Hungarian bagpipes sound like bees are playing them (1124 words)

And 5171 for the chapter and what? 11959 for the book. I think I may be pruning this stuff -- I'm afraid it's slow, too much information, too much Pablo crusing around talking to people, and it's what? 13-15 pages into the chapter and the actual story of the chapter hasn't started yet. But I'll worry about that later. I'm feeling the need for charts with circles and arrows on them, which is probably a good sign: it means that I've written into the part where it's bigger than I can hold in my mind all at once.

About the Hungarian bagpipes: I was listening to them on the radio the other night when I went to pick up Emma at Science Fiction Night at her friend's house. Hungarian bagpipes are called duda. Which is the coolest name ever for an instrument.

I was supposed to run errands, but Frank developed people to drive to the airport in San Jose and to San Francisco, and he's got the car. Truffle thought they were the most interesting thing to happen all day.

Now I have to clean house and think of some jobhunt thing to do.

(no subject)

Norton AntiSpam is a pain. Even after you tell it that a particular piece of mail is clean, there's no way to read it. Supposedly you can open the spam folder, but there's no way to open it. At least not that I can find. And I've wasted a couple of hours on it. And sent email to Symantec, who assure me that they've gotten my mail.

Well, don't worry about contacting me, I have turned it off and I won't turn it back on unless and until Symantec or somebody tells me how to read the ten pieces of mail I can see in the log, and which have been reclassified as clean, and which I damned well want to read.


I have not turned off the virus protection, natch.

Who writes those damned things, anyway?

I mean those quizes and surveys and things. And why don't they do one that extracts the music listings from your journal and either gives a summary of yours or compares them to your friends or the rest of live journal? Huh?

Mary Kay's fault

You take the list, you delete what's not on your shelves, and add the same number that you delete.
I don't know what it's supposed to demonstrate.

J.R.R. Tolkien
E.A. Poe
Shakespeare
Kurt Vonnegut


Dr. Seuss


Maxim Gorky
Patricia Wrede
Cordwainer Smith
Pamela Dean
Jhumpa Lahiri

(deleted: Tim Powers, John Donne, Nalo Hopninson, Kinky Friedman, David Brin)

On other fronts, my son drove a couple of guys from the dorms to the San Jose Airport and to San Francisco. After he got there, he found out that the one he drove to San Francisco is the offspring of friends of my father and stepmother. The key exchange that started the recognition of this fact: "My husband works in harm reduction. Do you know what harm reduction is?" "Yes, I do. Do you know Moher Downing?"

famous all over town.