pameladean

Caroline lent me a pen, which I forgot to give back.

Stella and I talked about tofu. Marissa and Pat and Caroline talked about copy-editing. Don had a huge stack of the reprints and got me to sign them all; this means they can't be returned. He doesn't return much stuff anyway, but it was nice, as it always is.

My mother's friend Helen came in and bought the first two books of the trilogy for her granddaughter, who is eleven.

Instead of buying books by the next slate of autographers, I bought Ursula LeGuin's new collection of essays and John M. Ford's new collection of stories and poetry. I looked for the third Riddle-master book, having discovered when I was assembling reading for California that ours has vanished; but like us, Hugo's had the first two. I know what happens, but I want the third one anyway.

In the car on the way to the restaurant, we were discussing why the bass line of music that Lydy plays in her bedroom can be heard quite so insistently in my room. I suggested that the waterbed might transmit sound into the wall, might even amplify it. David said the amplification wasn't possible since energy wasn't being added. "It's a heated waterbed," I said facetiously. He gave me the hairy eyeball and said, "Heat can't pass from the cooler to the hotter," and then he and Lydy did the whole routine, ending up with a rousing, "And that's a physical law!" Then they talked about less-successful Flanders and Swann routines. In the restaurant we had a little gossip and talked about The Book of the New Sun, via Gene Wolfe's rules for writing.

It's a gray sloppy day, but not very cold. This is the time of year when winter and spring have a kind of shoving contest.

Pamela