When you spoke of the seven wonders and you reached in your coat for your telescope

This was not a bad week. There was the wiped-flat exhaustion from Readercon that I failed to notice until Tuesday or so, but there was also my brother's birthday and Legend of Korra with gaudior and The Blues Brothers (1980) with derspatchel at midnight, which I may now consider the ideal time to start watching that movie. I have been listening to Anaïs Mitchell's Young Man in America (2012), which is a kind of epic cycle of American myth; it's not so much that it pulls back from the archetypal scope of Hadestown (2010) as it is a different way of focusing the same body of music and stories, the stretching shadow of the Depression. Yesterday, however, was a bad day. I got a poem out of it, but it was still a very bad day.

Today, the mail arrived. I am looking at:

1. A certificate for my poem "Tapping the Vine" placing second in the 2011 Dwarf Stars Award.

2. Copies of Gil Adamson's The Outlander (2007) and M.R. James' Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, sent me by handful_ofdust.

3. The Alan Turing T-shirt ajodasso sent me a link to on Tuesday and which I ordered promptly, because I know a necessary item of clothing when I see it.

Okay, universe, I'm sure there's a point in here somewhere.

Have some panoramic views of Mars.