News Roundup

So my collaborator Reaves goes under the knife today. One of his electrodes needs to be jiggled or somesuch. Wonderful thing, surgery, but there's this terrible anticipation when they put you out: Either you wake up cured, or maybe you wake up dead ...

The dogs, after romping at the beach and in the agility barn, which is floored with fine dirt, save where it is damp and muddy, are filthy, and even though I prefer warm sunny days to bathe them, this is Oregon, so they get a bath today, come whatever fog/rain/sunshine there might be.

Last night, we had occasion to be out in the country, away from city lights, to see the total eclipse of the moon. Caught much of it, up to totality. Fascinating to watch. Made us wonder what it must have been like in a primitive culture when people much more attuned to the sky saw such things and wondered at the reason. The moon, brightest light in the night, turning orange and muddy -- then reappearing.

And, last, and probably least, the doorstop-fantasy nears the end of first draft. A few days more, less than a week, maybe by, say ... Tuesday. Those of you who have expressed some interest will get an email with an attached .RTF doc, which should be readable by Wintel or Mac machines.
(RTF is an MS Word format, but can be opened with most Mac word processing software, including AppleWorks, TextEdit, or Tom Bender's wonderful Tex-Edit Plus shareware that will open pretty much any text file a Mac can read. This last has saved my bacon a few times when I had files trashed in Word or AppleWorks, and I recommend that if you are Mac user, you get a copy. Fifteen bucks. Sometimes with Wintel boxes, you get some weird control characters before or after the text when opening .RTF, but those characters can be taken out easily enough, highlight and click -- we live in the future now ...)