Views from Medina Road

Back from New York City. Cold and windy there; it was snowing last Sunday night as we stood in the taxi line in Newark, and again Monday morning, as we walked from the Incentra Village House, the 150+ year old lodging where we stayed at the recommendation of Ellen Datlow, with its narrow stairs and tiny rooms reminiscent of Amsterdam lodgings, to the nearby coffee house, Grounded, where I popped open my laptop and accessed the local wifi network to download my email, to see the latest from Arthur C. Clarke about the Indian Ocean tsunami. (Later, I intermittedly accessed the linksys wifi network from the room itself.)

We rode a freezing bus tour, we stood in line for the Guggenheim (we gave up on the Empire State Building), we shopped at Saks and Bloomingdale's, we ate at local breakfast cafes and Greenwich Village restaurants and also at the Gotham Bar and Grill. We had dinner on Tuesday with Ellen Datlow at a local sushi place, and got the tour of her New York City apartment and its art.

Flights were cancelled and delayed or rerouted in both directions. It was the holiday season. At least we made it back home, eventually.

I mostly caught up on the website today, Friday, with a couple magazines still to post, and a number of books to post-- books scheduled for publication in January or February or even March, which I've been sent in advance, a generally unusual situation. I prefer to post descriptions of books only once they're available for purchase-- in stores, or available via Amazon.

It's been a good year generally, better than the past couple years. There are still things to do: website improvements to make: complete conversion to blog posting of news and blinks; updating all the links pages; consolidating the style sheets to make the format of all the pages more consistent (e.g. the colors and styles of the links); tweaking those same style sheets to a more consistent font size and style; and so on. On the plus side, I've managed this past year to increase postings of new book and magazine pages pretty much as often as it is feasible or reasonable to post them: weekly for books, semi-monthly for magazines, monthly for new paperbacks and classic reprints.

It's been a good year in that I've read more than in the past 3 or 4 years, as I've tried to indicate by the cover thumbnails along the right margin of these blog entries...though still not enough. How much one should read, how much one should want to read, how much one should be able to read, are issues I've always struggled with, issues I'll perhaps discuss in more detail in some future entry or entries.

For tonight, here in southern California, the air is cool and clear, the winter rainstorm has passed for today, the new year is nigh. Tomorrow will be another day, another year; a fresh beginning. We observe these transitions because they give us the chance to begin again.