The bad:

In the past eight days, our kid has been diagnosed with glaucoma, undergone surgery, learned to fear scary eyedrops, and worn an eyepatch. I snapped the driver's side mirror off my wife's car while parking next to a pillar (the car was full of yowling cats, and I was trying not to hit the car beside me, which was parked over the line into my assigned spot). This morning, I got in our other car to go to work, and the car is a paperweight. Just sits there quietly. The starter is bad. I called Triple-A, was promised a tow truck in half an hour... and two and a half hours later it showed up. Also, we moved, and our new house is a chaos of boxes... while our old house is still full of jumbled stuff we need to take home. Our DSL isn't on yet at the new place, though it was supposed to be working Wednesday; at home, we only have the flaky wireless we can slurp with the old and crotchety laptop. Heather was in a fender-bender with a Frenchman (no one hurt, no serious damage, fortunately, but still.)

The good:

We have great friends. Amelia came over to watch River today, and loaned me her car so I could get to work, extending her babysitting stint from a couple of hours to all damn day. She brought us much food, too. She's awesome. And she's just the latest of many friends who've pitched in to give us a hand in the past trying week, notably David, Lynne (who came all the way from Santa Cruz to help me with movers, and fed us, too), Susan, Mya, Stephany -- we can't thank any of you enough. (That doesn't even count the friends who made offers to help, that we didn't accept -- we had more help than we could handle!) Times like these really drive home for me the importance of friends, family, and community. Thank you all.

My colleagues are great as well (I mean, they're also my friends, but they've been accommodating in terms of our business relationships). Not only have the people at my day job been wonderful, but my editors for fiction and non-fiction have been incredibly understanding about shifting deadlines, and my agent has helped out tremendously, too -- she knows how.

There are other little good things that help get me through. We love our new apartment, box-filled though it is. My kid is incredibly cheerful despite being awakened from a sound sleep at 4 a.m. to get antibiotic drops dribbled into his eye. Our old landlord is letting us use his garage as storage for a little while after our lease is up, so we don't have to move everything by the 15th (though we'll try). The view from the balcony is tremendous. After two failed attempts to get cable service hooked up (one via phone, where they never called back and, when queried, had no record of my confirmation number, and one via internet that failed for less interesting reasons), I finally just dug up a length of coax and plugged it into the cable outlet in the wall. And, lo, the cable works. Apparently the old tenant never canceled his service, so we'll enjoy the free gravy while it lasts, and try to sign up again when it stops.

Also: Today, I got my first finished copies of Poison Sleep, so it should be showing up in stores soon. Next weekend, I do a reading with Jeffrey Ford for Terry Bisson's SF in SF, which is always a blast. Our phone works, at least, even if our internet doesn't. I just drank a vanilla coke and vanilla ice cream float while sitting on the balcony looking at the lights of the city reflect on the lake. My co-workers are hiring cleaners to clean our old apartment tomorrow, just because they're nice. My car will be fixed for a few hundred bucks by tomorrow afternoon. My wife is beautiful, smart, and brave. My baby smiles at me all the time, and loves playing with me.

Sometimes bad things happen, but life is good.