HSU IT Department

I'm in day 4 of a five-day workshop on digital collections, digital projects, digital forensics and for all I know digital didgeridoos. My head feels about to explode, so the best I can offer today is this bit of silliness:

Well, I did not get accepted to Clarion West. It was a very complimentary and encouraging rejection ("very competitive group...our readers were impressed with your work...please apply again..blah blah blah") which of course I immediately think, "Oh, that's what they tell everyone."

How could they not recognize my genius? How??! Grrrr.

However, this means that Mr Psmith and I can once again do season tickets to our local Ren Fest, which is a Nice Thing. A chance to ponce about in hoop skirts and a tight bodice while drinking ale and singing bawdy traditional folk songs is not to be sneezed at.

Things have been mad busy on other fronts, between trying to finish a freelance job which has been postponed twice (by the client, not by yrs truly) but is now nearing completion (which means yay, I can soon get paid), Mr. Psmith's birthday yesterday (which required baking the family-tradition Grandma's Dark Chocolate Buttermilk Cake with Boiled White Icing, a terrifically sticky endeavor with a profoundly delicious conclusion), a two-week guest lecturing stint for a graduate-level course, the need to assist in the testing phase of a standards revision, and of course the usual work stuff.

Plus I'm in the middle of re-reading Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy, which is soooooo good I can hardly put the book down. I nearly came to an untimely end yesterday as I had my nose buried in the second volume while walking from the parking garage to work and tripped merrily off the curb into traffic. Good thing that lady in the green Kia had had her morning coffee.

Phew. No wonder I'm tired.

I like this article about Law & Order because it manages to work in the word Thersites; I can't decide if that's a tribute to the NYT or L&O, but either way, I give props to them.

This week was what I like to call a Sprinkler Week. You know those automated sprinklers with the little lever that goes chk...chk...chk...chk each time whacking the sprayer into a slightly different direction, and then eventually it gets to the end of its rotation and goes chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga back to its original starting point? These things.

My entire week was like that. chk...an email comes in, I fire off a paragraph about this...chk...another one comes in, I send off an approval of that...chk...another one, I shoot off my best effort at a list of the other things...

By the end of the day I'm my brain is spinning round and round going "chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga!!"

Wine....where is my wine...