable, it does leave those of us in the Bay Area forlorn in her absence. Alas! Also, it may mean she'll miss the imminent birth of her niece.