Personal note in unseemly haste...
This is going to be one of those days; worse yet, a lot of this day is going to have to be spent waiting for somebody else to do something so that I can then do the task assigned to me. I'm going to get cross, and I don't plan to inflict myself on you today, therefore, except for these very quick updates...

I've been reading your comments on the commotion -- and the morality controversy -- about Hillary Clinton's "emotional moment," with great interest and pleasure. Thank you for posting so much thoughtful and interesting and instructive information. [I've also been reading the uproar over Chris Matthews' barrage of remarks about Clinton, and Tucker Carlson's barrage of remarks about Clinton, and the various online collections of those remarks, and am giving that meta-topic a lot of thought in various cognitive directions.]

Yesterday, after we'd finished off the last of the first loaf of five-minute artisan bread, I showed George how to get the next one into, and -- later -- out of, the oven, successfully. He agrees that there's nothing to it, and I have now turned the whole operation over to him. I am looking forward to dinners accompanied by exotic breads of many kinds and many flours. We'll see what happens.

I'm waiting around for the contract from Barnes & Noble for the updated edition of The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense to arrive, but -- in a leap of faith based on 27 years experience with B&N -- I have gone ahead and started keyboarding the book. I had already copy-edited it line by line from beginning to end, and if the deadline in the contract turns out to be irrational, having an e-file in which all the typos and quaintnesses have already been fixed will give me a major head start.

I'm waiting around hoping that when I go to the Arkansas Literary Festival in April 2008 I'll get a chance to talk to some academics and get some input about what they might want me to include in a Teacher's Guide [to be posted at my SFWA website for free printing out] to go with The Science Fiction Poetry Handbook and Twenty-One Novel Poems. I'd rather not write that guide in an informational void; I'd like to know what profs who are willing to discuss a hypothetical lit course -- using those two books and a good sf poetry anthology -- feel should be in there. What would be useful; what would help them teach the class and lighten their load; what would just be superfluous. I think I know what needs to be in a Teacher's Guide for a linguistic textbook, and have written several of those -- but I've never taught a literature class, much less a science fiction lit class. So ... despite the fact that I badly need to get that guide written and posted right this minute for promotional reasons, I am waiting around.

I don't think there are any other loose ends that would interest even the most tolerant reader among you. The laundry and the housecleaning and the stack of clerical and accounting stuff that have to be fit into this cottonpicking day somehow are monumentally uninteresting. Sorely tempting me to just go read my friends-list posts instead...

Gaah. Feh. Cottonpick. Duty calls.