Mmm, I love three-day weekends. I'm horrible at the two-day standard weekend--I often waste the second day by feeling depressed that the weekend is about to end. Something about having a whole three days just takes away that whole pressure, and I enjoy all three whole-heartedly.

Nika's been visibly much happier all weekend, having us both home (and having so much less time in the nasty Elizabethan collar), and in turn, we've been feeling a lot happier too. I had a lovely recuperative shopping trip with Justina on Saturday (cute new top! hair clip! fun!), and last night we got together with friends for homemade curries and wine and good conversation.

We still have a few more days to wait before we find out more information...but we're all managing to take things a little easier in the meantime.

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I just finished a new draft of The Music of the Stars, my YA novel--whew! It finished printing about five minutes ago. I'm going to drop it off for a few more crits and then (knock on wood!) send it off to Shawna at the end of the month, while I'm in the US. (Cheap shipping! Hurray!)

And in other good news, my brother Ben's story Dreaming of a Gray Enemy has just been published in Afterburn SF. I really like this story, especially for the the fun twists on alien abduction experience:

...I’m a fan, a devotee, almost a connoisseur of skepticism. If there’s a PBS special debunking alien abduction claims, I’ll watch it. I’ll have someone videotape it for me if I have to. If there’s a book that comes out on the subject, I’ll read it. I’ll be angry for a lot of the time that I’m reading it, but I’ll finish the damn thing. Always. Its a little masochistic, but I’m genuinely fascinated by the rest of the world’s attitude towards the whole subject.

It’s as if you had a pet cat that lived in your house, and the majority of the human race simply refused to accept that cats existed. You try to tell people that you had a cat, and they get a pitying look in their eyes and tell you that you must have seen a dog and gotten confused. You try to show them pictures of your cat sleeping or cleaning itself, and for everyone but a few other cat-owners, the only subject open for debate is how exactly you succeeded in forging the photos. You wave your cat in their faces, and they look the other way and speculate loudly about whether you’re actually crazy, or just lying.

Very fun, and just the right thing for a Monday morning.