I'm lurking on LJ more these days than in the past few months, but haven't quite got that habit of posting back.
What news?
I took a week's holidays last week, which is to say that I was working on some chemistry freelance editing at home and spending seven days in close quarters with many children. The latter was more challenging than the former, actually. Said children are usually nice to be around, but I really must break them of the habit of watching
The Simpsons 24/7 in my living room. They have a nice family room downstairs with comfy couches and an X-Box, but the living room is closer to the kitchen (and therefore the food), so the basement TV hasn't become the default yet. However, I have a new and cunning plan: we disconnected the cable from the upstairs TV this evening and plugged it into the stereo instead (Jim wants to see how many radio stations he can get this way). DVDs are still watchable up here, which is mostly what I watch in the summer anyway, but actual cable TV is not. The long-term plan is to buy a big-screen TV for the basement for a 'family' Christmas present. That and six weeks of summer training for lack of other options will hopefully make 'TV' and 'basement' synonomous in their minds.
Jim and I made a quick visit to Toronto over the weekend for a kid-free night at a hotel and a day at Polaris (the convention formerly known as Toronto Trek). They were both fun, in different ways. ;-) I met Ron Glass and got him to sign my
Firefly DVDs and
Serenity promo poster (I'm up to five BDHs now!), as well as my father's
Barney Miller DVDs (a surprise for him--he doesn't know that my sister 'stole' them for me the last time she was over there for dinner :-). I also got Katee Sackhoff to sign my BSG DVDs. I've heard interviews with Ron before, so he was pretty much what I expected, but Katee surprised me. She was smaller and very much more girly than I thought she'd be. For some reason, I thought we'd be presented with a big ego, but she was downright shy at the start of her Q&A. All that Starbuck bluster really is just acting.
After a too short hook-up with
redeem147, Jim and I took
sunnyd_lite out for sushi and saki to celebrate her new job.
I haven't posted much on the house lately. We've spent quite a lot of time attacking extraordinarily weedy flowerbeds and hacking down dead branches from trees, so the place is starting to look quite civilized. I have four whisky barrels planted with tomatoes and found my first ripe one yesterday. I also did my research (thanks
petzipellepingo!) and made a list of plants that like both shade and the toxin oozed out by black walnuts, and the front flowerbed actually looks like, well, a flowerbed. It used to look like a grassy hummock, so I'm calling it a win.
I'm back at work this week, though I can't say I've been terribly productive. I have, however, finished the first draft of Chapter 3 of
Wish You Were Here and sent it off to my betas. Hopefully, I'll get it posted later this week.