4 August 2002

Good morning! We have DSL, have had since 2:00 yesterday afternoon. Twenty-nine hours of outage. We were all in some major withdrawal, and I fussed a lot about what was getting bounced, if anything. So if you sent me something before around 8:00 last night and I haven't responded to it, will you please re-send? Thanks. I'm less worried about friends and more worried about editors, since I have several e-subs out there, and they won't read my journal and re-send me things. I believe I provided my hotmail address as an alternate address for just about all of them, but of course I can't be sure.

Ah well. It's functional now, and that's what's important. Yesterday was something of a minor project day. I worked on some short stories and didn't touch the novel directly. I added to our list of short stories -- I'm trying to have a spreadsheet that lists the short stories we own and where they can be found. I've got all of the magazines out here handled now, and Timprov did a bunch of the short story collections and anthologies when we first came up with this list. (More lists! Woohoo, more lists!) This way, if I particularly like something, I can look and see what else we have by that author, especially if it's a bit obscure. I also can look at the list when collections and/or anthologies come out and see if we already own the entire table of contents, which is a good thing to know. I would kind of like it if our old mags became bound periodicals sometime, but it's pretty low on the list due to the expense and effort it would take. We still have a bunch of collections and anthologies to do, and then there are the two boxes of elderly magazines in Timprov's room serving as his nightstand, but it's interesting to me to pick at the data even now.

I started copying recipes from my "saved-messages" folder into my recipe box, so that I don't have to keep calling them up and popping around the corner to the computer when I want to cook something that someone e-mailed me. Another project that would have waited pretty much forever, but I did some of it yesterday instead. Ah well. Sometimes pointless tasks have their own charm.

It's going to be a short week here. On Thursday, Mark and I leave for Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I am going to be Maid of Slightly Less Honor in Mark's sister Sarah's wedding. (Maid of Slightly Less Honor was Mark's term. Cal suggested Maid of Honorable Mention, which I also liked. When Mark and Scott-who-goes-with-Michelle were in Ed and Jen's wedding, Scott had a total ordering of men: Ed's brother was the Best Man, making Scott the Second Best Man, Mark the Third Best Man, and Vanya the Fourth Best Man. I imagine he could have continued the total ordering with the wedding guests until he got to Worst Man, but we didn't press him for that. In some ways, I didn't want to know who Scott thought was the Worst Man present, although now I find myself curious.)

Today we've been to church, and we're going to try shopping for me and for Sarah and Jeff some more. And I'm going to read more of MI6 (I'm on the Baltic chapter, hooray!) and Revelation Space and maybe finish "Sigyn and the Humans" and find some less pointless tasks to do. I have plenty. Does anybody know if taffeta can be ironed? That's the first thing, because if it can't, I'm going to have to find a one-hour dry-cleaner in Grand Rapids, because none of our suitcases will fit the skirt hanging straight. I've started my packing list, but I had to immediately start inundating Sarah with questions about events and levels of formality.

It's complicated being the Maid of Slightly Less Honor.