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I never did get around to writing here about the tall ships. I would still like to, but the chances of my doing that decrease with every passing day. Briefly, though, we spent three hours out on the bay on a faithful reproduction of an 18th-century brig, engaged in mock battle (complete with cannon fire!) with another 18th-century-style ship. I got to help; specifically, I got to help pull the spanker in and out. (No, silly, it's a sail.) It was tremendous fun, and highly recommended. The Lady Washington and the Hawaiian Chieftain are still in the Bay Area--according to their calendar page, they're in Sausalito now through next weekend. If you have any interest at all in this stuff and are anywhere near Sausalito, and can afford it, you should totally go. You have to make reservations for the Battle Sail or Adventure Sail (more participation, less cannon fire) at least a few days in advance, so sign up now for next weekend.

The rest of that week was busy. Birthday stuff ate my life for the first half of the week, then sf stuff (mostly Hugo and SFWA stuff) ate my life for the second half of the week. I didn't get nearly as much done as I'd hoped.

Last weekend, I spent all day Saturday reading subs, except for things like mowing the lawn. Saturday night, I watched Goodfellas, which was the only movie left in the top 40 of the IMDB's top 250 movies that I hadn't seen.

(The only ones I'm missing in the top 60 are Paths of Glory, American History X, Der Untergang, Das Boot, and Requiem for a Dream.)

I more or less liked Goodfellas; the true-story aspect of it made it somewhat more interesting to me than the Godfather movies, though it still didn't entirely grab me. But I was interested enough in the true-story aspect to listen to the first half-hour of the audio commentary from the real-life Henry Hill (the ex-gangster whose life the movie's based on) and the real-life FBI agent (?) who worked with him after Hill agreed to cooperate. It sounded like the movie took a fair number of artistic-license liberties, but was pretty accurate about a lot of things.

So all of that led to my staying up way too late Saturday night.

Sunday morning I woke up way too early, for no obvious reason, after much too little sleep. Later, after applying some caffeine, got to have a great long and far-ranging talk with Jenn R--science fiction, community, D&D, the value of niceness, movies, all sorts of good stuff.

So what with one thing and another, I didn't get home 'til midafternoon Sunday, and then there was April Fool's stuff to look at online, and email to answer, and maybe an episode of Enterprise with Kam? And I never did get back to SH reading that day.

The rest of the week went by in a blur. I did get a bunch of overdue magazine administrative stuff done, but am still way behind on reading subs and editing.

Hung out with Kam on Tuesday evening; we went to see Pan's Labyrinth, which I'd previously decided not to watch (due to having heard that it was extremely violent), but then it turned up on the Hugo ballot so I figured I should see it. It was very dark, but actually not as violent as I was expecting, though I did look away from the screen momentarily a couple times (which I rarely do). Compelling and creepy. Good acting. There were aspects of the plot that I felt didn't quite work, but overall a pretty good movie.

Had dinner with Lola on Wednesday evening, had an SH meeting and then chatted with Naomi on Thursday evening, and worked late on Friday night and then stopped by Gerry's party for a while. Came home relatively early, but was too exhausted to get much of anything productive done.

(Somewhere midweek, I finished reading The Other Wind. Sadly, I was not thrilled with it. It's fine, but it felt padded to me; it seemed to me to have only a novelette's, or maybe novella's, worth of plot, and I wasn't as enthralled with her prose as I usually am. Tehanu and Tales from Earthsea remain my favorites of the Earthsea books.)

For a week or two, I was back in my unfortunate pattern of staying up way too late ('til my eyes couldn't stay open), but then only getting a few hours' sleep, and waking up too early and not being able to get back to sleep. Friday morning, though, I did manage to get back to sleep, resulting in something like 8 hours' sleep for the first time in a couple weeks; that was great. And Friday night I got another 8 hours or so. So I'm better-rested right now than I've been in weeks.

Somehow most of today has sped by without my managing to mow the lawn, do the dishes, or read any stories. I'm gonna head over to the Evanses for dinner, then spend the evening on magazine stuff. And maybe see a movie--I've had The Glass Menagerie out from Netflix for weeks now, and just received A Scanner Darkly. (Unusually, I hadn't seen any of the Hugo long-form dramatic-presentation nominees this year, so they're all now at the top of my Netflix queue.)

The rest of the weekend I hope to focus on magazine stuff, doing dishes, and sleeping.

And possibly working on travel plans. It's looking like it's going to be a very travelly summer. Thinking of going out to Chicago for a week in late April to early May, then to see Grandma in WA on Mother's Day weekend, then WisCon in late May; then possibly another Chicago visit in late June or early July, and a wedding in Boston in early July (and I want to spend at least a week in Boston if possible), and may try to attend a really nifty-sounding small new convention called Think GalactiCon in Chicago in mid-July, about which I'll post more soon.

And I keep telling people I'll go spend some time in LA, but as usual I don't know when. It kinda looks like either mid-June or late July are the earliest I could manage that. We'll see.