All out beyond horizon

And this morning I was woken by floor-shaking, ear-filling mechanical noise that appeared to be located directly outside our bedroom window. derspatchel got out of bed and verified that it was a woodchipper in the street immediately below our bedroom window, deconstructing the branches that came down in the nor'easter last week: it might as well have been out in the hallway. Downstairs was no quieter. The cats were panicking, so we let them ino the room; they dived immediately under the bed. And we lay in bed with earplugs and pillows and fervent, partly threatening prayers for the city to clear the sidewalk already and not bother checking out the tree in the backyard and eventually the agonizing judder and ripsaw moved off and the cats cautiously came up to the topside of the bed and I overslept from the interruption and I thought that was a completely unnecessary start to the week. It's getting better, though.

1. My poem "The Crane Husband" has been accepted by Not One of Us. After two months' drought of poems, it came very suddenly out of nowhere around midnight on Saturday. I credit taking a day in which I did absolutely no work whatsoever.

2. Yesterday, despite exhaustion and illness, I sang the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" at Music to Cure MS and I am very, very pleased with how it went. I dedicated it to klwilliams, for the living, and my mother's cousin Billy, for the dead. The rest of the evening was marked by (me) falling over and (Rob) discovering that his wallet had gone missing on the bus and waiting until ten o'clock at night to hear from the MBTA if anyone had turned in it. Remarkably enough, someone had. So that was exciting.

3. Saturday night was my family's annual Halloween party. We had a respectable complement of rushthatspeaks, jinian, sairaali, nineweaving, teenybuffalo, my niece who is now ten months old (and can walk if she holds on to things) with her parents, and friends of theirs with a seven-year-old daughter who was all about the pumpkin-carving. I baked a lot on Thursday, including a shredded-apple-and-crystallized-ginger cake-thing I plan to try again. Rush brought caramels. Rob took some pictures of our pumpkin and Greer took a picture of me. ( See? )

4. runedrum is now compiling Storyfox: A Database of Vulpine Science Fiction and Fantasy. (Introduction and explanation here.) I have already inundated her with all the fox titles I could remember over the weekend, but I know for a fact that I can't have gotten all of them. Go and make suggestions! Your own work, others', it's fair game so long as it's foxish. Foxfoxfox.

5. The Strange Horizons Fund Drive is still running, and there's quite a lot of special issue left to go. Two more weeks, I think. Help make it all happen!

There is sunlight today. I should walk around in it.