It happens to all of us--some of us have backups and the others are left crying. Consider my eyes somewhat damp. Yes, I suffered a crash recently. Wayne, my trusty Apple MessagePad, lost his mind about a month and a half ago and quit recognizing my 8 MB external storage card. I went crazy.

"I've lost all my data!" I screamed, until cooler heads prevailed.

"All your data?" Jill asked me.

Hmm. I did make a backup before I left for Europe. But all my Austrian trip notes were gone--I thought, then I discovered that I had left them on the internal storage. What I did end up losing were my latest set of First Impressions. When I'm writing them, they are on the internal store, but as soon as I finish one, I move it over to the external. Sigh

Thus part of this installment is a recreation of what I lost. Some things I didn't even try to recreate, including comments on recently nominated short stories. I'm very sad I lost them, but there's no use crying over lost data. That'll teach me to make more often backups.

The preparations for moving continue to affect First Impressions as well. Good thing the only one setting deadlines around here is me, or I'd be in big trouble. Only six weeks to go until the move, and as long as our housing situation (both here and there) is solved, I think we'll survive. Any words of advice regarding graduate school or Washington, D.C. is greatly appreciated--well, except for those they paraphrase to "Don't do it." It's too late. We're committed now. If you want to try for the I told you so award, drop me a line in three years.

The dissolution of my library and music collection continues (more on this in the review of Data Smog below). I've finally got all the hardbacks typed up and on the web at URL no longer valid. The CD list can also be obtained by a link from there. In the next few weeks, trade and mass market paperbacks will be added.

Finally, I'm debating moving the maintenance of this mailing list from a manual job I do here to a "free" service called FindMail (www.findmail.com). I have to put quotes around "free," because FindMail appends "innocuous" little spam to the bottom of the message. Your email address is not sold to anyone, nor should the advertising be that disrupting. Check them out. If enough people (say, one or two), find this disagreeable, I'll continue doing it the old fashioned way.