Quote of the Week

"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from."

--Andrew S. Tanenbaum

On the bus

I just got a call from my nephews' grandmother. G did indeed get on the bus. After several days of both boys leaving me frantic messages that I should not pick up any phone call with their area code for fear it would be their grandmother, it was a very low-key conversation. She thanked me for helping with the bus ticket, asked if I knew how long he planned to be out here (answer: he didn't say), and confirmed that she really didn't want C (the younger one) coming out here alone.

I don't think she knows G plans not to go back. And I don't think it's my place to tell her. Let's hope this whole thing doesn't blow up in our collective faces.

The voices in my head . . .

Joel's lips smile a little, his eyes as cool, flat, and dead as ever. "You are not really such a bad man." He leans over to brush Vaughn's lips with a kiss.

Vaughn sits where he is, a wooden statue of himself in his surprise.

Joel says, "I, on the other hand, am." The smile fades, slightly. "But I am still a man. Even with the hole in my head."

Greyhound

My nephew-the-elder (as opposed to my nephew-the-freak) gets on a bus tonight to come home. Where he feels Home is, anyway, which is the important part. He's a newly emancipated minor. I don't know if he can pull this off or not--I hope he doesn't screw up his chances of going ROTC (which he wants, desperately) because he couldn't wait out two more years with his grandparents. But this is G. He may just be able to do it.

Let's hope he actually gets on the bus.

11th Hour

In a last-ditch effort to get Pete on the cruise where we're having our family reunion, I have enlisted my sister's aid. She's going to call the cruise company directly today, and again on Monday. I know this doesn't sound like much to normal people, but my sister has this remarkable ability to achieve ends and manage logistics that are otherwise unmanageable by sheer force of personality. I guess we'll see if she can pull it off. She's also going to look into any single-berth passenger who's looking for a roommate to save money, and she offered that if any ritzier cabin for four is open, she thinks it would be reasonable for us to take it and split the cost of the upgrade.

We'll see what we see, I guess.

Odd conversations . . .

Sorry I've been quiet. Between the tail end of this cold and the stress of touching down at work without really being there long enough to accomplish much, I've been pretty thrashed most evenings.

I've said before that aspects of being an author are disturbing. You're all your own heroes . . . but that means you also have to be all your villains. You're male and female, mad and sane, bisexual, victim and perpetrator . . . all these things come out of you. I occasionally complain to my friends that some character will tell me something I really didn't need to know. Often in loving detail.

Last night, as I was not quite asleep, two of my characters began having a conversation. The ex-priest who gave up his vocation before he could disgrace the priesthood and the sado-masochistic madman with a psychic hole in his head. The two have always hated each other. And last night, they sat down with each other and began having a thoughtful conversation with each other. In my head. Even three-quarters asleep, it was really odd. Even for me.

Quote of the Week

"I know you think war is glorious, Arthur, but it is not. There is little glory in bodies cut in half. It is not even butchery. It's not a clean slice to the neck or a killing hammer blow. There is no clean gutting, no decorous and beautiful fallen. In death, men lose dominion over their bowels. The fetor of battle is the smell of shit, and then of rot. And during and after battle, there are hosts of men halfway dead and halfway alive. They cry piteously to be dragged to one margin or the other, to be saved or killed. Living men missing half their bodies and losing more each moment to the creeping work of gangrene. Dying men with bodies whole but for a single slender stab to the gut, enough to kill slowly but certainly. It is seeing them, speaking to them, bearing water to them, clutching their hands as inexpert men with axes or saws or torches do their best to stay the spread of death--that is war. The moment's glory is followed by decades of torment and regret. That is war . . . "

"This, Arthur . . . this is history."

--Merlin, Ulfius, in Mad Merlin, by J. Robert King

Still paddling the old canoe . . .

Still on cold meds, and now antibiotics, too. Aside from that feeling of someone having shoved cottonballs into my sinuses, I almost feel like a human being. Sort of. I can think (a little) and I haven't thrown up in more than 48 hours. This is a vastly good thing. All of which means . . .

I am now functional enough to be completely bored out of my mind.

I am so not equipped for just sitting around the apartment. I lack appropriate food supplies. We don't even have cable, and as seldom as I watch television, at the moment, I'm just not fit for much else. L'sigh.

Rites of Kids

One of the most unexpected things about Rites this year was the kids.

The kids at Rites are always great--sometimes annoying, but great. Kids have such an interesting outlook on the world in general, and pagan kids are more skewed in particular. But this year, there were babies. No less than half a dozen couples brought children under one year of age with them to Rites. At the maypole, they all ran up at the beginning, and rather than make an announcement of what had happened in the last year, they just held the babies up.

Somewhere behind my right shoulder, I heard L's voice say, "When did we become grown-ups?"

A couple of my friends noted that the Rites kids were beginning to look to them . . . regardless of not having kids of their own. I think maybe my generation is finally coming of age, in its own, inimitable way.

But wow, it was hard to see the babies and know that I won't have one of my own for some time, yet. It'll be rough when I see the little ones at the family reunion in two weeks, too.

The hunger . . .

Charles de Lint is the kind of writer who makes me want to write.

Whooo . . . Aaaaare . . . Youuuuu . . . ?

Your results:
You are Uhura

Uhura 70% Geordi LaForge 65% Jean-Luc Picard 65% An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 55% Beverly Crusher 55% Spock 50% Deanna Troi 50% Will Riker 45% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 45% Chekov 40% James T. Kirk (Captain) 40% Mr. Scott 35% Data 34% Worf 25% Mr. Sulu 10%

You are a good communicator with a pleasant soft-spoken voice. Also a talented singer.

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Test


Well, I would have put it more that I'm the one you don't necessarily notice, who quietly sits in the background and makes it all work. But I may be a little biased. What's really amusing is that my top three are within 5% of each other and vary so wildly.

Quote of the Week

"So what I'm going to do is [give you] the ones that I think don't suck."

--Mark Feathers

Home again, after a fashion

I'm home. Rites was wonderful. I'll say more about it later, and my other journal will have notes at some length. Gabefinder did not make it due to a canceled flight. Gabefinder is probably the most-jinxed person I know with regards to making it to Rites.

I caught a miserable cold during the last couple days of the festival. Flying with a head cold sucks, but the fact that it acquired a swollen throat and fever was really more concerning to me.

Once on the ground, Pete had to give me the bad news that there was a windstorm while I was gone and my windshield was spiderwebbed by a tree branch. Needless to say, I was not driving home on Tuesday night. He poured me into his bathtub and made me chicken soup. I love my boy.

After some dancing with the glass company, I did manage to get the windshield replaced on Wednesday. Then took more cold medicine and promptly fell asleep, putting myself four hours behind schedule. When I got to Tucson, I started sorting laundry, figuring I'd be doing that after work today.

I woke up today early because my body decided I was going to toss my cookies. Violently. I've thrown up three times in the last two hours. So . . . work is not the first thing on the schedule this morning. Going to the doctor for a strep culture, some anti-nausea stuff, and an opinion on whether or not she thinks I'm contagious is the first thing on the schedule. I'm hoping really hard that this isn't her day off; I really don't want to do the emergency room thing, and it's very expensive.

Just thought I'd let y'all know I'm alive.