20 March 2003

We got some personal bad news yesterday, the kind of stuff I haven't been putting in this journal. So we're all feeling more than a bit low around here.

Also Timprov had CNN on until the wee hours of the morning, and the atlas is lying open to the Middle East pages so that we can consult them if we need to. (You know, if anyone calls us for strategic or tactical advice.) I'm going to try not to have CNN on permanently today. I'm going to try to read Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map and work on the edits to Dwarf's Blood Mead. I'm also going to try not to brood, fuss, or otherwise spend excessive time worrying.

The up side is that Timprov's doctor visit went pretty well. We have some medicine for him to take and a couple of specialists for him to see right away, with recommendations for a third specialist if it turns out that the third problem isn't largely caused by or dependent upon the first two.

(Just call it the obfuscation entry. I shouldn't even have told you what books I was going to read and edit. I should have just said, "Things are going on. Some of them good and some bad; some of them here and some elsewhere." Sorry, guys. It's just like that sometimes.)

CNN is so repetitive, and yet...there is virtue to knowledge, and to bearing witness, and it's hard sometimes to recognize the limits of those virtues. But they are limited at times. There's nothing I can really do for anybody in that region of the world right now. Knowing doesn't always help.

But I'll turn it off in a few minutes, maybe when I'm done reading the paper. Just a few minutes longer.