Welcome home. You didn't miss much. There's a lawyer wants to charge people to park behind Red Knapps. You know, parking is at a premium in the big town here. The bait vending mahine in front of Little Caesar's ran out Saturday morning. Bad timing. Oh, and the family of the crypt that was destroyed when the firemen rescued the kitty are suing the kitty owners, the kitty, and Purina Cat Chow for damages.

Yeah, heard about the parking already. Everyone's determined to turn Oxford into Rochester, congestion and no parking.

Sorry to hear about the reviews ending. As far as I'm aware you have the distiction of being the only newspaper reviewer to have ever paid attention to our books, thanks!

It reminds me of when I started writng for Upstate which was the Sunday magazine for the Rochester, NY paper. I did some feature articles, cover stories, which were a lot of fun and paid well by my standards. The paper had a circulation of well over 200,000. I got on great with the editor. Guess what. Almost immediately they replaced the magazine with one of those Entetainment oriented advertising supplement things. You can't count on anything. Well, with newspapers you can count on them becoming ever more dumbed down and ad driven.

Despite my assurances yesterday that I was okay with this, I was kind of down about it. I guess I just got laid off. It happens all the time as a freelancer, but in this case although I was getting a little burned out, I basically liked doing the reviews. I'm a firm believer--I think a freelancer HAS to be--that when a writing gig disappears, another better one will pop up. That has been my experience, although generally I have to go looking for the better gig.