Half a year in Akitakata!

Wooo. It's been fun. Feel a bit cut off. Can't watch Watchmen until much later.

Not much has happened. I'm getting used to the job, but it's starting to look like my contract won't be renewed - which is unsettling. I bought stuff to send home, but I'm too lazy/depressed/apathetic to send it. I've picked up some new manga, which I'm considering sending back. Maybe.

It snowed yesterday, but otherwise has been warm in the way early spring gets. Snow up here (we're 40 kilometers or so from the sea, 150 meters up, and surrounded by mountains) isn't very lasting or heavy, so it's no big deal. Just enough to get in the grooves of my shoe soles.

I bought "the best of fantasy 2008" recently, and it's uplifting... is the best word I can come up with. I felt bad about my level of writing recently, but now I've got a benchmark to compare it with. Seems my ideas are almost not surreal enough, and my writing is about two drafts away from publishable - my style is somewhere between too descriptive and too brief, which is good. This is good, but I wanted the "SF 2008" instead - that comes out "sometime in March", according to the bookstore guy.

So yeah. I'm fine, Rachel is fine. Hopefully all will go well.