We just got back from dinner in the northwest suburbs with one of Carrie's friends from Michigan. It was nice to catch up again, and we were quite impressed with the restaurant, too. We'll be eating the leftovers tomorrow night, so we should take it easy with the eating-out thing--that's twice in one week!

Today I got another FedEx, this time containing a stack of forms to fill out for the new job, along with benefits information and so forth. That'll keep me busy for awhile over the weekend! Hopefully I'll find out tomorrow whether my start date is indeed this Monday, or whether it'll be a week later.

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Last night I had hours of entertainment when the laptop virus-scanner informed me that it was completely out of date and I would have to buy the latest and greatest version in order to continue downloading updates. After I figured out that, yes, that's what it was telling me, I then had to find the appropriate version.

I had to contact their customer support people to get a few things straightened out, and the end result was that I had to spring for the 'Pro' version which came with 2 licenses so I could install it on both computers.

The other computer already had the latest version, which expires in October, but it worked out cheaper to buy the 'Pro' version with the 2 licenses than it would have if I'd bought the standard version (with a single license) and paid the usual upgrade come October.

I then had to install it on both computers and download the latest updates, which entailed clicking on lots of dialogue boxes and restarting the computers at the appropriate time. It wasn't difficult, but it was more time consuming than usual.

Thankfully they've got a rebate deal going at the moment, so it wasn't as expensive as it could've been. It seems like a nice racket considering you can't go without a virus-scanner these days, and the free versions out there don't tend to get updated as frequently nor contain as many features.

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I was rather underwhelmed by the latest issue of Electric Velocipede after I finished reading yesterday. Still, I did have a couple of favourites: Edd Vick's Choice Cuts (a strange tale where people can change sexes on a whim and pregnancy is outlawed), Stepan Chapman's Ariadniad (a princess of Crete reveals secrets and a sinister conspiracy to a sleeping slave), and Alan DeNiro's A Keeper (a surreal tale with a bizarre culture, an artist with a medical problem, and a talking goldfish!). As usual the weirdness quotient was high with this issue, but it doesn't always work; there were quite a few tales where I had to wonder what they were on about!

On the writing front, I'm still yet to get my act together. I've done a couple of critiques and written some notes for a story in progress, but that's about it. It's just a matter of sitting myself down at the computer and finishing the story, but lately that seems to be an effort. Hopefully I can psych myself up to finish the story this weekend and get started on something new...

2004 Stats:

2004 Word count:	20,103
Stories written:	8
Total submissions:	18
Total acceptances:	0
Total rejections:	15
Waiting for response:	5
Books read:	9
Fiction Mags/Chapbooks read:	16