Bad Blogging and Space Object Re-entry

I have to scurry to get something on the blog so it won't be an entire week since I last wrote here.

It was a busy week. I interviewed for and wrote a story for The Ellsworth American and helped Rob pull together some stuff for a magazine that's going to display some of his work. Wrote a Filioli synopsis and some first-person Filioli commentary to interject between chapters. (I'm sure there's a formal word for "interjections between chapters" but I don't know it.) Cleaned up the first six chapters as much as I could--changing the main character's age at the last minute, because it's first person and I wanted less time to have elapsed between the events and the time of narration. Probably this'll turn into a major screw-up, because it was so last-minute, but I guess anything can be fixed at this stage.

Got the Filioli package to Kate the Superagent yesterday. So we'll see. A long time from now, probably, life being so busy at Harcourt in the wake of the Houghton-Mifflin merger.

Last night we went to see "The Gondoliers," put on by the Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Hancock County. Their past director and music director are back--yay, although last year's show was pretty good, too. Gorgeous music, singing and dancing, great costumes, nice set--only marred, as usual, but the fact that you couldn't understand a lot of the lyrics, especially when sung by the chorus or a neophyte soloist. You could tell what you were missing when one of old pros came on--every word as clear as if he were sitting next to you. But it was all fun--except for sitting next to Rob, who doesn't like "The Gondoliers" very much and was more annoyed than usual about the mysterious lyrics. This afternoon I'll write a review for the paper.

One highlight of our week was an email from FEMA telling Rob what to do if a satellite fell on his head. Some years ago, he agreed to be the Emergency Management Director for our little town. Before 9/11, this was an unpaid position with no responsibilities. In recent years, it is an unpaid pain in the butt. Rob and other firefighters had to be trained to combat Global Terrorism--Rob jokes about standing his ground when Al Qaeda frogmen march up from the harbor--and he's always having to do some little emergency-related chore.

This time, he got a memo warning him about the satellite's "uncontrolled decent." (Do you suppose they meant "decency"? Because I thought we had that well under control.) Then it said: "We will have six Federal Joint Interagency Task Forces located around the country ready to deploy the moment we know the impact area, responding to assist you in your role of immediate consequence management." It attached a nine-page "First Responder Guide for Space Object Re-Entry," which I plan to keep among my souvenirs. There's a novel in there somewhere, don't you think?