There's nothing much new since my last entry, but it's about time for another, so here I am :)

We had the house inspection last week and probably not too surprisingly the inspector found lots of little problems (and a few bigger ones), but nothing that would cause us to want to back out of the deal. The seller is another matter (they didn't really want to know about the problems), so hopefully we can work out something. Now we have our fingers crossed, we're touching wood, and trying not to count our chickens ;)

It was a fairly relaxing weekend. We went galavanting around looking at fridges and furniture again, and had a play with an iPod on display at one store. I'm still waiting on mine, unfortunately.

Some of Carrie's relatives were in town this weekend, so we caught up with them and had a good look around the shops in Long Grove, in-between lunch there and dinner at the Outback Steakhouse.

When in Long Grove I tried an ostrich burger for lunch, which was quite nice (it reminded me of lean beef). I'd actually had an opportunity to try ostrich at the hotel in Madison when we went to Wiscon back in May, but I chickened out and had a steak or something instead.

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Nothing new on the writing front this past week. I did a couple of critiques, but I've been too tired or lacking time to work on anything of my own.

A few days ago the critique group decided we'd only do one critique a week since everyone seems to be quite busy lately. That should give me a little extra time to work on editing and some new stories--in theory at least :)

Not only have I had little time for writing lately, but I haven't been able to do much reading either. Tonight I made an effort to read a sizeable chunk of Song of Susannah (Dark Tower VI). It's getting very interesting now (I'm around the 300 page mark) and it won't be too much longer before I'm done. I'll be just in time for the final book in the series which comes out next month! Three cheers for Stephen King for finally reaching the end of the saga :)

Among other things, I'd also really like to catch up on some of the small press mags I have that are gathering dust, and get stuck into a couple of Charles Stross's books. I'm particularly interested in reading The Atrocity Archives (a Lovecraftian spy-thriller, from what I understand). So much to read, so little time!