Even with a holiday, it wasn’t shaping up to be a great week. I got sad news about a 10-year co-worker over the weekend, and yesterday the mother of one of the supervisors I manage passed away after a battle with cancer. My employee, and the rest of her family, are devasted but trying to hold it together.
On the 4th of July Spouse and I went to memorial service of a great friend from boy scouts. It was a wonderful event–completely the opposite of somber, with funny hats, Cuba libres (his favorite drink) and hilarious stories–and a Marine honor guard, but it served to remind me that he’s not around any more.
There is good news, though, not to be too shallow. After six full months of fighting with AT&T about the quality of our phone lines (to make it more complicated, they aren’t our phone provider anymore, so it was us joining forces with a local, scrappy ISP) today an AT&T guy showed up and magically fixed the problem. Then Rob from Sonic.net, our provider, stayed on the line with us and walked us through every connection inside the house and discovered that in addition to the bad pair of cables we had outside, there was one problem inside as well. That problem is now eliminated.
My comments on China Mieville’s Embassytown are up at fanlit. At the end of the week I will post some commentary here because I cut it down some for fanlit. It is, as one editor said, more literary criticism than review.
But I LIKE literary criticism!
And apparently I do too! I see that I haven’t done this yet–maybe tomorrow . . .