Thought I'd pop by and write an entry before September draws to a close! It has been an absolute madhouse around here lately, hence the lack of updates.

As you have no doubt gathered, we now have our cable net access back up and running. The cable people managed to cut our phone line when they came back to bury the cable a few days later, so we had to get the phone company in to fix that. Things have been working well since (that was last week).

The movers came and moved all the furniture on Saturday, and Carrie's parents were here from Thursday until Monday helping out, which was greatly appreciated. We've contributed mucho moulah to Home Depot over the past few weeks, but hopefully we'll be spending much less there in future. Along with the countless necessities, we couldn't help but buy some other items to improve the place (like those new doorbells, and new hardware for the bathrooms). It's not all extravagance though -- we currently have paper shades for all the windows, and it'll be awhile before we can afford some nicer ones :)

This evening Carrie ferried back the last remnants of the apartment, just in time for our apartment lease to expire. Our next exciting task *cough* will be to unpack stuff so the house doesn't resemble a box-strewn post-apocalyptic wasteland so much. There's also the small matter of the growing mounds of leaves multiplying in the backyard. The front yard is taken care of, at least -- the lawn is nicely mowed and the scruffy bushes have been trimmed.

Since my last entry I have furnished our basement with a guitar stand (watch out, neighbours!), and the long-awaited iPod arrived. Our entire CD collection (some 200 albums) doesn't even half-fill this thing (it's the 40Gb model) and I've had an absolute ball with it.

It didn't take me long to sign up with Audible and start listening to audio books on the way to work. Thus far I've listened to The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of the 20th Century -- which includes a dozen stories, Harlan Ellison's Jeffty Is Five and Arthur C. Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God among them -- and I'm in the middle of Philip K Dick's The Minority Report and Other Stories. The Greatest SF was quite good, although the title seemed a bit of a misnomer. Sure, they're all good stories, but I reckon there are others that should've been included in lieu of some of the selections.

I'm gradually getting back into the swing of things with the critique group after a hectic few weeks, and I'm planning on giving some attention to my much neglected writing, too. There's a pile of stories to edit, as well as some new ideas I'd like to develop into short stories. If only I can make myself resist the lure of the new Star Wars DVD box-set and Stephen King's final Dark Tower novel...