Yesterday, Janet officially had a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. She discovered that her handbag was missing, which means that her passport, green card, and credit cards are now missing. We looked all over the apartment and couldn't find it, nor was it in the car. We went back and retraced the places we visited on Thursday (the last day she remembers having it), but have had no luck so far. I'm hoping against hope that someone turned it in to the Cary police department, and that we'll be able to recover it quickly. This was not a good way to start the weekend.

To take her mind off of it, we went to Lazy Daze, the annual arts and crafts festival in downtown Cary. It wasn't terribly packed by the time we got there, but it was unbelievably hot, and we had to take several breaks in the shade because the heat was affecting Janet so much. We planned to meet up with our friends Jason and Stacey, but with all the people there we never saw them. We did buy one thing, a wind twister (like these), which is hanging and twisting on our porch right now.

When we got home, we were both tired from the heat and walking around, and I considered taking a nap, but instead screwed around online for a while. I got a shower, then she got a shower, then at 7:45 we headed off to John Kessel's house, for a kickoff party for all the creative writing grad students, sponsored by the English Dept. I got to talk to people I knew, as well as people I just met. Said a quick hi to Lew Shiner and Wilton Barnhardt before traversing the food table; they had some yummy sushi, vegetables and dip, tortilla chips and salsa and guacamole, cheese and crackers. We met the guy who is the Collection Management Librarian for D.H. Hill Library, which means he's in charge of buying any books with humanities content for the library, including literature, philosophy texts, psychology reference materials, &c. We talked about small presses for a while, and he said that Small Beer Press was one of his consistent favorites. I told him a bit about Two Cranes, and he told me to contact him when the food anthology is published so he could buy a copy for the library.

Janet and I were some of the last people there; I think Richard and Barb were the only ones there later than us. Some interesting conversation at the end of the night, about their recent trip to the Boston Museum of Science where they held an actual mastodon tooth and got to touch actual props from the Lord of the Rings films, about the nature of color and narrative in Hero (which Janet and I saw Friday night, and which was freaking awesome and you should all go see it), about the dumbed-down re-subtitling of said movie from when Janet saw it in Singapore, and about Hollywood's constant need to remake foreign films (such as Ringu into The Ring, or Ju-On into The Grudge) in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator in American society instead of just showing the original. We also talked about old Animaniacs episodes, and the one in particular where Orson Welles is doing a commercial for Rosebud Frozen Peas, "Now with even more delicious green peaness." It was a fun evening.

Today, I have homework. An article to finish reading, a reader response paper to write, a presentation to prepare for, prospecti to analyze, and two stories to critique.

And if you haven't taken the poll in the previous entry, please do so. It's in the spirit of scientific inquiry.

Now Reading:
Liquor by Poppy Z. Brite

Stories Out to Publishers:
6

Books Read This Year:
45

Zines/Graphic Novels/Fiction Mags Read This Year:
25