There's good and there's bad. Good things first, in the interests of positivity.

Friday's mail brought my cheque/check (choose spelling according to nationality) from Realms of Fantasy for my story Crab Apple that is due to appear, well, sometime. Hopefully that means my proofs will be on the way soon too. It's a shame that the cheque/check had to be in US dollars, though, as the exchange rate is so awful at the moment.

It's Nika's birthday today. She's five years old, although she's hardly slowed down from when she was two. Here's a photo of Nika from a few years ago. She hasn't changed a whole lot since then, other than putting on a couple of pounds (haven't we all? *sigh*) I'll put up some new pictures of her in a day or two, including some birthday ones, hopefully, if I remember to buy some batteries for the camera.

We're finally starting to make a little progress on the wedding, what with it being less than two months to go. We've figured out quite a bit of the service, sent out invitations, and asked people to do readings. We've also booked the hall for the reception. We do need desperately to talk to the minister, though, before he thinks we've cancelled the whole thing. And we need to book a hotel for the wedding night. And arrange catering etc for the reception. And. And.

On the bad side, the results of the European elections were very disappointing. As I expected, the far-right parties did much better this time around. The only positive was that although the British National Party (an extreme racist party with neo-Nazi links) increased their vote, they didn't win any seats in the European parliament. Partially, this was because the UK independence party did so well. They came third. Now, they are also a far-right party, and pretty obnoxious, but they don't have the links to racist violence that the BNP have. It's not much comfort, however. The left-wing vote was, unfortunately, splintered by the creation of a party called Respect, who ran an anti-war, anti-Tony Blair campaign. Respect are simply the latest in a series of front-parties for, predominantly, the Socialist Workers Party, who never stand for election under their own name. The Green Party, who also had been anti-war, kept their two seats but made no improvement on that. If the Green vote and the Respect vote had been combined, they could increased their representation at the expense of the right-wing parties, but fragmentation seems to be a symptom of the left wing. All in all, the results were fairly depressing.