19 May 2003

I swear it's not my fault. It's all the fault of that darn Northwest Airlines. I was looking for a modest trip home, and they're the ones that are possibly giving me the best rate on eleven days with the folks and eight up in Minneapolis. It's totally not my fault that that's a better airfare than, say, seven and four. I can't help it.

As my mom would occasionally say when experiencing deep regret for a situation, oh, shucky darns.

In other "shucky darns" news, Oceans of the Mind has decided to buy "Wishing on Airplanes" for their "Exploring the Moon by Earthlight" theme issue. Woooo! I'm glad I took the time to write it, then. You can see the painting that was supposed to inspire all of the stories in this issue here. As I was writing this story, I thought, well, if I don't sell it there, I'll finally have something to send to Artemis. Because truthfully, I don't have all that many Moon stories in me. Maybe "Fan Club," although I had thought of that more as a Mars or asteroid belt story. Hmmm. Aaaaanyway, I think that's the only down side, and it's a pretty darn small down side. It's the sort of thing that would have been an okay up side if the story had been rejected, but it wasn't, and acceptances (especially pro acceptances) are their very own reward. Well, acceptances and the checks that follow them together form their own reward.

Timprov wondered aloud whether I was thirteen yesterday: I spent most of the day on the phone. (This is why I forgot to post yesterday's entry until several hours after I finished writing it.) And I still have four people to call on my week's to do list. Uff da. Yesterday I talked to both Michelle and Scott -- it's useful to be have them under the same roof that way, because then if one of them needs to do something else, the other one can just pick up the phone and talk to me instead. And I talked to Andrew, and I talked to my folks, including four separate conversations with Mom. (I think that's a record for us, but we had two different sets of flights/visits to discuss.) I think that was it, but it was quite enough -- I'm just not used to that much time on the phone any more.

I also finished reading Italo Calvino's The Road to San Giovanni, in which I liked some essays better than others, and read a chunk of Alex Irvine's A Scattering of Jades. Not sure what I think of it yet, other than that it's got a good premise.

Also I worked on the Not The Moose. Of course.

I'm trying to break a couple of bad habits right now, but they're fairly weird-to-break bad habits, so it's harder than it might be. I would like to stop sleeping face down, for example. It's not very good for my neck. (My mom is not worried, or wasn't last time we talked about it: she says I'll quit that when I get pregnant.) But by definition, it's not something I do consciously. Hard to break that. And I'd like to stop sitting with my legs curled up under me all the time, especially at the computer. Not so good for the back, that one; not very ergonomic. And yet it's how I automatically sit -- one foot never touches the ground in front of the chair when I sit down, it just gets tucked under me right away, and then the other knee usually gets pulled straight up, or else dangles over the edge of the chair, elevated enough by the sat-upon foot/ankle that it doesn't touch the floor. This is not really okay. But it's not the sort of thing that's very easy to spend a lot of time thinking about.

Daniel gave us a cordless phone for Christmas, and the happy result is that I can now drive everybody bazoo when I'm on the phone. Our apartment is not very well laid-out for pacing. You can pace from the window of the master bedroom to the end of the hall, if you don't mind having a slight jog in your route. But Mark's computer sits at the end of the hall; my computer chair effectively walls off the living room from the dining room from the kitchen. You just can't work up a good pace. This is not to say, however, that I don't do my best. Sometimes I thread my way through the computer chair maze; often I'm doing the window-through-hallway route, and Timprov can hear four out of every twenty words I say, even with his door closed. I try not to do this; I try to just sit down and talk. It doesn't work very well. But the other happy result is that I don't sit at my desk with my neck holding the phone, trying to play a stupid computer game, so there's definitely an up side, and if I had to take a survey around here, I think they'd prefer the pacing to the neck-cricking.

Wandering, wandering, I took one of the four "to call"s off my list: Grandma and Grandpa. It's supposed to be 75 here today. I think there should be a law against telemarketers sounding like something horrible has happened. A deep, sad voice saying, "Hello, Mrs. Gritter?" is enough to make me think something has happened to somebody, even on a good day. Which today is. (Because I get to go home! And the folks and grands are coming here! And I have a good book to write! And I sold a story!)

I should run to the bank and the post office, and maybe to the Office Despot and the Goodwill. Various things need picking up and dropping off. It's also Mark's grandparents' anniversary, so I should finish writing e-mail to them. And of course, I'll work on the book. Somewhere along the line, though, my brain lost all coherence, so I'm going to attempt to gather the pieces of it back up again before I do anything that requires them all to be together. Have a good Monday.