So we have to move. Again.

So we have to move. Again. Our landlord died and the people who inherited the house have decided to sell it. (Precisely the same thing is happening to my sister right now.)1qq We don’t know when exactly we have to be out, but we have to be out. We also don’t know where exactly we’re going to end up, because the median rent in Dublin is more than we’re currently paying, which is more than we can actually afford, which means: not Dublin. Ted’s job is north of Dublin, so…

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Picoreview: Woman in Gold

Picoreview: Woman in Gold: well worth watching. Woman in Gold is based on the true story of an Austrian Jew whose family artwork was stolen by the Nazi occupation, and her international legal battle, sixty years later, to get it back. Helen Mirren plays Maria Altmann and Ryan Reynolds plays her lawyer, Randol Schoenberg, who comes from a long line of highly distinguished Schoenbergs and who has thus far totally failed to make his mark. And good god, Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black plays the younger Altmann. That woman is…

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purging boxes

I’ve spent this afternoon Getting Rid Of Stuff. Some of this was of the prosaic “empty the trashes” nature, but the bulk of it was involved in going through boxes that have been sitting around with the intent to be gone through. The big thing to tackle was a large box of received correspondence from roughly 1990-1998. A few months ago in another one of these Getting Rid Of Stuff binges I almost threw it out wholesale, but held off, and days later realized with a shock that I was…

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the actor’s nightmare. ish.

I had dreams between 5:30 and 7:30 in which I could not tell if I was sleeping or awake, even though several times I recognized I had to be sleeping. The point at which I was doing a stage play with Christopher Lloyd (Doc in the Back to the Future movies) was not enough to make me realize I was sleeping, although my absolute failure to remember any of my lines or even the gist of them after a week without rehearsal was. The point at which my phone melted…

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Recent Reads: Shaman

I’ve owned Kim Stanley Robinson’s SHAMAN since it came out, but hadn’t read it because I was still writing the Walker Papers, and regardless of how different his shaman and mine were likely to be (which was very, given that his book is set 40,000 years ago), I didn’t want to be reading about somebody else’s shaman while writing mine. :) SHAMAN is one of those books that’s either going to work for you or it isn’t, I think, although a lot of KSR’s work can be summarized that way.…

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