Great news Pix! The power of the ~ma comes thru!!!

Ion, work called while I was eating dinner, apparently my keyboard reprogram this morning had a bad side effect (fixed what they wanted, somehow unfixed something else). They call in a panic, with 2 minutes to curtain!! Why wasn't this checked earlier? Also, I am not a keyboard programmer, I can't fix this over the phone. Lastly, spending 30 sec describing every character on the screen does not help. When I say "towards the top, does it read..." I don't need you reading the very top line and ignoring the 2nd line that says what I asked for! Grrr. Stupidstagemanager. Grrr. t /rant

Sorry. The timing of mid dinner, and call me with no time to fix struck a nerve.

Good luck with the follow-up mammogram, Jilli. I had to have one after my first mammogram, too. It was all ultrasound, basically painless, and they figured out the oddness was just some harmless cysts. I hope yours goes just as well. (Well, I hope your parking experience goes more smoothly, but of all the things that could have been problematic that day, parking was probably the best one to go.)

Whuh. Posted, then had a DH arrive home in desperate need of a guacamole burger.

That is great news, Kristin.

Am willing to bet that this could be practiced in six or seven virtual environments

Just Los Angeles...the original VW. Honestly? If I was in this wedding in Second Life, it wouldn't be news.

I had my second molars out so my wisdom teeth could come in and take their places. The molars themselves hadn't erupted, so there was a lot of digging around; even with the novocain it was a bit rough. However, it wasn't painful, per se.

I did take a day off from school to give myself time to quit drooling blood down my shirt and let my face return to something like normal size. No vicodin, just tylenol.

Good luck with the mammogram, Jilli.

Yay for good news for Kristin's dad!

Lord, what a day. I sent my agent a severance letter today. No anger or anything bad, just thinking I needed to take a step back and figure out what I want to do.

I kind of want to find the joy in writing again, you know?

Wow, this feels so weird-- I'm essentially unpublished and unrepresented again. Just like starting over.

You are at least half a step forward, Barb. You have been published and recognized. You have some stuff to show. Good Luck.

Thanks, beth-- I'm oddly far less stressed about it this time than I was last year at this time when I was also going through the agent search.

I think it's because last year the first inklings that something was wonky with the Carmen contract were showing up and I still had other material out on submission. Right now, I've got nothing on submission at all so it's as clean a slate as I could possibly hope for.

Best of luck to you, Barb. Here's hoping you can quickly find an agent you can really work with.

Ugh, Barb, that's annoying for you, but good luck with it.

Jilli, I'm jealous. I kinda have been wanting to do that. But it requires that I go to the dentist first. Which I, um, still haven't gotten around to. Even though I got recommendations a few months ago from everyone. Erm.

So, today, while I was meeting with my advisor and discussing some research that we're working on (this was an unscheduled meeting -- he'd come over to my office and asked if I had time to talk), someone walks into the office. My advisor greets him, then introduces him to me. He introduces me by first and last name, the visitor by just first name. Visitor sits down, starts talking to advisor, who tells visitor about some of the stuff we've been working on, and after a little while of conversation, I finally connect visitor's first name with some of the people and places they're mentioning, and realize that this is someone who is a Very Big Name in the field.

I'm not terribly good with new people. I'm especially not terribly good with new people when I have had no warning that I'm going to be meeting a new person. When my advisor asked me to come talk to him in his office, he had to have known that this guy was going to show up while we were talking. Would it have been so difficult to tell me sometime before he walked in?

So, as I could have predicted, I got flustered, said about three words in twenty minutes, and generally looked like an idiot. (Also, I'd had PT this morning, and didn't bother to change clothes afterwards because I was expecting to just stay in my office working on my own research today, so I was wearing stained sweatpants and hoodie. Ugh.)

This is the second time he's done this -- introduced me to someone and expected me to tell this person about my research without giving me any warning. (At least it's better than last time, when he did give me two hours notice, but also told me that he wanted me to read a paper that the visitor had written before I talked to him. He did not have a copy of the paper, the internet did not have a copy of the paper, and the library only had it in off-site storage, which takes a few days.)