Quick life and magazine updates
Fourteen of the twenty book boxes arrived Saturday morning. Presumably the rest will arrive Monday. They're stacked in my garage now. I hope to start going through them soon, a box at a time, but given that my garage also holds a couple of boxes of papers and such from high school, I'm not going to make any guarantees about when I'll get through the book boxes.
Saturday night, we got back to my place after the movie only to find that there was no water in the upstairs bathrooms, and only a little downstairs. After much puzzled poking about, we gave up and went to sleep. This morning I happened to notice a knob/handle thingy next to a water nozzle out front, so I turned it, and the water came back. Kam suggests that one my neighbors must've used the water and turned the handle rather than the spigot when he was turning the water off. (I'm too sleepy to figure out what the right words are for the round handle next to the spigot vs the bar handle on top of the spigot.) Sounds likely. Anyway, all fixed now. I continue to be surprised at how easy it is to turn off someone's utilities from outside their house--it's also easy to get to the electrical box and shut down all electricity to someone's house.
Good customer service experience for once: I finally called Sprint to get them to retroactively cancel International Calling on my cell phone account. I added it to the account in early August, just before WorldCon, in order to be able to call home cheaply, but they neglected to tell me that there would be no coverage for my phone in Glasgow. (To be fair to them, it's possible that I just didn't have the right kind of phone or card or something.) So I didn't use it, and I forgot to cancel it when I got home. But I called tonight and spoke to a woman named Rosie (sp?), and she quickly removed all the charges for the International Calling plan, including the August charges. No argument, no fuss, and she was friendly and cheerful throughout. I was pleased and relieved. Thank you, Rosie!
In magazine news, we have just under 70 stories left to respond to before we're done done done! for the year. That may sound like a lot, but it's not much more than we receive in a given week these days, and considering that we've sent over 230 rejections in the past two weeks, I think we're doing well. We've replied to all stories received before 21 October, so if you submitted something before that date but haven't heard back from us, please drop us a query ASAP. We're hoping to respond to all remaining stories within the next week or so, but I'm not gonna promise that.
Really must go sleep now.