Time flies
Yesterday morning, helped Twig and assorted friends load up a moving truck to move her down to Monterey. Sadness! Okay, I mean, it's a good thing for her. But she'll be much further away now.
I didn't drive down to Monterey with the others to help her unpack at the far end, 'cause I had too much to do, mostly magazine stuff. And I did get some magazine stuff done. On the other hand, I also decided at some point to take a break, and lay down with my new copy of the newly released trade paperback of Harry Potter #5, and fell asleep. Drowsed on and off for something like three hours, I think; just as well that I hadn't tried to drive anywhere far away. Was really exhausted.
Also spent a long time on the phone Saturday evening with Rob S.; the first time in ages that we've both been home and available for chatting for an extended period. A very nice long rambling conversation, pushing and popping the conversational stack all over the place.
Today, did laundry, read more Harry Potter, sat in the sun for a few minutes until a yellowjacket showed up. Ate various kinds of leftovers. Went out and got a haircut, then went grocery shopping. There was some magazine stuff mixed in, but I was having a hard time focusing on it.
I'm intrigued at the number of Britishisms in this installment of Harry Potter. I knew they'd always been somewhat capricious in deciding which terms to translate to American English and which not to (see my previous entry for comments on use of crumpets), but I'm noticing it more than usual this time. The differences page shows that they changed "he's mad" to "he's a madman" but they didn't change git or most occurrences of British plural-verbs-for-singular-groups. I thought hosepipe on page 1 was a Britishism, but MW3 lists it as a synonym for hose with nary even a usage note.
As usual with the HP books, I'm not really sure why I'm reading the series, given how much else has been patiently waiting to be read. I like the HP books well enough, but I don't love them. As usual, I'm finding the book not so much hard to put down as easy to keep reading. (I also picked up the 25th anniversary edition of The Princess Bride, after some waffling about whether I wanted the 30th anniversary edition instead, but I'm saving the new material in that book to cheer me up next time I need cheering up.)
Anyway. Somewhere in there I updated our Awards page to include the Honorable Mentions from the latest Year's Best Fantasy and Horror—thanks, Jason L., for providing that info. (I think I added one other one Jason had missed.) I still haven't updated that page with the info about the Rhyslings; hope to do that soon.
I'm pretty sure there were other things I was going to mention here. Oh, here's one: had a very nice evening with Kam on Friday night—good Indian food in Mountain View (with lots of leftovers, see above), then on the way home my tongue got tangled while trying to say something and I ended up making funny noises, which Kam noted sounded kinda like Stitch from Lilo & Stitch, which led eventually to our watching that movie again. We were a little hesitant about whether it would stand up to repeat viewing, and there were certainly parts that weren't quite as great as the first time, but it still made me laugh a lot and cry a little; a really excellent movie. (And though a couple of the most brilliant bits weren't as brilliant the second time, I felt the heavy-handed bits weren't as heavy-handed either, so overall I may actually have liked it more this time.) I'm still distressed that it missed the Hugo ballot last year by 4 votes, probably due partly to voters not being entirely clear on the details of how the long-form and short-form categories work.
