6 September

Salon has an article we're finding hysterically funny around here. The headline is "Many schools not drug free." No! They can't be serious! Not drugs, not in high school! In it, they claim, "Half of all teen-agers this fall will attend a school at which drugs are sold, used or kept, according to a national organization that fights drug abuse." As Mark said, yeah. And so will the other half.

Sheesh.

So, no jury duty for me. Yay! The California system wins! But we had an unpleasant false alarm yesterday late morning just before I found out about jury stuff. And by alarm, I mean alarm: the fire alarm started going off, and we couldn't shut it down. And Timprov's window was open, and he could hear that the other fire alarms were going off, too. So we went and stood out on the landing and watched the apartment people scurry around, watched the firebeings come into one of the apartments downstairs from us and in the corner of the building, watched them haul out sodden carpeting, watched the maintenance people try to figure out how the heck you shut off the fire alarms. Took them about half an hour. This, I guess, is the major advantage to the fire drills at college: you know the people in charge know how to make the obnoxious noises stop.

And speaking of obnoxious noises, I'm making some myself: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won the Hugo for Best Novel. The Sky Road and Midnight Robber were both up for it, both infinitely better books. Am I biased against Goblet of Fire for being YA? No way. I write YA. I adore some YAs. But Goblet of Fire was underedited and frankly amateurish in large chunks, and it had plot holes you could drive tanks through. But, "Hey, I've heard of that! A lot of people liked that!" will evidently win you a Hugo. Go figure.

And seven months after submitting -- five months after the editor said he'd read the story and was going to talk to the other editors about it -- I just got a rejection from Would That It Were. Ah well. I suppose timely decisions are entirely too much to ask.

But in happier news, I had a good trip to Omaha. (No, Karina, you're not the only one who gets Counting Crows in your head when I write about Omaha. I sing it quietly to myself as we come in on the plane.) If you want to see pictures of it, well, here they are.