Thought I'd fill in a bit about why I have been so invisible lately. If you haven't missed me, please don't say so; I'm SO sensitive.

The day before I left the US of A, the laptop I was planning to take broke down in a major hardwareish way. While I was away I tried to keep minimally au courant via Internet cafes, which are plentiful and convenient in London and a bit thin on the ground anywhere else. I was able to take care of top-level matters and not much beyond for a period of three weeks.

When I returned it was to a DSL provider who was convinced we had cancelled our contract and had been cheerfully returning our checks whilst cutting off our service. I had tens of thousands of unopened mails on just one account, and no way to bring it through the spam rules in Outlook, which would have eliminated 90% of the bulk.

Once again I tried to handle the most urgent matters by hanging out in a neighborhood coffee house a couple of hours a day on a borrowed computer, but I invariably found myself in one place and the files I needed in another, and at the end of that time had STILL not managed to see most of my mail.

Now we've finally convinced Qwest we really ARE subscribers, and after being home for three weeks I'm finally close to being dug out of the giant hole; at least I think that's daylight I see up there; might only be the headlight of a descending locomotive...

Good to be back, and to be back. Mostly. Nasfic was fun, but my energy level was too low to appreciate it properly. I got to one party. Count 'em. One. Hi again to everyone I got to see, and Hi for the first time to anyone I didn't. If you were there and missed us, the trick to finding us, for future reference, is looking in the bar, where you'll find us drinking endless pints of soda and lime and endless lattes, forming infinitely reconfiguring amoebas of tables and chairs as our mates come into and go from daylong breakfast/lunch/conversation/meeting things.