Not one but two first readers sent me rave reviews of what I can now reasonably call my second novel. My almost-finished second novel, that is. A handful of other people are still reading it, so my joy may yet be stamped out, but when I fixed a typo that someone had alerted me to I started reading right there, in the middle, and read on to the end (when I ought to have been in bed), and there was some really good writing there.

The advantage of sending something out to readers and waiting for comments is, of course, that I can keep myself from looking at it for a few weeks without guilt. If I’d decided not to look at it without having something to wait for I’d have felt uneasy about it, and perhaps opened the file and worried at it every once in a while, and Little Voice saying “it sucks! It all sucks! Tee hee!” wouldn’t have shut up.

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No, not the folk group, though they seem interesting.

Boudewijn is making backups of all our CDs, and putting old LPs on CD, making our whole musical history scroll past. There was a time in my teens when almost all I listened to was Alan Stivell (or here if you want to go straight to the English version without the cover page). And everything that was like it, such as Ar Skloferien and Gweltaz: Celtic music with political texts. And I was wistful —every teenager needs something to be wistful about— that I didn’t have any Celtic roots.

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I love the pieces of spam I keep getting that tell me to upgrade my mail software. Sometimes they’re blunt to the point of rudeness (“Get a better mailer.”), but today I got, not for the first time, one that was actually polite:

Your Email Client does not support MIME encoding. Please upgrade to MIME-enabled Email Client (almost every modern Email Client is MIME-capable).

In fact, my Email Client does support MIME encoding (it’s KMail). It’s just that I’ve turned it off.

The last instalment of the 2004 youth tournament. The kid missed two in a row, first because we were in Paris which is rather too far from Apeldoorn, then because it was November 21, the Presentation of the Mother of God, too much of a Sunday for either me or Boudewijn to miss church on.

I promised her the last meet even though it was on a Sunday, so we set off, with one cold, one book (mine wasn’t long enough, it ran out on the way home and I had to borrow The Princess Diaries from the kid) and two mandarin oranges each, to Almere where it also started.

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