Howdy all. Sorry for the unaccustomed silence. For about two weeks, I have been suffering from the Cold from Hell. It started out as a sore-throat and fever kind of thing, and then morphed into a stuffy-nose and blocked sinuses kind of thing, and then morphed again into a hacking cough kind of thing. Right now I think I can feel it trying to crawl back up into my sinuses, but I intend to fend it off.

Of course, these colds never arrive at a time when you can take it easy. This one spanned a couple of work deadlines, plus the deadline for finishing a short story I'd promised to my crit group. So basically, when I haven't been furiously writing, I've been curled up in an armchair with a mug of tea, reading a book or watching a DVD, and trying to remember how to breathe. Hence the lack of journal postings.

Which is too bad, because bunches of interesting things happened while I wasn't posting. Let's see if I can hit the higlights.

Interesting thing #1: Daniel's story, Why I Am Not Gorilla Girl went up on Strange Horizons. I am extremely fond of this story. Not just because it's a great story, but because I was sitting with Daniel in a cafe when he wrote the opening paragraphs, and he passed me the notebook and had me read them aloud to him just so we could hear what it sounded like. It's a great read aloud story. Maybe when I get over this hacking cough, I'll try making a recording.

Interesting thing #2: We got ourselves a Netflix membership. We've been watching more DVD's lately, and have been finding the selection at the local video stores a tad underwhelming. In particular, Daniel's become a pretty serious anime freak of late, and we haven't found a place in our new neighborhood that has a good selection of anime for rent. (Buying anime isn't that hard, and given the demographics of the neighborhood, there must be places that rent it. But we haven't found them yet.) Netflix's selection of anime isn't perfect, but it'll take us a while to exhaust it.

It's working out remarkably well. It's nice to have the DVD's just show up in the mail, and to not worry about late fees. Daniel's been feeding his anime habit, and I've been indulging my latest TV addiction, CSI.

I rented a few episodes on DVD just because, when I tell people that I write user manuals for mass spectrometers, they not infrequently say, "Mass spectrometers? You mean like on CSI?" And not having seen the show, I tend to kinda go, "Well, yeah, I guess so."

So, I watched a couple of episodes, and I am hooked. It figures - I'm a total criminal forensics junkie. I can't believe that a show this geeky is one of the hottest things on prime time television. The main characters are basically scientists, and the cool part is, they actually act like scientists. And the science, at least in the episodes I've seen so far, is pretty accurate - except for the fact that a lot of the lab tests on the show are portray as taking much less time than they take in real life. I totally crack up every time they whip out a full DNA analysis in a matter of hours. Guys, it oughta take you longer than that just to do the PCR! But, hey, dramatic license, right?

It's also much nicer to watch television on DVD than it is to watch it in original broadcast format. Guess it's kind of a poor man's Tivo.

Interesting thing #3: Been reading a lot of books. I read John Barth's _Giles Goat Boy_, and felt a bit lukewarm about it. It had some good stuff in it, I thought, but not really enough to justify its 800+ page length. Am now reading Stephen King and Peter Straub's _The Talisman_, which I'm enjoying, but about which I may also end up saying it had some good stuff, but not really enough to justify its length. In between, I read Tanith Lee's _Wolf Star_, sequel to her YA novel _Wolf Tower_. I enjoyed this one, though as with _Wolf Tower_, I found Tanith Lee's world building sufficiently interesting that I sometimes felt like she was doing a disservice to it by skimming through it with such a short book. Which is bassackwards, and is really probably the kind of thinking that gets us big long books of which one can say, "it had some good stuff, but not really enough to justify its length." Hey, I"m not saying that I'm either consistent or easy to please on this subject.

There is a wonderful moment in _Wolf Star_, where the protagonist is completely exasperated with herself for getting crushes on guys who are complete asses, and for getting crushes on guys when she knows that she already has feelings for someone else. And I was like, "Oh, gawd, I remember being that age." I never know, with Lee's YA work, to be glad or sorry that I didn't read it when I was actually a teenager, because she nails certain kinds of teenage irrationality so very wonderfully. (Or at least, she seems to nail what I, from my safely adult perspective, can remember feeling at various different points of my teenage life.)

I also reread _Issola_. I would say that I want to be Steven Brust when I grow up, but he doesn't seem to need any help with the job.

Hmm. I suppose that's all for now. I promise not to let so much time elapse before my next entry.