Yesterday Lisa Costello and I drove home from Seattle. This after a very nice brunch with John Pitts, Melissa Shaw and her husband, and Greg Bear and Astrid Bear. We visited with another friend on our way out of town, then hit the road hard and fast for Portland.

the_child was already home from the beach when we got back, so we collected her, made a fast turnaround, and hooked up with Jersey Girl in Portland to admire the new house she and Lisa are sharing, and go to dinner.

We headed for the Good Food Here cart pod on SE Belmont, but on arriving discovered that none of us had thought to bring enough cash. So we wound up at Dick’s Kitchen where elk and buffalo burgers were had by all, along with kielbasa and oven fries with Cambodian garlic sauce. Nobody tried the water buffalo sausage, which I may go back for. (I’ve also had the dork burger there in the past, ground duck and ground pork mixed together, but that’s an occasional special which wasn’t on last night.) Good food and good company for four tired people.

Today I am back at the Day Jobbe where I will spend the next few weeks working on an exceptionally large project. Also, with the new, reduced chemotherapy in play, I am as of now back to being able to drive and have a social calendar. (Hooray!) Somehow the next month’s worth of weekends have rapidly filled up. I’ll even be making a few appearances at conventions and events, including (probably) Norwescon, as well as being Guest of Honor at Gaslight Gathering in San Diego in May.

Also in the department of fun stuff, I will be writing a chapter on steampunk for a forthcoming Writers Digest book on genre fiction. I’ll be doing this after my current novella-in-progress (working title: “Pan, Human”, though I may change it to “Hook Agonistes”) is finished and before I dive back into Original Destiny, Manifest Sin.

So, yeah. Life goes on. Cancer giveth and cancer taketh away.