SP and I want to go out to Calgary after she finishes school to visit my mom et al. The dates are not very flexible at all, because you sign up for daycare by the week in the summer, and you have to do it in, like, February (or possibly March -- anyway, a while back): school finishes on 25 June, and we have no daycare for the following week, and I need to be back at work on 7 July because we are also driving to Ann Arbor in the third week of July for my dad's eightieth birthday and we have no daycare that week either.

So my mom said, as she generally does, use my Aeroplan miles to book your tickets, I have lots. And I said, sure, thanks, I'll do that. And then, for a couple of months, I didn't get around to it. And now, of course, since we are only, what, six or seven weeks away from wheels-up, there are no more reward-miles tickets to be had -- not, that is, for the standard rate of 25K points per ticket. If we wanted to spend more points than my mom actually has -- and she has a lot, because she's a globe-trotting sort of person these days -- then, sure, we could get two "ClassicPlus" reward-miles tickets in Business Class. But that obviously is not an option.

The problem is, the alternative is to buy the tickets for actual money, and they're going to cost almost  $500 each just for the airfare (that is, without all the taxes, airport improvement fees, fuel surcharges, and so on that the airline sticks on after you've agreed to purchase the ticket). How can it cost almost $1500 for two people to go from Toronto to Calgary and back? I'm speechless.

And, more to the point, I haven't got $1500. I might come up with half of that, if my mom were to look at her bank balance and her accounts receivable and decide that she could afford to go halves. But I really wish I'd not been an idiot and had instead gone and got the tickets three months ago, when there might actually have been some left.

Sigh.

Just got back this afternoon from a meeting-conference-workshop thingy in Chicago, hosted by the University of Chicago Press (home of the legendary Chicago Manual of Style) and held at the super-fantastical Hard Rock Hotel Chicago (about which more anon).


  
And some photos 
 

I just finished a book. It was an extremely good book, and I enjoyed it a lot, and I will be looking for the sequel when it comes out.

But.

Either the author or the copy editor does not know how to use the verb to lay correctly. (You lay a book on the table in the present tense. In the past tense, however, you laid it on the table yesterday.) Either the author or the copy editor does not know that when you make a plural word with an "s" on the end possessive, the apostrophe goes after the "s", not before. Either the author or the copy editor does not know that the expression is "making do", not "making due". At least once in every chapter I ran up against one or more of these errors, and it irritated me. (There was also an instance of a word with two p's in it that ought to have had only one, but that could happen to anyone and was probably just a composition error.) Also, there were comma splices.

I don't know whether the errors in question were introduced by the copy editor (in which case s/he needs to find a new career) or whether the copy editor found them and fixed them and the author stetted the changes (in which case the author needs to trust his/her copy editor more), but either way, they adulterated my enjoyment of an otherwise excellent book, and this makes me grumpy.

I am trying to finish the copy-edit on a really dire article on peer-review in a certain large country in Asia that will soon be hosting the Olympics.* Trying to make my brain focus on that, but what it's actually doing is singing "Ae Fond Kiss" in a nice warm baritone, and inventing some soprano harmony on top.

I hate it when my characters get into my brain and take over while I'm trying to work.

* Circumlocution intended to prevent this entry from coming up the next time someone runs a Google search on that topic.

From The Lilith Blog, for the USians in the crowd, an excellent idea on what to do with your "economic stimulus" money.

And now for something completely different: this this is just frakking hilarious. Go on, click. Rosy Perfection Salad awaits. As also does the Frankfurter Spectacular. And let's not forget the random greeny goodness of Hot Wrap-Ups. I've seen this stuff before, but I still cannot behold it without dissolving into helpless laughter. I defy you to withstand its mirth-inducing effects. And if you like that site, then you definitely need to check out The Gallery of Regrettable Food.

That is all.

What I did at work today (in no particular order):


ETA: LJ cut (was hellaciously long, which I hadn't quite realized before)

Well, not really ;^)

At this time of year the obvious thing to blog about is Pesach prep. I am significantly less stressed about this than I was last year, because -- huzzah! -- we have been invited out for both seders this year. I have promised to bring desserts for second seder, and obviously I still have all the nastier parts of the holiday preparations to do, things like cleaning the oven and the fridge and "turning over" the cupboards and so on, but oh, the bliss of not having a big fancy ritual meal to prepare here in my own house!

Which is weird, you know, because the cooking is the part I actually like. But never mind.

So this afternoon DH picked up SP from daycare, and I went down to the Bathurst & Wilson No Frills, which at this time of year is not a task to be undertaken lightly, to finish off the Pesach shopping. And it took (because the store is both large and incredibly badly organized, as well as being crowded) a long time, but -- huzzah again! -- I came home with everything on the list except the macaroons. I think this might be the year we skip the farshtinkener macaroons. I even found guar-gum- and xanthan-gum-free cottage cheese (i.e., DH can actually eat it without getting sick).

