It weighs about 3 1/2 pounds. Seems like it ought to weigh about ten, considering it's been incubating for a year and a half. Now I just need to come up with a snappy cover letter to go with it and wait 4 months for the publisher to send me a form letter to say they're not interested, if I understand the process correctly from what I've read on ( Read more... )

Michael and I went to WalMart to get groceries and a 6-pack of beer. The checkout clerk wouldn't sell us beer because although he had I.D., I didn't have mine with me. Store policy - if 2 people are together, both get carded. Michael asked what would happen if he came in with his 13 yr old daughter, then. We were told that if we'd said I was ( Read more... )

Today I went to the library to pull stuff from the stacks to photocopy, and they were selling a big table of old textbooks for a couple dollars each. I ended up with an armload of 8 ~100 yr old medical textbooks, including 3 about how to perform an autopsy. I want to see a new CSI spinoff set in 1903. There is some really good material in these ( Read more... )

They say there is a first time for everything.  This week was the first time I've ever been attacked by a muscovy duck.  I have no idea what it was upset about; I was just walking down the sidewalk minding my own business. The purse that I've been meaning to clean out because it was too full of  heavy junk came in handy as an improvised duck- ( Read more... )

10 years ago, I hit the library stacks to find more details on an interesting statement that I found in a psychology text, and after slogging back 40 years through journal articles citing other journal articles citing other journal articles, I was disappointed to find that there was really no reasonable basis for the statement.  A little later in ( Read more... )

I gave my daughter an old 35 mm camera from a junk store to take to camp so that if she loses it, it won't be a big deal.  I told her I was going to put a roll of film in it for her since it's tricky to load.  "What's film?" she asked. 

Some people suffer from road rage, but I suffer from road bemusement.  Mainly, why is everybody in such a hurry ( Read more... )

I ran into a professor from the microbiology department in Ottawa.  We made some small talk and he told me that he planned to go to his friend's wedding in Tennessee but he was having some car trouble.  I told him he could ride with me, since I was headed to Alabama.  I wouldn't even make him help pay for gas if he would share the driving.  He was ( Read more... )

Gran Torino is the best movie I've seen in a while.  Go see it if you haven't.  Don't let anybody spoil the plot for you - it's not entirely obvious what is going to happen.  (Contains excessive bad language and some violence, but they both have a good reason to be there ( Read more... )

Reflecting on 2008

1. What did you do in 2008 that you'd never done before?

I rode a dirt bike.  (Scary!)
I got acrylic nails. (Now my real nails are wrecked, but it was amusing.)
I tried absinthe. (Something like a licorice jelly bean dissolved in rubbing alcohol.  yum yum)
I worked on an archeological dig.  (Ok, it's just a 200 yr old ruined building ( Read more... )