So it turns out that I underestimated my book's page length..considerably. When I made my last count, I was at 420 pages. Not bad considered I had guessed 400 in the initial proposal to my publisher. During this last count, however, I forgot to add the last third of my anthology (all parts of my book are in different files, per the publisher's ( Read more... )

I had a meeting with my project editor on Friday. We wanted to meet and talk about final details to the work before the September 15th deadline, which is fast approaching. I'm ahead of schedule, which is good. The book is done. All parts are in. Major revisions and even most minor revisions have been completed. The book is to be submitted in many ( Read more... )

Big raise coming our way. It was announced at the big meeting yesterday at school that we're getting an across-the-board 5% increase and then departments can give out another 4% in merit pay as they see fit. All of this added to my $2000 raise for promotion gives me a $7000 raise! This pushes me well beyond the $60K mark for my base salary, and ( Read more... )

So I've been spending my time lately clearcutting my front yard. Below's a pic of our dead tree being chopped to pieces ( Read more... )

Jo Napot ( Read more... )

I'm sorry I can't show more pictures. I did not bring the docking station for my digital camera, so I can't transfer the images from the cam to the laptop. I even had to buy an additional memory card to handle all of the images ( Read more... )

Things are going well here in Budapest. We just got back from a 3-day excursion into the Northwest countryside. We saw two Abbeys, two castles, the famous Herend porcelin factory, Lake Balaton, the second largest lake in Europe, the site of the 1989 Hungarian picnic, which was a revolutionary mass walkout of communist Hungarians across the Iron ( Read more... )

Here is the pic of the castle, from the movie Underworld, I just posted about and visited. They dressed it up quite a bit for the movie, but the banister, stairs, wood carvings, are the same!


( Read more... )

Very cool! I was just at a castle whose insides were used for shooting the castle scenes in Underworld. That first shot in the first movie when Selene walks into the castle and you see all the vampires hanging around the staircase, that was filmed here. I got some great shots of the room and will show them later! Very very cool room. They had ( Read more... )

I'm in Budapest. Arrived 2 days ago. Having a great time so far. Lots of new information from the lectures, and have taken an introductory tour of the city. Today we went to the Fulbright Commission and participated in a large conference with the US Embassy here in Hungary. I got to meet a few US university presidents and a lot of Hungarian leaders ( Read more... )