While I'm Waiting

Yes, I'm in waiting mode:

• Thursday is Weekend Assignment night, but John Scalzi had major technical issues on a couple different fronts and was unable (more or less) to post this week's assignment. Ah, well, he'll probably get it in tomorrow. (Update: yes, he has.)
  
• In a little over 36 hours, I'll be watching the last Doctor Who of the 2007 season, a few hours after the BBC broadcasts it. On July 6th, it starts up here, on SciFi, the same episodes I've watched way too many times already, but I'll be there anyway.
  
• A new season of the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood is coming, and The Sarah Jane Adventures, and then the third annual Doctor Who Christmas special, appropriately airing on Christmas.

And at this point, I'm not so much waiting to hear from a publisher, as a publisher is waiting for me to finish my latest "final" edit of Heirs of Mâvarin and send it off. (The publisher doesn't know this yet, of course.) And a few of you may actually be waiting to read the sequel to The Jace Letters that I promised to start posting on my fiction blog. So far Jace seems to be dawdling over her email to Sandy in London. Sandy is already discovering something strange there, but she hasn't told anyone what it is yet, including me.

So what shall we do while we're waiting? Well, I'm just finishing up watching the 2005 series of Doctor Who on DVD, but I did do a little work on Jace's letter, and I hope to finish editing Chapter Four of Heirs tomorrow night. And because Thursday night is Scalzi night and I'm stubborn, I'm going to to a Weekend Assignment anyway. I've been doing them almost from the beginning, but the key word there is "almost." I never did the first one ever, because back on April 16th, 2004, I'd never heard of John Scalzi. Time to rectify that little oversight!

Your Weekend Assignment #1: Share 25 totally random facts about yourself. Include at least one you've never shared before with anyone.

(25 too many? All right -- try 10 instead. But remember to put in one that you've never shared before. People who do all 25 get extra credit, though. Mmmmm. Extra credit.)

I've done at least one meme like this before, but what the heck. Let's see how quickly I can pull meaningless (and possibly a few meaningful) bits of biography out of my teeming brain:

1. When I was in about first grad, maybe second, I got in a fight with Jamie Gerber, my only classmate at Manlius Elementary who had also been my classmate at Pebble Hill School in kindergarten.
2. She was trying to take my toy dog Trophy. I pulled on Trophy, and somehow managed to flip Jamie over my shoulder. End of fight.
3. The first time I met Cindy R., I was eight years old. There was a dead bird in the street, somewhere near where Berkshire Parkway meets Somerset Lane. Cindy advised us not to touch it, for health reasons. She was seven years old at the time. A year or two after that we had a fight, and I think I flipped her, too. That fight involved my jacket somehow, as a weapon. That was the last time I ever flipped anyone. Like the first time, it was totally accidental. Most of the time we got along, though. We collected china animals and Britains Ltd. plastic animals together.
4. I've long since forgiven Stevie C and Greg K for what they did over forty years ago. Forgiving Brian G. was a little harder, because he was never, ever anything but mean to me. And no, I'm not going to elaborate.
5. I'm not quite sure where my cell phone is at this exact moment. (Update: it was at work. Good thing, too, because my brother called to say one of my aunts is dying. I haven't seen her in about 30 years and she's in her high eighties, so the news is not devastating to me. She outlived her husband by half a lifetime.)
6. Speaking of phones, I've just been staring at a phone jack, dangling from a wire running through the board that holds up my totally inadequate room air conditioner. Two little wires are exposed where that cord meets the jack, a red one and a green one. If it led to a bomb, which would be the correct wire to cut?
7. I don't like onions.
8. Or olives.
9. One exception on the onions: toasted bits of onion on bagels, onion rolls, etc., or in onion dip.
10. No exception on the olives, although I can tolerate olive oil if I have to.
11. When I was a kid, I called egg salad sandwiches "egg and olive without the olive." This was because my mom called then "egg and olive sandwiches," and prepared them accordingly. Ack!
12. My favorite character in my own work varies, but I'm especially fond of Rani and Fayubi.
13. I worry that I won't be able to write Kate's story properly.
14. I have Mardi Gras beads hanging from an otherwise empty CD tower at the moment, left over from Employee Appreciation Day.
15. I haven't updated the church blog and website this week.
16. There is a little red x on the Norton 360 icon in my taskbar or tray or whatever. It's been there all night. It probably wants to optimize my hard drive, but it can't until I get it 15% cleared off.
17. I feel guilty about certain emails I haven't replied to yet.
18. I worked late tonight, trying to get a couple of things done, but didn't quite get there.
19. When I called before leaving the office, to see what to pick up for on the way home, John asked for a pony.
20. Safeway was out of ponies. I checked.
21. I never got out of the office for lunch today. Don't really mind, except that I was going to go make a car payment near Speedway and Alvernon. The drive over is long, hot and no fun.
22. I'll do it tomorrow instead. I also have big plans to clean the refrigerator, but not at lunchtime.
23. I'm pretty sure the last fan letter I wrote to an actor was to Wayne Rogers when he left MASH, trying to talk him out of it.
24. There's a half-written fan letter to David Tennant on my desktop.
25. I have a theory about the Toclafane. I'm thinking about posting it on my LiveJournal tomorrow night, so we can all laugh on Saturday about how wrong I was.
    

I'm sure there are a number of things there I haven't told anyone before. Don't expect me to point them out, though.

Karen