I've been listening to the stream from Indie 103.1 these past couple of days -- good stuff, nice mix of the familiar and the strange.

Ours is a house of sickness. The cats are sneezing (though I don't agree with Heather's assessment that they also have severe psychological issues!). Heather's got a deep-down chest cold, and I've got a cold, too, with itchy eyes, stuffed-up head, etc. There's a lot of moaning and unpleasantness around here, but we're in surprisingly good spirits, despite it all. Today I had a bowl of vanilla ice cream topped with cherry pie filling. That never fails to cheer me up.

We had a good weekend. Heather was crazy-productive, I was merely productive. I finished work on Star*Line 27.2, which was difficult, since I lost a lot of stuff when my computer crashed last month. I managed, though. Just one more issue to go. I also signed and returned a couple of contracts, revised a short story, and submitted a couple of other stories. Just keeping things moving.

I read Lunatics by Bradley Denton over the weekend. I liked it, not as much as Blackburn, perhaps a bit more than Buddy Holly is Alive and Well.... There were some wonderful moments, and the overall conceit charmed me, but too much of the characterization was of the straight-declarative sort. He spent a lot of time telling the reader that one character was irritable, that another was cold and rational, etc., and the stated characterizations didn't always fit the actual behavior of the characters. Still, it was worth reading.

Though Heather and I are mostly stone broke, rolling-pennies-for-gas, peanut-butter-and-jelly-sack-lunch poor, we went out for brunch on Saturday to celebrate my Year's Best Fantasy sale. (That, and buying groceries for the week, pretty much wiped out my checking account, but all my bills are paid, so it's okay. If an emergency befalls us, there's always credit cards, or my savings account, which, for the first time in years, actually has a nontrivial amount of money in it.) I'm feeling pretty good about things, artistically and personally. Life is nice.

At work I'm in the midst of integrating the past couple of years' worth of books into the main collection. It's a big job, and slow, but it's a nice change of pace from sitting at the computer, and I am a bibliophile at heart, so handling all those books is neat. Occasionally I realize I'm holding thousands of dollars in my hands -- my boss has a first edition of The Lord of the Rings, a signed Chilton first edition of Dune, and lots of other treasures. It's a nice job. I'm happy to have it.