Wow. It's 4:30 in the morning. I'm glad I don't have to be anywhere until tomorrow afternoon...

Today, I bought two things. The last issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentelmen Vol. 2 (And thanks to Jon Hansen for letting me know in his journal that it was out!). And a new computer.

Whee!

My old computer had a 4 gig hard drive; this one has an 80 gig hard drive. The old one had a celeron processor; this one has a pentium 4. The old one did not have RAM so much as it had an old, mangy goat; this one has a genuine longhorn. Also a DVD drive, which I don't need, but hey, why not? (it's also a combo CD R-W, and there's a separate CD-Rom drive, too). 'bout a million USB ports (so, wow, I can have my digital camera and the printer hooked up simultaneously!). Lots of software I mostly don't need, but with 80 gigs of space, it's not like they're taking up valuable real estate. And, since they were running a big package-deal special, I got a 15" flat screen monitor, too (it would've only save me $80 to buy the computer without the monitor). Nice laser-mouse. Everything nicely black and silver, as opposed to the dirty-gray to which I'd grown so accustomed.

You know, when I bought my old computer, 4 gigs was perfectly respectable. How things change...

The new one is a Gateway 500X, if anybody cares. I don't, especially -- I'm content knowing that it's fast, and shiny, and cheap, considering everything I got, though not cheap in any absolute sense (It cost 1/3 less than our car, but then, our car was a bargain). I should have it paid off in a few months, barring unforeseen financial catastrophes. We're not traveling anywhere until Wiscon, so I had some discretionary income to spend. The limitations of the old computer were starting to get on my nerves. We're going to see if we can swing getting Heather a new laptop, since her old one is elderly and cranky (though stylish -- an old-school clamshell mac). And, hey -- tax write-off. Which is welcome, as I've had a pretty good year, fiction-writing-income-wise.

I spent most of the afternoon wrestling the two computers, attempting to transfer files from the old one to the new one via a direct cable connection through the serial ports, which, in a perfect world, is relatively fast and simple. But since my old computer has a distressing tendency to crash at the slightest provocation, and does not enjoy being restarted, it took a very long time to get the two computers to form a rudimentary network, especially since I was working with only my own basically-non-existent computer skills (my ignorance on the subject of computers is as vast as my ignorance on the subject of Pre-Cambrian geology). Heather was very tolerant of my swearing and gradually-eroding patience. Eventually I got everything set up, and let the files transfer merrily away, watching Angel episodes with my sweet darling pook. Around 3 a.m. the files finished transferring, and I naturally had to sit down and poke at this, and fiddle with that, and curse and growl at (and remove) all the useless, intrusive things that Microsoft included (AOL was installed on this thing! Horrors!). Then, since I hadn't been on e-mail all night, I had to check that, and read journals, and so forth. And now it's more like 4:45 a.m.

Greg sent the end of our weird robot collab, and it's marvelous. We have some revising to do, but we're not far from having a damn fine story on our hands.

I got contributor copies of the October/November Asimov's (which contains my poem "Still Life, with Frog"). I read much of the issue tonight, and it's really very good so far. Swanwick's "Coyote at the End of History" is very nice, as is Walter Jon Williams's "The Green Leopard Plague" (I heard about that one a bit at Rio Hondo; it was his Rio Hondo story in 2002, I believe), and Kage Baker's "Company" story "Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst" is lovely, even if the title gives away a bit too much, in my opinion. That's all I've read so far, but the other stories look promising, too.

Tomorrow Heather and I are going into the city to see people and do things. We'll wind up at the Tachyon Books anniversary party at Borderlands. I'll have to find something by Peter Beagle for him to sign. He was a tremendous influence on Rangergirl, and on my writing in general (and thinking of which, thanks to Karen Meisner for handing me a copy of Folk of the Air a couple of years back. I'd been aware of Beagle before that (isn't everyone, what with The Last Unicorn), but that was the book that made me love his work.)

Now, I'm getting a bit tired. I'd better sleep.