incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

This week was mostly a continuation of last. The cold continues, which made driving ~300 miles on Wednesday interesting; and, just to keep things fresh, it mutated into a sinus infection very early on Friday morning. Antibiotics are helping and I'd probably feel relatively good today, except that last night around 1:00 I decided to add a cough suppressant to my cocktail of drugs. I'm sure there must be some decisions made at one in the morning that are good, but let's just say this wasn't one of them.

(Instead of Mercedes Lackey, I've gone to Tamora Pierce for this cold. Her books about Kel are very good for the middle of the night while waiting for coughing fits to really go away. I'm not going to booklog them because I don't have anything new to say about them—well, Owen is just the cutest thing ever, but that's not really useful.)

In happier continuation news, my cheap modified CueCat arrived and works a treat; I highly recommend it plus LibraryThing if you have a lot of books you want to catalog. The Internet Review of Science Fiction bought my Sunday-at-Boskone report—my first writing sale! I'm thinking of sending them a review of Bad Magic whenever I get around to re-reading it; I brought it to Chad's doctor's appointment yesterday, because it's so weird that it would probably fit quite well with the cold-pill state of mind, but instead I ended up writing most of a booklog entry on those Suzanne Enoch books (and coughing. Don't forget the coughing.). Syracuse won the Big East championship last night; the phone rang immediately after and, since I expected it to be Chad's father (he usually calls after big games), I answered it with "Go, Josh Wright!" Of course, it wasn't his dad; fortunately, it was his mom, who puts up with my weirdness admirably. (And hey, a five seed! Yeah, there's that whole 5-12 thing, but that's much higher than we expected.)

Ooh! Mom's just told me that the World Men's Curling Championships are going to be in Lowell in April. I have no idea whether it's going to be practical to go, but I want to. Must investigate.

Finally, it looks like there are cool though hectic things coming up at work, so I am going to go back to doing some preliminary research in that general direction.

Another cranky week; not really worth talking about. Well, Madrid would be worth talking about, but I have nothing to say. The world makes me sad, but we have to live in it and make the best of it all the same.

Much basketball this weekend; see this post and the post above on Chad's blog for details. Poor Chad looked like someone had hit him on the back of the head when the brackets were announced: Maryland and Syracuse, his teams, are seeded in such a way that if they make it past the first round (not guaranteed; they're playing Western-area teams in Denver), they'll play each other.

Yesterday, we bought lots and lots of books: handfuls of Westlake for both of us; presents for Chad's father, including Doyle and Macdonald's The Price of the Stars from me; and more for my inpile, including pegkerr's Emerald House Rising, SeaWasp's (Ryk E. Spoor) first novel Digital Knight, and Laurie J. Marks' Earth Logic. As of today, I'm almost up-to-date on the booklog; I have a re-read of Tooth and Claw to get through before I can log it, and that's it—just in time for a lot of other books to pop into the queue: new J.D. Robb out of the library, new Caroline Stevermer and Guy Kay on their way from Amazon, and then I want to re-read all of The Viscount of Adrilanka before logging Sethra Lavode, and then we're into April and new Westlakes . . .

Blog-like items:

• Law and current events:
  • I like How Appealling, I do. But this spoof is dead-on.
  • Grim Amusements points out an incredibly stupid Congressional bill.
  • Buried in an article about the train bombings: "The cabinet Friday approved emergency measures to grant Spanish nationality to any victims and their family members who were in Spain illegally and wanted it."
• Other stuff:
  • In case you haven't seen this yet: ellen_fremendon on sssstudentses.
  • A professor of pickpocketry talks to the NYT.
  • Diary of a double-lung transplant recipient at Slate. My uncle died when I was in junior high, waiting for either a heart-double-lung or just a double-lung; it kept changing and I can't be sure now. Several people on the other side of the family have had or needed kidney transplants. Have you expressed your wish to be an organ donor?

Friday morning, there was a quarter inch of solid ice on my car. It took me half an hour to clear it off so that I could go to work. Schenectady got another quarter inch during the day; I got less in Albany, where it's generally warmer. It continued spitting ice Friday night, and wasn't supposed to let up until mid-day Saturday. Since my parents were getting the same kind of weather out in Massachusetts, we said, "Well, guess we're not going to visit them this weekend."

Friday night at 10:00, the power went out, flickered back on, and then went out for good. When it went out the second time, we said, "Well, guess it's time for bed."

[ The important thing to note here is that, though our furnace is gas, the heat gets disturbed through a forced-air system. Which runs on electricity. Which means no heat when the electricity's out. Which is incredibly stupid, in my opinion: if you've got gas coming in for the heat anyway, why not rig the fans and such so they run on gas, too? ]

Saturday morning the power still wasn't on, so we went to Bruegger's for a leisurely breakfast. Came back, power still wasn't on, so we went to Chad's office. Came back around lunchtime, cleared an additional inch of snow and ice off the other car, discovered that power still wasn't on, and said, "Well, guess we're going to Whitney Point for the night." Chad's parents weren't getting the same bad weather, live closer than my parents, and had his grandmother and one of his great-aunts up anyway, who we wanted to see.

Went to the Point, had a nice dinner, watched Kansas *thump* Marquette—who knew?—and Syracuse pull it out against Texas. Go, Syracuse. Slept a bit fitfully (we've gotten out of the habit of sleeping in a double bed) but warmly. Stayed through lunch and then headed back: power or no power, we had things to do that couldn't really be accomplished there. Chad's parents are really way too good to us.

Still no power. It was about forty degrees in the house. According to the recording on the power company's phone, power is expected to be restored late Monday. We said, "Well, guess we're going to a hotel." Before we do that, though, we have the exciting experience of bailing out an alarming quantity of water from the sump pump hole (because, of course, the sump pump runs on electricity) and moving around some stuff that got wet. (It's a good thing we didn't put the paperback shelves in the basement . . . )

Between this and the 100+ inches of snow we've had this season, this has really been a great introduction to the joys of home ownership.

To be fair, I usually don't get too worked up over things I can't control, like weather and traffic, so it could be much worse.