Perpetual sludge

Today was such a wet and sludgy day, my first day back to work after a three-day weekend, and all around it was pretty busy. I’ve got several book projects in the pipeline, a couple that need to finished and off my desk before the end of the month, so I spent most of the day reading chapters for one of those projects and making some final edits where needed. I’m really just sort of glad the day is over.

This evening I spent a whole lot more time than I expected to working on a little side project, my mother’s birthday present. It’s all hush-hush, but her birthday is this weekend, and I’ve been putting together this gift for awhile.

And I also finished reading Scott Westerfeld’s The Risen Empire. It’s really space opera, and the fact that it ends on a cliffhanger with much of the plot unresolved is maybe the best argument against my whole “no new books for 2010” pledge yet.

And that’s that. Right now, I’m going to go to bed or watch Lost and then go to bed. I haven’t yet decided, though bed is definitely in the near future.

Tuesday various

  • An inspiring profile of Roger Ebert and his struggles with losing his voice (and food, drink, strength) to cancer and how his life has changed since then. [via]
  • Apparently, we were once this close to Israeli President Albert Einstein.
  • Oh man, why did no one tell me yesterday was International Grover Appreciation Day?
  • I think there’s an argument to be made that new and valuable art can emerge from appropriation, but wholesale lifting of entire pages without acknowledgment is still plagiarism and, therefore, still wrong. That much seems pretty clear-cut to me. [via]
  • And finally, if I’d know this was what the Olympics was like — “Try to imagine Pegasus mating with a unicorn and the creature that they birth….I somehow tame it and ride it into the sky in the clouds and sunshine and rainbows. That’s what it feels like.” — I’d have been watching from the beginning.