Reading: The Wannoshay Cycle by Michael Jasper
Music: The Poxy Bastards
TV/Movie: Baby Mama
Link o' the Day: Collecting Antique Barometers



The Easter Bunny was good to me this year, and by Easter Bunny I mean myne lovely wife. Saturday night she tried to convince me that I was not getting any chocolate in my Easter basket this year--yeah--you heard me, I'm 42 years old and I get an Easter basket. Jealous much? Anyway, as it turned out, I got a lot of chocolate--much of it also involving peanut butter and I think the person who came up with that little mix deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. So I have an unhealthy amount of chocolate to go through, but I also know how to pace myself these days. This supply should last a year.

What was particularly impressive was instead of a "basket" she ventured into the fishing dept at Dick's and found me a kick-ass new tacklebox to approach the new season with. It's big enough to hold my large supplies like bait-cutting knife, radio, gloves, and so forth as well as long bins for my wire leaders which are always a tangled mess. It has a nice deep bin on one side which looks like it'd be good for holding bait, and loads of places to store other fishing essentials. Oh, and chocolate.

Plus if someone tries to mug me, they could get seriously damaged if I get in a good swing with this thing.

I also got some cool DVDs which I'll likely write about in future posts, as well as a book that looks like it'd be a fun read. More as that develops.

I think I did pretty well in return: a signed book from an author she likes, an iTrip, gift certificate, and other odds and ends. Nothing she can go fishing with, I guess, but ah well.

In other news, I got my taxes done early this year. Well, early for me. I'm usually one of those April 15th filers. but because I'm officially in business for myself now, the rules have changed. I found a great tax guy who saved me a lot of money. While my payout was still pretty choke-inducing, it could have been a lot worse. I even got my quarterly estimates set up.

Welcome to the cost of doing business.

-=-=-=-=-=-

I survived the weekend. That may not seem like much, but for a guy who prefers to have his weekends relatively free of obligations, I think it means a little bit. A healthy portion of the weekend involved blasting through a couple of deadlines that got tighter than I liked. Scheduling on my end was not an issue. One editor suffered from that virus that was going around the past couple of weeks and the other had some tables and figures coming in late. But here we are come Monday morning, 4:23 in the morning and I'm sending files off to a printer and then heading off to paginate another job to send to another editor. Later on this morning I have a couple of covers to work on (which means if they come out decently, I'll be sharing the results tomorrow).

So it was a rough weekend in spots, but I've emerged unscathed. Tired, but unscathed.



In unrelated news, on May 1st, a new blog by writers for writers will begin called Charge of the Write Brigade. Myself and eight others will be writing on writerly (it's a word!) topics on a bi-weekly schedule--my contributions will appear on the first and third Monday of each month. The site will also include many guest writers, occasional market reports, and more.

More as this develops.

-=-=-=-



Today's link goes to an article on Collecting Antique Barometers. Why? I happen to like them. My favorite type of barometer is the old-fashioned ship-sort with the temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure featuring brass wheel gauges set into wood. My collection isn't extensive by any means, but I do have a very nice banjo-style barometer that came all the way from Norway--complete with gauges written in Norwegian. I'm now on the lookout for an old pocket barometer and possible an antique stick barometer.

Cheers!