So what have you been up to?
Not posting much, clearly! I spent most of July on sabbatical and have been back a little over than a month. (No, I'm not an academic--I work for a tech company that has occasional ridiculous benefits.) I spent four weeks traveling in Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway, and Sweden before dropping my friend B. back off ( Read more... )

Summer is settling in beautifully! It's been a busy few months--my brother was married in the spring (one of them, at any rate. I have quite a few), which was wonderful, apart from the fact that I was a complete wreck. I am not a crier, in general, but apparently I have my exceptions. I'm very fond of my sister-in-law--both my sisters-in-law, now ( Read more... )

Goodness, has it been four months? I'm around here and there, mostly lurking. I haven't felt particularly fannish or sociable for a while, but I'm sure I'll come back around again eventually. I have the tidal kind of online engagement.

Every so often I make mental bookmarks of things I'd like to post about, then never do. Here are some of those ( Read more... )

I can't believe summer's over already; it's been a much pleasanter one than the last few years, other than some severe weather at the beginning. I didn't even regret the lack of air conditioning.

Every few years I remember libraries exist, check out far too many books at once, and end up with overdue fines. This time around I also remembered I can ( Read more... )

Recently returned from upstate New York, where our first customer flipped the switch on the project I've been working on for about a year and a half now. It was more fun than stressful, to my surprise--we'd anticipated most of the major issues, and the only bug we identified was something I couldn't possibly have found in testing. I got hugs from ( Read more... )

Despite the writing and far too much work, I've been doing a lot of reading. I finished two books in the last two days! Not sure what I'll pick up next, but these were both very good.

( Broken Homes, the fourth in Rivers of London - beware heavy spoilers )

• I left work early today, which is notable because it is the day before a major deadline, but I'm done! So done, in fact, that I've spent more of the last two days putting out other people's fires than working on my own projects.
• I've just arranged to take cello lessons, which I have wanted to do for approximately ever and am now actually ( Read more... )

Not dead, just tired. Ugh. I've been curled around myself like a hedgehog for weeks now in one of those funks where being with other people is just so exhausting (though not quite as exhausting as being with myself). Even online interaction feels like a painful effort. I'm at the point, though, of slapping myself upside the head and telling myself ( Read more... )

If you're calling your sister at one in the morning because it's urgent that someone pick up your girlfriend's car from the shop and deposit it at the Park and Ride sometime in the next four hours, you might want to reconsider phrases like "I need you to" in favour of "please, please, please would you help me out here, and also I love you". Frankly ( Read more... )

I've been tearing through the Vorkosigan Saga. Bujold is one of those authors (like Pratchett and Heyer) positive accounts of whom I have from all quarters received, yet somehow I just haven't got round to her until now. And hot damn she can write.

As it turns out, the entire series thus far is available for free download in pretty much any format ( Read more... )