I now possess an Emergency First Response card after spending the day yesterday getting certified in CPR and First Aid. The writer side of me relished the instructor’s description of the sound the ribs make when you break when while providing CPR. He is a police officer, a volunteer fireman and a dive master who specializes in marine rescues. He had all manner of neat stories about vicious injuries, like having to hose out his boat three times to get rid of the blood after they rescued someone who had multiple wounds from a boat propeller.
It was nice enough on Sunday to have lunch outside. My wife and I went to an Italian restaurant in Rice Village and sat on the patio. On the drive home we passed through a cold front, about a mile’s worth of heavy rain, and then the winds picked up and all of a sudden it was winter again, with sub-freezing temperatures for the last couple of nights.
I posted my review of Killer Summer by Ridley Pearson last night. I’m about 80% of the way through Black Hills by Dan Simmons (a nearly 500-page book) and also started reading The Vintage Caper by Peter Mayle (of A Year in Provence fame) to my wife. The latter is a fun, light caper about an obnoxious wine collector who feels the need to brag about his $3 million collection of Bordeaux wine in an LA Times interview only to have the collection stolen from his cellar shortly thereafter.
This morning I put the finishing touches on my Storytellers Unplugged essay, Going for the Gold, which will appear tomorrow morning. I noticed that another SU participant blogged on the same subject yesterday but I decided to go ahead with mine anyway since it was mostly written and we have a different take on the topic. Speaking of gold: yay Canada for winning their first ever gold medal at an Olympics hosted in the country.
Over the weekend I reviewed the proofs of my section of When the Night Comes Down, the collection from Dark Arts Books that will launch at WHC. It was very clean. I only found one typo (a proofreader found another that I’d missed) and a couple of places where I’d changed something during the editing process that interfered with continuity or transitions from one paragraph to the next. All easily handled. The book goes to the printer tomorrow.
Since just about everything was a rerun last night, I caught up on my Sunday evening recordings. The Amazing Race got off to a rollicking good start. The two undercover cops bragged that they saw themselves winning every segment, only to finish ninth out of eleven on the first leg. I was pleased to see Jordan and Jeff win the first stage. Jordan struck me as a nice person during Big Brother. Naive and unworldly certainly (as demonstrated by her confusion between China and Chile), but she managed to perform a mentally and physically challenging task that stymied big burly guys, so kudos to her. I wouldn’t mind seeing them win. I got a kick out of the grandmother who elected to allow her granddaughter to take the challenge by saying that she had “the balance of a drunken, elderly person on stilts.” Some of the miscues were hilarious, too — especially the team that went inside someone’s house and started painting. Chilean dude didn’t have a clue why these people were there (with a camera crew) doing a bad job of painting his walls!
One of my more obscure short stories, Groundwood, was accepted as a reprint for a forthcoming series of books. I don’t spend much time shopping around reprints and generally only do so when I stumble upon a call for submissions that accepts reprints and matches something I have in the trunk.
