I didn’t quite stay offline throughout the long weekend, but I didn’t do that much with my website or LiveJournal or any of my other usual haunts. Kept up with e-mail, read a few message boards, that was about the extent of it. Starting today I am a doctoral research widow for the next three weeks as my wife begins the final phase of her data collection, so I wanted to make as much of our four days together as possible. I took her to the bus stop this morning and I’ll see her again just before Christmas.
We cooked meals and ate too much (and yet, I somehow lost weight, much to my astonishment this morning — three pounds!) and watched movies and played cards. I also read John Grisham’s short story collection (review to come) and about 1/4 of Don Quixote. I started the book before, a couple of years ago, and I put it aside for one reason or another and never got back to it. So I found a version for my Kindle and I’ve been reading it before bedtime. It’s a fascinating concept, willing something into existence through sheer force of belief. I’m up to the part where Sancho Panza is returning to bring Don Quixote’s message to Dulcinea while Quixote deliberately “goes mad” in the mountains.
I sent out several press releases to the usual suspects when my new book was about to be released, and another one of them paid off today. I spent 10 minutes on the phone with the editor of the arts supplement of a newspaper and they want to do something about the book before Christmas. It wasn’t exactly an interview today, just a touching of bases as a preamble to whatever it is they decide to do.
I upgraded my message board from version 2.2 to 2.4 today. It’s not an easy process, nothing so slick as how WordPress gets updated that’s for sure. I had to do a clean install in parallel with the old version, set all the file permissions manually (thankfully I’m a UNIX wonk from ‘way back), migrate the configuration, users and old messages to the new install, decommission the old board and commission the new one so that any old hyperlinks to the MB still work. It took several hours and I was sure at two or three points in the process that I had absolutely screwed it up. But it seems to be working just fine. Remains to be seen if I have all of the anti-spam features configured properly.
I was sorry to see the Harlem Globetrotter duo get eliminated from the Amazing Race last night, but the minute they decided to take a 4 hour penalty I was pretty sure the writing was on the wall for them. Four hours is an eternity in this race. All because one guy couldn’t figure out how to make a word out of the letters AFNRZ. I was hoping the brothers were going to get dinged for breaking the gollem’s arm. Jeez, they’re annoying.
I received editorial feedback on a trio of stories that are going to be published next year. One of the stories required minimal revision, one requires a moderate amount of reconceptualization and the third one is going to take a fair amount of work to get it into shape for the editor. I tidied up the first one and got it back to the editor this morning. Should be a neat project, but it hasn’t been formally announced yet. I’m also expecting to receive the proofs of my story for Evolve this week, which I’ll have to review post haste.
