My insanely talented sister just had her story "Stitching Time" (re-) published at Pseudopod, the weekly horror podcast. You can listen to it here.

The timing was great, because on Wednesday (just a few days after it went up there) I got my brand spanking new, sleek black iPod "Nano" (since it's visible to the naked eye, "nano" strikes me as false advertising.) Stitching Time was the very first thing I listened to on it to break it in. Moody, creepy and oddly uplifting little story.

I subscribed to Pseudopod and it's sf/fantasy sister podcast Escape Pod, and I've been listening to them quite a bit this week. I don't have a car, and my daily commute to and from campus is at least an hour roundtrip of walking. (When its light out, sometimes I can read a little bit as I walk, but on the way back its almost always dark.) On days when I teach at Miami-Dade College, it's considerably more than that. Getting to listen to short stories while I walk really makes this routine dramatically less boring.

Out of the stuff I've listened to so far, besides Stitching Time, I've particularly enjoyed Last Respects by Dave Thompson, a darkly hilarious post-vampocalypse story, and, over at Escape Pod, Just Do It by Heather Lindsley.

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On Thursday, I actually went out to Sunset Tavern to watch the Redwings game on TV with the other Michigan transplants in the philosophy program. Which is a bit worrying--seeking out hockey games is a sure sign of creeping Michigan nostalgia.

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On Friday night, an very drunken Honduran immigrant cornered me at a bar (I guess I looked friendly and not otherwise occupied) to rant and rave about assassinating Castro and Chavez. (Makes gun gesture with his fingers): "No one has the guts!"

No, dear reader, I didn't express the slightest disagreement. The rate of conealed weapons ownership in the greater Miami area is just a wee bit too high for that sort of thing.

(For the benefit of anyone who doesn't know me well enough for this to go without saying, I think the Castro regime, for all its faults, is still almost certainly a lesser evil to the kind of regime Cuba would probably get if the CIA and the Miami exiles got their way, and if I were a Venezuelan, I'd vote and campaign for Chavez.)

So I smiled and nodded a lot, and then detached myself to go find my friends at the earliest possible opportunity. No harm, no foul.

Still. Got to love Miami.

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Oh, and the inestimable 3na just sold another story to Fantasy Magazine. Not surprising in the least, but very cool.