Here we are, in May already, and I hardly noticed it coming. Damn. It's sunny, though, apart from the thunder storm we had earlier, in which I got soaked, and it almost feels like summer.

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I finished my first pass through on The Sleepers yesterday. I fixed a few things and tried to work on the pacing, but now I'm going to get it critiqued and hope other people like it. There are bits I really like and bits that are a little wonky still. Anyway, we celebrated by making chocolate fudge brownies. I've eaten all of mine already, sadly, but luckily Steph has bought strudel, so I can continue my quest to get fat.

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Today was all budgets, budgets, budgets. I got back to work from the dreaded evil sickness to find that all financial projections for the next academic year are due in tomorrow, so I spent all day remodelling the projects I administer and trying to forecast income and expenditure for putative projects that may or may not happen and which no one knows about yet. Tomorrow will be exactly the same.

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The Nebula awards were announced at the weekend too. Apart from the screenplay, none of my favoured stories won. On the other hand, the ones I hated didn't win either. I was left feeling that the winners were good but not spectacular. I would have chosen different winners, but I guess that's why they only let me have one vote. :grin:

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On Friday we took a trip to Liverpool to sort out Steph's residency visa for when her student visa runs out. Liverpool is probably a fine place--people tell me it is--but its underground system is probably the most ugly one in the world, and it defies all laws of space and time.

Anyway, sitting in an immigration centre waiting (and waiting and waiting) gives you a new perspective on the whole issue of immigration, a perspective that the politicians beating their chests about being tough on immigrants could do with getting. In these places, immigrants are treated as children. Phones, cameras, tape and video recorders are banned (so you can't have a record of what happens to you?). The walls are covered in notices telling you what you can't do, and threatening: "Ali lied about his real name and nationality. We took him, hung him by fish hooks from the ceiling and beat him with electrical cords." You get the idea. When people were called up it was through announcements made too quickly in an accent that even I couldn't understand easily. They were made to line up or wash their hands. The whole experience was degrading and humiliating for the immigrants.

The staff we talked to were very pleasant, and I'm sure most of them had no intention of being nasty, but when you are in that position of power in that system, it leads you to dehumanise the people you are dealing with.

When we got called up to do Steph's application, we found that the fee had doubled from £250 to £500 (nearly US$1,000) to process the application. There appeared to be no reason for this, because the actual process took their staff no more than 30 minutes.

Anyway, Steph's application was approved, and she now has residency rights for two more years, thank God. She can't claim any benefits, but she can pay taxes. The attitude seems to be to screw immigrants for every penny they can pay and to treat them with contempt in return. Nice.

I've been hoping some political candidate would come around canvassing so I could tell them what I thought about the whole issue, but they haven't. I guess no one is particularly interested in my vote.