Our gorgeous, sunny weather has disappeared, replaced by thunder, lightning, and pounding rain. As I sat with my supervisor this afternoon, talking about my chapter (all good stuff), thunder rolled so loudly we sometimes had trouble hearing each other talk! Of course, I hadn't brought an umbrella, and today was the day my jacket zipper broke... It's getting to be time to go thrift-shopping again. (But hey, that's actually good news by me. I love thrift shops!)

One of the best things I did today was to read Sarah Prineas's story Liberty Pipe on Strange Horizons. I loved it! For anyone who's lived in a factory town, it's just a perfect fantasy story. Growing up in Lansing, I knew very few men of my father's generation who hadn't worked in an auto factory at one time or another, and then later, living in Pittsburgh, memories of the factory days filled the city. "Liberty Pipe" captured the feeling of the factories perfectly, for me, and managed to mesh the scariness, ugliness and power of the factory with a really shining magic.

In other words: read it! It's good. :)

I managed to write another 4 pages of my thesis by the time of my meeting today, and I'm aiming now to finish the chapter by the time I leave for America, on May 23rd, which feels like a much more sane and do-able deadline. Whew...

And now I'm off to start heating the oven for celebratory apple strudel! Hurray! Thunderstorms and rain be damned. It's a good day anyway.