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This is your daily Hood Ornament update...

This morning, the tarp covering Marilyn has been expanded to cover her skirt and upper body as well, which fortunately stretches the white bit of it over her face. She definitely has features, and she's smiling, but I can't tell precisely what those features are.

My office mates are amused by the poll results. We're all going to be very disappointed if it's just Marilyn, though that would fit the mould of this artist's ongoing lack of cleverness.

In news of writing, I finally managed to sit down with some links brainwane sent me and go over them, and I think you guys may be interested in her retrospective on the process of putting out an anthology as well as her anthology co-editor's thoughts on the scifi short-story publishing industry and slushpile reading and all.

In the latter there's a lot that franky goes over my head, but especially for writers there's a great list of "slush pile tips" about a quarter of the way down, regarding a few handy things you should probably avoid doing.

I am currently awaiting a proof copy of Dr. King's Lucky Book so I can page through the new revision, but once that's been done I will probably be putting it up for sale with relative speed, including the standard signed-copy offer. I'll be posting an opening sale date for that as soon as I have it. I will endeavour to make the opening on a weekend this time, so people won't be hampered by classes and work if they want to sign up.

Uberboss has essentially begun to treat me as if I already have BossBoss's job. Nice in a lot of ways but not so good in others -- I'm not as mobile as I will be when I have that job, and there's some stuff I don't have the authority to do yet. It's giving me a taste of the job, though, which is interesting and educational.

BossBoss is leaving the same week as the head of IT and our videoconference specialist are leaving, which is the same week our department's helpdesk admin goes on a ten day vacation. The end of July is going to be fascinating to watch.

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Today a letter arrived at work addressed to the company at large -- no individual name -- with the address handwritten and the stamp upside down. Inside was a check for thirty thousand dollars.

This is not my record for checks received by US mail -- that's fifty thousand dollars -- and I have held a FedEx envelope containing a check for ten million, which is a one followed by a truly unnatural amount of zeroes. But thirty grand's pretty good.

The real problem is that nobody's here today; I'm holding down the fort and dealing with some construction while everyone else is at an offsite, so all I can do is lock it in my desk and hope it's still there when I come in tomorrow.

This job never stops being just slightly surreal.

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Because I haven't been able to fold in a while, I have about a jillion spare pieces of "origami" paper (which is not really that great for origami, too thick and stiff). I thought today I'd do some modular origami, because it uses up a lot of sheets and most reasonably intelligent five-year-olds could do this, plus it looks AWESOME when you're done.

Like the Modular Ring, which unfortunately is not a diagram but the SLOWEST VIDEO EVER, though I feel the payoff is worth it.

And then I took myself off to have some ice cream, which is not as good as cashing a check for thirty thousand dollars but much less illegal.