annathepiper | Some of what's been happening lately (Reply)

-0: I just banged my knee. Hard. Well, okay, technically, it's the part of my leg just under my knee, but damned if I know what to call it. Anyway, whatever it is, I knocked it against the corner of the coffee table, right on the bone, hard enough to break the skin. I had to get a band-aid, and

solarbird and

spazzkat suggested that I also get a cold pack to minimize the bruising that's sure to result from that sort of a knock. In conclusion, OW *!$@!*&$%!!.

+1: Dara and Paul and I went down to Lake Forest Park Town Centre earlier today, where I mailed off the first three chapters of Faerie Blood to Luna. As per my last post. Meep!

I'm hopeful about this. Luna's entire line of material seems to be a good match for Faerie Blood: fantasy with a heavy emphasis on the heroine's point of view, emotionally complex, with romance on the side. I'm just a tad bit worried about sending them an urban fantasy set in Seattle, given that they're about to publish an urban fantasy set in Seattle, but hey. If they tell me no, at least this should buy me a bit more time to get the third draft done. And hopefully to call it a wrap on this book.

+2: Also at Lake Forest Park Town Centre, we went to the bank and Dara and I had a little chat with them about rearranging our checking accounts for the sake of minimizing the amount we have to pay in service charges a month. Actually, we'd intended to shut down one account entirely, but we remembered--hey, we've still got pending charges against the one, we'd better leave it open till they clear. So we changed that one into a "people have cooties, so do all your transactions via ATM or online" account, and upgraded the other to the "maintain a minimum balance and you don't have any charges at all" account. This should get us off the hook for service charges to the tune of at least $30 a month on the average, and we need the buckage, so that's all good.

And at least we got the account for which I've actually recently bought checks--the ones that got misprinted, in fact, and which I had to have resent--to be the one that got upgraded. And that one will be the one we keep if we decide to shut down the other. This way at least I don't have to waste two whole boxes of checks.

Also, we reset the PIN number on the other account. In theory we're going to shut this one down anyway and shouldn't need to do any further transactions with it, but we'd both forgotten the PIN number, and I wanted to have a known number on the thing just in case we need it for some wacky reason.

To give you an idea of exactly how closely we're scrutinizing our money these days, I've bitten the bullet and signed up for direct deposit for my paycheck just to get the $2 credit for using direct deposit, too. I've had no real particular reason to avoid doing it before now, except a small bit of irrational reassurance to have the actual physical check in my hands. I have just a tiny bit of fear that this'll be another thing the bank can screw up. Hopefully I shall be mistaken.

-3: One of the reasons we have to be worrying about this buckage is that, as Dara has posted, our health insurance rates are about to double. Sigh. Let's hope neither of us has any more major medical adventures for a while.

Between my rate of pay not matching my last contract and our rental income taking a hit from having sold 5026 to finance moving to MurkNorth--but still paying two houses' worth of bills--and also having to pay for getting the space we were occupying at MurkSouth into shape for rental, things are definitely tight right now. Tight enough that we also might not be able to afford to go to Scotland for Worldcon this year, which is the part I really hate. But unless I get my contract renewed in April (a non-zero possibility, but not a given, either), it probably isn't going to happen. Bah.

+4: Dara and I went to MurkSouth last night for the Sari Party hosted by

mamishka, and that was fun. It involved the eating of tasty Indian food (mmm, butter chicken, which we hadn't had in some time), the drinking of homemade mango lassi, the trying on of a lot of lovely saris, and the watching of Lagaan. Or at least half of Lagaan. Dara and I had to leave early because of one of the tires on the car going flat.

But I liked Lagaan, and suggested to Meems that we give it a proper watching once we finish off Firefly on our TV-watching get-togethers.