A looooong time ago now, I ordered 5 books from Amazon, including Tim Pratt's Blood Engines. Delays upon delays ensued. Finally, this past Monday, the package arrived, complete with the invoice for all 5 books...but only 4 books were actually in the package. Blood Engines had been left out. Amazon has never once screwed up that way before, at least for me. I ground my teeth, emailed them, and they apologized and put Blood Engines into the mail at 6 a.m. the next morning, first-class. First-class Royal Mail only takes one day to ship, so I was due to get it Wednesday morning.

So. It's now Saturday afternon, and the book still has not arrived. First Amazon did its first-ever (for me) mispackaging, then Royal Mail suddenly went hay-wire on this one specific package...there really is only one possible answer: the Universe does not want me to read Blood Engines. Unfortunately, I really, really want to. Time to email Amazon again...

But in the meantime, huge congratulations to Tim and Heather on the birth of their first baby!

Today it's a gray, rainy Saturday, but it was brightened by a trip to the library and then to the café. I read this month's Interzone, which included two stories I loved: Ben Rosenbaum's "Molly and the Red Hat" and Aliette de Bodard's "The Lost Xuyan Princess". Now that we're back home, my pleasure with the world (apart from its irrational anti-Blood Engines diktats) can be summed up with a single piece of information: I am currently wearing red-and-black-striped pirate socks AND fingerless red-and-black (and skull & crossbones-patterned) pirate gloves!

So it's still a good day, despite the Universe's tendencies towards literary fascism.