25 November 2003

I have a cousin who didn't quite know how to write letters for awhile. Someone told her that she should just tell me what she would tell me on the phone. So for awhile, I got missives that included sections like, "Okay, just a sec, I gotta go to the bathroom now. Okay, I'm back."

I begin to think that the Communications of the ACM are just as trivially detailed, and that we have an archive of all of them. This is not precisely true, in the last case, at least: we start with about Volume 37. Before Mark began receiving this magazine, I might add, because half of them have someone else's name on them, a Michael who had his Stanford office before he did.

I've been organizing Mark's computer science magazines because Aunt Bertha died. That is, Mark's computer science magazines have been piled around the guest room, which is also Mark's office, since we found them in the moving boxes. There was no reason to shelve them right away any particular moment, and there was always a reason to do something else that particular moment. Now, however, the grands and Onie will be along a day early, because Aunt Bertha (my grandma's second brother's wife) died and they will be going to the funeral in town here, so I need to get the guest room inhabitable today instead of tomorrow. So, "Communications of the ACM" it is, in great stacks. I am now suspicious of everything the ACM wishes to Communicate, as if they were three-year-olds with logorrhea: is this really vital? Can't this wait?

(Aunt Bertha's death, by the way, was probably a blessing, under her particular circumstances, and we were not very close. So while I appreciate any of you who intend to be nice to me, this is not my time to grieve; please don't worry about how I'm handling it.)

(It occurs to me that it is not particularly horrible to say, "If she/he died, I couldn't tell a story." It's true of most of the people on the planet. Still, it feels strange that I don't have a story for Aunt Bertha.)

There is a lot to do. So naturally my brain is doing useful things like writing an alternate version of Cat Stevens' "Wild World" to fit waking up on a snowy day. "White World." Thanks a lot, brain, you're terribly clever.

Also naturally, the bathroom that is most natural for guests to use has a broken toilet as of last night, and my e-mail does not appear to be receiving at all (which is different from the problem it was having) and may not be sending, either. We shall see. Woohoo. Lucky us, to get to see such things. Okay: my e-mail is sending. Just not receiving. Tra la la la. When Mark wakes up, we'll get it fixed. Still, it's one more thing on the list to deal with.

So. Well. Stuff to do, stuff to do, stuff to do. I did a bit of house stuff, and Mark got the e-mail working again, yay. So one less thing.

But one more thing for you: let me know if you'd like a Christmas card and think you might not be on my list. Especially if you think I don't have your address.

Back to house stuff. And The Whim of the Dragon for breaks.