On Saturday, after a day of running around in the park with the baby and such, our friend Amelia came over to babysit and I took Heather out for a belated birthday dinner to Pizzaiolo, where the food was just as good as we'd heard (and the service was actually much better than we'd heard). My pizza had meatballs on it! Afterward we went to the spa on Piedmont Ave. and hung out in the hot tub for an hour. Mmm, sweet relaxation. My calves finally forgave me for hauling all those scores of boxes up a million stairs last week.

Sunday we went to the huge park near the port of Oakland, which is really lovely. Vast beautiful expanses of grass, which, when you look closer, you realize are absolutely littered with goose turds. Ah, well. River had fun running around and playing with a ball and he only fell down in poop once that we noticed. (And we live by the lake, which is also a bird sanctuary, so we're fairly adept at poop-dodging.) Nice views of the water and the bridge and of San Francisco across the bay too. We might picnic there next weekend if the weather's good.

We also went to Wal-Mart, because we had about $150 in gift cards there. It is a strange fluorescent realm, but we came away with vast quantities of necessities and not-so-necessities, so that was good, though the baby was melting down after such a long day out.

Did I mention that I did a Best of 2008 write-up for the Green Man Review? Well, I did, and it's there, along with many other year-end write-ups.

The Locus Recommended Reading List is now online, with many good titles included. And, proving I get no special favors for working there, not a single title by me made the list this year. Sigh. I console myself that books in an ongoing series seldom make the list, and I only published a handful of short pieces last year, so. But still, disappointing -- first time since 2002 I haven't had anything on the list, and that was the year I made my first pro sale, and so effectively the beginning of my career. So it goes.

In the realm of nice surprises, I got a check yesterday for a sale to Finnish magazine Portti, which I didn't remember making; I dug back in my e-mail and found their request to reprint the story dated September 2007. So good things comes to those who wait! (And now I can buy groceries, yay.)