We all know that I am not a language peever, but I reserve the right to hate the word meme anyhow ( Read more... )

It's just a regular workday.  I was late getting to work, but not because I was crying or anything.  I just poked around.  I didn't think about it till I heard a siren screaming up Laurel Street at about the same time that it happened.  I hardly ever get real sensory flashbacks when I hear sirens or see firetrucks or ambulances or any kind of ( Read more... )

So this year Frank has to start taking the long-acronym licensing exam for US physicians, in order to be licensed in the US and countries which recognize a US license as well as being licensed in the Eurozone and countries which recognize the Eurozone license.  We went through a lot of twists and turns in the spring to find out what he needed to do ( Read more... )

I just noticed I've started to read publisher's calls for submissions again.

I think . . . I think I'm moved from the deep purple into mauve (in the nineteenth-century coding of widows' weeds).

I'd been playing around with an idea about a drummer boy and now suddenly I have I think a full-fledged, entirely new novel in Fantasy Not-Poland Not-Early-Twentieth-Century, involving inheritance, sibling rivalry, a magical wild sow, a foresty marsh, and the aftermath of war. I wasn't even thinking about fantasy when I started. But while I was ( Read more... )

I used to get a lot of Chinese manufactory spam, which mostly rendered in punctuation marks and obscure symbols, with just enough English in there to understand that some very earnest people wanted to get me to order up vast quantities of nylon O rings or sealed bearings ( Read more... )

This will show my age:
one of my favorite songs ever is Bert Jansch's "Bright New Year," which I thought of all the time with respect to my own mother. Here it is covered by a young man who gets it okay.

Bert Jansch - The Bright New Year ( Read more... )

actually made up October 4-5, 2009, and sung to a tune somewhat reminiscent of "The Lark in the Morning," but more subdued, and with a bit of chorus thing tagged to the end of the verse ( Read more... )

Last night I went to bed early and in my own bed -- for the first time in almost a year. The cat and dog were more than delighted. The dog was so excited she tried to hump ythe bed. The cat just purred all night and now he is upstairs yowling at me, trying to get me to go back to bed ( Read more... )

So I have one of those newfangled bagless vaccuum cleaners. I thought the point of advances in cleaning technology was to make the house cleaner while exposing the cleaner to less direct contact with filth, but it doesn't seem to be the case with this contraption. I'm tapping out the dust from the paper filter after every use as directed, leaving ( Read more... )