In Which Our Heroine Blames the Soviets

4 October 2004

Mark and DDB fixed the futon, and now I'm actually comfortable sitting on it and talking to people and don't have to perch on the edge of it any more. Yay! It pivots where it ought to! It does not require one to slide into nap or oblivion!

Since I last updated you, I have finished reading three books for contract work, none of which was good. William Sleator's Others See Us was in the all-right-I-guess category, better than the other two, but with a wholly unsatisfying ending. I'm now reading The Best American Science Writing 2003. The last Best American Science Writing volume I read was a good source for the names of science writers worth reading, so I have hopes for this one, too.

We talked to Mark's grandpa for his birthday yesterday. (His birthday was Saturday, but we knew he had a party and stuff planned.) It was his first birthday without Mark's grandma in well over five decades. We all had a Moment about that together on the phone. It was hard. But, y'know, it was hard because she was wonderful and we loved her, and the only way to make it easier would have been for her to be less wonderful and us to love her less, and that's not the kind of easy any of us is spending our life looking for.

People talk about "the grieving process." I'm not sure I know what that is. It's been almost nine years since my Gran died, and I still sometimes miss her enough that it brings tears to my eyes. Is that part of "the grieving process?" Processes are fixed and orderly. Missing someone you love is not.

Anyway. I also talked to my dad (I'd talked to Mom on Saturday -- they're out of town and taking turns with the cell) and to Erica, who is extremely pregnant and about whom I was a little worried. But it sounds like she's doing pretty well.

Today is Sarah's birthday. Yay! And Friday is C.J.'s. None of the people whose birthdays I have on my October calendar are people I knew when I was 18, and all of them are important. Strange, that. Birthday clumping in my life timeline. Or maybe it's not strange and I've been focused enough on the book that it seems so.

I'm down to the single digits of chapters to finish. I've done some hard ones lately: the death of a character I'm fond of, the Soviet invasion of Hungary. I spent most of yesterday afternoon grumpy with the Soviets over that, and there was no cornbread for dinner as a result. Stupid Soviets.

Sampo Countdown:
Chapters begun but not yet finished: seven.
Chapters not yet begun: two.

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