rolanni | It's September 30...

...do you know where your copy of A Night in the Lonesome October is?

This will be the ...fourth? fifth? year that

kinzel and I embark upon Roger Zelazny's countdown to Halloween. We'd never heard of the book until someone on the Friends of Liad mailing list mentioned it, and next thing we knew a copy showed up in the P.O. Box, from Vicki Brown, and we immediately began to cultivate the habit.

Vicki died earlier this year, much too young, and this year we'll have someone else with us while we're reading...

Today saw some more office-like tidying.

kinzel helped me hand my birthday present from him -- my original Narbonic strip, which he had framed. Not-so-good picture of the picture

I actually dusted behind the monitor. Dust behemoths, my children...

Almost all of my floor is now accessible, except for the pile of books holding up the teddy bear (visual aid behind the cut)

and the boxes of authors' copies underneath the worktable, and the reference books for the last project... There is, of course, filing to be done, but we won't talk about that now.

kinzel reminds me that today is an anniversary of sorts. In only a few short hours we will mark the 18th anniversary of our flight from Maryland. About this time in 1988, we were, as

kinzel tells it, at the point of throwing chairs at each other. Except the chairs were already packed in the truck. On October 1, we were on the road to Maine: two humans, three cats, two computers, a lot of records and even more books, all packed into a UHaul van, and whatever was left over crammed into the trunk of the '88 Beretta. On the third, we were in Skowhegan, and on the fourth -- it snowed.

It's faintly amazing to realize that I've spent most of my married life in Maine; we'd been married a bare eight years when we decided to leave everything and everyone we'd known and head for the North Country. And so does youth make heroes of us all...

LJ's being slow tonight, and so, as it turns out, am I. So with a