Every year I ask myself why I do this every year, considering the fairly extreme non-observant-ness of the rest of my life and the fact that, by the standards of any genuinely observant person, my family's Pesach observance is so half-assed as to be completely pointless, and come to the conclusion that it's just a personal idiosyncrasy I have to accept. Another thing I do every year, and this year is no exception, is to alternately boggle and sigh over the price of things. Kosher food is hella expensive; kosher-for-Passover food is even more so ($11.99 for 500g of cashew butter! Oy vey! And at Dominion, where I didn't buy it last week, it was $16.99. SRSLY). Except, really, most of it you don't have to buy at all, if you can cook: you need a couple boxes of matzos, some matzo meal and maybe cake meal and potato starch if you're going to bake, and a few other staple items, and otherwise what you mostly need is lots of produce, dairy (which doesn't have to be KfP if you buy it before the chag), and meat (if you're that way inclined), which you prepare slightly differently than during the rest of the year. Oh, and dozens of eggs. Eggs are vital. The older I get, the more phantastickal and bizarre the prepared KfP options become (at the NCJW food drive a couple of weeks ago, I saw a KfP taco kit -- really, why bother?), and the fewer of them I buy. Leftover homemade potato kugel is the way to go, say I :)

In other news: not writing much, but trimming. The Midnight Queen is now 1800 words shorter -- not much, considering my goal is to cut 10K words, but every little bit helps (and I'm only on about page 180 of 442, so ...). 

As promised in a previous post, and in anticipation of Pesach, which in my mother's house when I was a kid was always an occasion for chicken soup with matzo balls, the vegetarian "chicken" soup recipe. It's very, very good. Don't be scared off by the garlic quotient.

Having evidently had no opportunity to post anything whatever for some considerable time, I attempt here to fill the resulting gap, both with certain entertaining anecdotes vis-à-vis SP, and with a (much-abbreviated, because not universally fascinating) report on Ad Astra -- accompanied by photographic evidence of, inter alia, a certain goblin-related gathering.

1. A week ago, or maybe two weeks, Monday morning began with the discovery of a total flood of the laundry room, which occasioned much unhappiness and fears of having to purchase a new laundry appliance (or call in a repair person for the one we have). Now, I live in a perhaps 750-square-foot flat, so our laundry room is (I've just measured it, using the tape measure from my sewing box) approximately 43×61"; the flood was mostly under the washer/dryer, hence largely uncleanuppable, but also involved the vacuum cleaner and the plastic bag full of attachments for the central vac. I got the water cleaned up and traced its source to one of the taps that controls the hoses attached to the washer part of the washer/dryer. Tap off = end of leakage. Yay! (I put the otherwise disused mop bucket underneath the taps just in case.) All day I stewed about it, however, certain that the leaky tap would prove to be the cold one. Fortunately, it turned out that it's the hot-water tap that leaks, so the solution is simple: for the one or possibly two loads (it's a very small washer, did I mention that?) per week that I do in hot water -- towels and floorcloths and things -- I can open the tap and stand there for five minutes while the tub fills, then turn it off and stride briskly away (the washer does all rinse cycles in cold, the clever chap). W00t! Appliance repair averted once again.

2. There's this program called American Idol, which DH and I like to watch the first few episodes of when they're doing the very early auditions and some of the contestants are comical, and over the past couple of months -- I can't remember when it actually started -- SP has become an avid, dedicated fan. In particular, she is an avid, dedicated fan of one particular contestant. Alas, on this week's episode said contestant didn't get sufficient audience votes and was, in consequence, banished. SP sobbed about this for at least half an hour, and still mentions at least once a day that she's "still a little bit sad" about Amanda. I have tried to turn this into what they call a "teachable moment" by explaining that different people have different tastes, and the fact that someone loses or wins in a contest like this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how good a singer s/he is or anything objective, but the response has mostly been "But I never fought it would happen to my friend!" I might have been more successul with the approach suggested by my friend JD, who said, "I think this is an important lesson about how the rest of the world has tastes that may be different than ours, and how those other tastes are, in fact, WRONG." ;^)

3. It's cold. Still cold. But sunny, anyway.

4. In two days I will have a 30-year-old baby brother. OMG.

5. W00t! Looooong weekend!! (SP's school and daycare are closed Easter Monday, and I am under pressure to use up some of my copious vacation time before my employer's fiscal year-end on 30 April, so we are having a girls' day out in which we will eat lunch at Wendy's (I know, I know...), shop for clothes for SP (notably spring/summer pants, because the ones she's been wearing for the last two years are now shorts), and buy a birthday present for her friend who's having the party next week.

6. It never rains but it pours: next weekend's programme includes Ad Astra on Saturday (and particularly jimhines 's book launch for Goblin War at 4pm); SP's friend's birthday party on Saturday afternoon, directly opposite one of the panels I particularly want to go to, "Fantasy and Mythology"; SP's Hebrew school's Purim-related food-bank fundraiser, "Souper Sunday", on Sunday, for which I have rashly promised to make a large pot of Not-Chicken Soup with Matzo Balls and a challah -- I may fink out and purchase the latter at the bakery on the way there; and a visit from our friend C and her son, who will be a year old in a couple of months and we've never met him (they live in Ottawa). Oy! Oh, and SP's dance class, which she's going to have to miss if we're going to do all this other stuff -- I feel bad about that, but ...

7. I sent out two query letters to agents last week. One is still pending a reply, but the other got a form rejection within 24 hours! Goodness. That one was in the long-shot-but-worth-a-try category, though, rather than the OMG-this-agent-is-perfect-for-me category. So no big.

8. At the beginning of May, for the first time since 1999, I will be going on an honest-to-goodness business trip! Very exciting. I'm going to a meeting for production and design managers hosted by the University of Chicago Press, which lasts for two and a half days and requires a three-night stay at what sounds like a horrifically fancy hotel. The real reason this is a landmark, though, is that it will be the first time I've spent a night away from SP since she was born. She and I have been away from DH a number of times, either because he went somewhere or because we did, but she and I have never once spent a night apart. It's going to be weird -- but I'm sure we'll all be OK :).

9. Just finished reading book II of Guy Gavriel Kay's The Sarantine Mosaic. OMG, why did I not know about these books before??

There's probably more, but I have a long grocery list and the bus comes in ten minutes...