Come and see me this Sunday! And if that doesn't tempt you, come and see Jeffrey Ford! We're both reading as part of SF in SF, Terry Bisson's awesome reading series. 6 p.m., at The Variety Preview Room, 582 Market St. @ Montgomery, 1st floor of The Hobart Bldg. It's easily BARTable. (That's how I'm getting there.) Doors open at 5. Cash bar. I'll probably read a couple of rather short stories, if I have time. It'll be great!

Well, our phone worked... for two days. Then it stopped working. We, of course, still had no DSL, a week after I was told it would be turned on -- which has caused me to blow a deadline. As for our free cable? It got disconnected yesterday. Which means I was finally able to order cable... which will be installed a week from today. Sigh, sigh, double-sigh. So last night at home we had no phone, no internet (even the wireless we could slurp went down), and no TV. Fortunately we had many boxes to unpack, and we all strolled (well, River rolled in the stroller) over to the Merritt Bakery to get sandwiches for dinner (and eclairs for dessert), so it wasn't a totally un-fun evening.

On the bright side, I just talked to Heather, who told me the phone guy came and fixed whatever random damage was done to our connection, and wonder of wonders, the DSL is working, too! (It was technically working last night... but since we had no dial tone, it didn't do us much good.) She says the connection is blazingly fast, too. Who cares if we don't have cable yet? With DSL we can download Lost from iTunes! (Or, ahem, less reputable sources, but it's so cheap and fast, I have no objection to doing it the legal way.)

It's amazing how much a little thing like this can improve my day. I can download e-mail! Pay bills! Write my internet porn column! Buy plane tickets to Wiscon! Balance my checkbook! Observe internet slapfights! Etc.! Life is a wondrous thing.