Views from Medina Road

..It makes national news, apparently. Every five years or so we here in Southern California get a series of storms, one after another, day after day, for a week, that dumps as much precipitation as is usual for most entire years. The last time was 2005; five or six years before that, I recall, I had to prop up a leaning tree in my backyard to keep it from uprooting itself from the mushy ground and falling over into my pool.

This time, though I'm living in a house now on a hillside, there's no such immediate danger, though I am experiencing leaky skylights and window frames. For all that people still complain about weather forecasters, it was cool, earlier this evening, to listen to the TV news and hear the weatherman talk about an especially strong thunderstorm in the Agoura Hills/Calabasas area, and to expect hail in Woodland Hills in about eight minutes. Sure enough, ten minutes later I heard the pelting of hail on the roof.

Several projects and tasks are underway here at Locus Online HQ, including the imminent update of the Locus Index to SF Awards (this weekend, tentatively), and a new section on the website focusing on a 'book of the week' derived from my more-or-less weekly New Books listings. Then, in another week or two, the online ballot for this year's Locus Poll and Survey, which I'm thinking to reformat somewhat from the drop-down menu style of past years, should be posted.

Meanwhile, aside from the website, I've set aside catching up on reading important 2009 novels (Bacigalupi, Robinson, VanderMeer, Miéville, et al, eagerly awaited) to put in my duty as nominator or judge for a couple annual SF awards, which I expect to occupy the next two or three weeks, and which I probably shouldn't say anything more about. Then I'll get back to those novels, and to expanding the SF Awards site with some of those long-anticipated expansions.