Tra La, It's May

Busy week.

My Dad called and he wants pictures pictures pictures.... so here they are...

I spent most of Monday sort of recovering from a weekend writers' workshop with Ellen Datlow. A group of (mostly) Wordos spent the weekend critiquing fourteen stories. It was fun meeting Ellen in Eugene instead of at OryCon because I didn't have to worry about when the next pannel was.

Arthur and I went to my folk's on Monday and spent the night. Arthur and my Dad get along well. Arthur still talks about the time Dad showed him the moon; but his new grandpa thing is mixing pizza dough in the Kitchen Aid. I'm sure that once he figures out my Mom has a computer downstairs that she'll be his New Best Friend.



We also visited my Grandmother. She's doing quite well; she's walking with a walker and you'd never guess that early last Februrary she had her hip replaced. She's also in a new place, and I don't know what they're doing there, but Grandma's recovered a lot of her mental functioning -- it's like she was about four or five years ago.

Tuesday was Beltane. There was a nice Unitarian Pagan ritual at the UU church. We danced around a Maypole and jumped over fires. I surpressed my urge to expain to people, "When a Boy God loves another Boy God very much, things get tied up and there's dancing afterwards." Tuesday night is usually Wordos night, but it was kind of nice to take a quick break from all the critiques.

Pollen season is here, so that means Mark has been sneezing a lot. And he's been really tired. He provides great support for Arthur when he gets home, but the poor thing is so tired by the end of the day that he frequently passes out with Arthur during the bed-time story.

On the writing front, I've been working on a PHP script to help me manage my stories in the mail. Marketing is the hardest writer task for me, and my script tracks which magazines I've sent stories to and makes suggestions for where to send them based on genre, word count, and pay scale (not in that order). I like being able to write scripts; it's one of the things I miss about my old job at the U of O. And... I have some things I have to iron out of the script before Arthur wakes up from his nap.