They called me about an hour ago and gave me a date for the taping. I will be taping on November 28th. I won't be able to tell anyone how I did until after it airs, and I won't know that date until after I come back from LA. I am SO excited! Now I have to start reading almanacs obsessively. The only sad part is that Jeopardy airs against ( Read more... )

It seems that my house and my car are in a battle for my wallet. Last year when my engine died I was planning to spend my vacation insulating my attic. Instead I spent the week at my Mother's waiting for the car repairs and had no money left to buy insulation ( Read more... )

As I write this my Mom is either watching a truck being loaded with all her worldly possessions, or driving from her former home in suburban Detroit to her new condo in Grand Blanc, a suburb of Flint just to the south of here. After seven years of living in Flint I finally got my Mommy to move closer and I am thrilled to bits. Of course, getting ( Read more... )

I was trying to hold off on this until after my next book talk, but I am afraid I will forget too many titles by then. This group had a very slow start and for a while looked like a boring group, then everything sped up a couple weeks ago. It has turned out to be a diverse lot.

Living in Amida's Universal VowI started to read this collection of ( Read more... )

I am SO happy right now. I just got an e-mail from BBC America announcing that "Count Dracula" the 1979 BBC production starring Louis Jourdan is being released on DVD on September 25th. That is the production that started my whole vampire fetish and 13-years as a vampirologist. To me, Louis Jourdan will always be THE Dracula, in part because he ( Read more... )

Jeopardy auditions were on Monday, but to tell the whole story I need to go back to Saturday. My sister Maureen turned 50 last week and my mother decided to have a surprise party for her on Saturday. I knew that driving to Detroit the day before my trip would be a pain, but I agreed to do it. I knew that my sister would want one of my peach ( Read more... )

Today I finally gave in and bought myself a mobile phone. I don't think I would have done it if my employers hadn't given me a $20 gift card to an office store as our yearly "thank you gift". After weeks of searching the stores website and reading their ads, the only thing in the price range that looked interesting were the pay-as-you-go mobiles ( Read more... )

I seem to be having rather a run of luck at the moment. At my conference last weekend a number of publishers and vendors bought me breakfasts and lunches. I was also given a $50 gift card to Borders for talking with a publisher about book design for 15 minutes. Then the next morning I won a gift basket at a breakfast sponsored by a database ( Read more... )

A little update to start. I had a very nice vacation visiting my brothers and their families. Having to share my Mom is always a bit annoying, but I had a good time. The best part was that most of my aches and pains went away during the trip. I guess my chiropracter is right that most of them are work-related. Tomorrow I am off again for a ( Read more... )

Not that anyone would notice since I rarely update this thing, but I'm off on vacation tomorrow for two weeks. With the events of the last two days I doubt that will be enough time to get over being sick of this place. Management is planning to freeze our salaries and slash our health care benefits. This is at a point where we are already so ( Read more... )