Last night was supposed to be our Big Night Out. We got a babysitter! We went into the city! We had dinner reservations at one of our favorite fancy restaurants!

And when we got there, the restaurant was dark, because a power transformer 'sploded, and the restaurant had no power. (Actually, the power had just been restored moments before, but the whole staff had already gone home except for a lone sou chef who broke the bad news.) He told us to come back on Friday and they'd "take care of us," which isn't much help, since we don't have a babysitter on Friday! (We're trying to find one, and it might work out... we shall see.)

We were devastated. There is no pain like the pain of a frustrated craving for truffle mac & cheese.

So it's peak dinner time in the Mission and we have no reservations. We tried Luna Park, where there weren't even seats at the bar, and where the hostess lied to us and said we could get a table in 15 minutes -- "20 at the most." Half an hour later she admitted that there was no table in sight and we left.

We couldn't wait any longer because we needed to be somewhere by 9 p.m. at the very latest, and it was already after 8, and we were, moreover, starving. We wound up at a wine bar with an eclectic food menu, which was actually pretty good -- bruschetta, a cheese plate, cabbage and potato soup, yummy lentil stew, salami pannini, great wine. It was a nice enough meal, but we were rushed, and bummed out about that truffle mac & cheese. Alas.

We got to Modern Times bookstore around 8:55, so we missed Susie Bright's entire reading. Gah. We chatted with her a bit, though, and then caravaned with her group over to a tiki bar in Alameda to celebrate Susie's impending 50th birthday. (Five people in one cab. Heather sat in my lap. It was like being in high school again, only in high school it wasn't a cab, it was somebody's mom's car.) The bar was great, and we drank tropical drinks, and Heather socialized while I was my usual hermetlike self. She got nice and drunk and we both had a fine time, and we caught a cab home with a jovial racist cabbie (racist but not sexist; he supports Hillary, not Obama). We were back in the house by midnight, where our baby was sleeping adorably and was, apparently, pretty much an angel for our awesome babysitter Mya.

Definitely a mixed night, but it had high points, and any time I get to spend with Heather is time well spent.

Our magical sleeping baby what magically sleeps all night has changed his behavior. Don't get me wrong -- he still goes five or six or even seven hours at a stretch, and generally goes back to sleep pretty easily after eating -- but that bliss of clockwork nine hours at a time is a thing of the past. So it goes. He's still the best baby ever, and is adorably chubby and cute and grabby and drooly (and, at the moment, snotty with a cold, but he's handling it pretty well).

Simon at Bloggasm has an article about SF ezines, with input from lots of editors. Interesting stuff (but then, I made my bones publishing in ezines, especially Strange Horizons).

My friend John Sullivan told me about a neat site, Zeros 2 Heroes, basically a social networking site for comics creators (and aspiring writers and artists). People can post pitches for comics series, and the community votes on the ones they like best; the winners get developed as webcomics. It's a cool idea.