Well, I don't know, what are the hours?

It is snowing thickly outside. Somerville has already declared a snow emergency. It remains to be seen how this will interact with the window situation.

I am nonetheless, at the moment, quite happy—among other reasons, because I just saw the results of the 2012 Strange Horizons Readers' Poll. Congratulations to gwynnega, Sofia Samatar, selidor, and rose_lemberg, who is evidently not sweeping the poll only because she didn't publish five poems with us last year. (All of those poems are my choices. I am actually making a difference as an editor. I am really pleased about this.) Also to alankria for fiction and to hawkwing_lb and rushthatspeaks, my wonderful-writing love, for reviewing. This magazine is pretty awesome.

And because tonight I saw This Is Spinal Tap (1984) at the Coolidge Corner Theatre with my mother, who had never seen it before and loved it, because she recognized the entire scene from the years when her brother was the producer for Kansas, especially the tour where Kansas opened for Queen. "The roadies were exactly like that!"

And because this afternoon I walked down to Ball Square and met derspatchel for lunch at Kelly's. I ordered a Reuben, planning to replace the sauerkraut with coleslaw as usual; the waitress told me they were "out of Reuben" and suggested I try a Monte Cristo. (I didn't think of it at the time, but I bet they were out of corned beef. Happy day after Saint Patrick's Day.) I'd never had a Monte Cristo before. Ham, swiss, turkey, French toast. There was no shortage of each. It is probably a data point that I ate it at two o'clock and with the exception of some coconut lime ice cream from J.P. Lick's around nine-thirty, I haven't really had any food since.

And because I am reading Margaret Talbot's The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century (2012), which I pulled off the fifty percent rack at Porter Square Books without having heard of it at all and because of a badly torn page in the index got for a full third of its price. I am a quarter of the way in—teenage carnival barker to hypnotist's assistant—with pre-Code Hollywood still in Lyle Talbot's future and while I recognized his name in the vague way of a person who watches a lot of TCM, Rob placed him from Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). I am enjoying it enormously so far.

I don't know what will happen with the apartment. We have not yet been able to make an appointment with the building inspector—I am going to call the city again tomorrow—and my room was 54°F when I came home. It's different layers of uncertainty; some of them we can organize and some of them we cannot. But I am still making a life. I insist on that.

Words about winter pull you inside the cold

I feel like the intellectual content of this journal has crashed. On the other hand, I feel like my intellectual content has crashed: the apartment situation is taking up so much of my time. I woke this morning around seven-thirty when I couldn't sleep through the snow anymore, left a message for Somerville's Inspectional Services around nine o'clock and didn't really fall back asleep afterward, got out of bed around eleven-thirty, ate rice cakes, worked for Nokia, called the city back around three in the afternoon and spoke to an actual person who was horrified when I described the issues with our windows and promised a building inspector would call me tomorrow morning. (The same building inspector, in fact, who left a stop-work order on derspatchel and ratatosk's front door last fall when it turned out the incredibly disruptive and shoddy construction on their second-floor porch had been undertaken without a permit. I do not know if he will remember me, but I recognized the name at once—I was the person he spoke to, because I was going up the front steps just as he was getting out of his car to identify himself to the household and it was just as easy for him to hand me his card.) If I do not hear from him by a reasonable hour, I'll call again: we need this situation resolved, or at least we need to start resolving it. It's still snowing out there. I am pretty much living in the common room because my bedroom is too cold to occupy outside of the bed with five and a half blankets on it. It's got nice couches, but that's not the point. We can't unpack because we don't know if we're staying or house-hunting. My books are all still in their boxes, my clothes in a heap of bags. And I like where I am right now, geographically: I like walking into Ball Square, I like being twenty-five minutes from Davis; I like the variety of buses available to me if it's late or the weather is bad and I like that gaudior already knows how to drive here. I have donuts I can walk to easily, which hasn't been true for me since the bakery whose name I remember as Do-Si-Donuts (I am torn between hoping I've gotten that wrong and hoping that really was it) closed in Arlington Heights. There is a used book store at similar distance—a small one, but their science fiction section is great and they have already furnished one book with uncanny timing. I don't want to move again, but I don't want to stay somewhere I really can't live, either. I made grilled cheese with ham for dinner, because it is comfort food. If this week goes on the way it began, Friday will necessitate noodles and cheese.